The daycare wasn't free, at least not when I started in early 2007, and the waiting list was huge.

It wasn't presented that way through my long interview process where the benefits were discussed a number of times. I relocated from Australia with a young family, and the cost and wait time for childcare was somewhat of a sour note amongst the holy-shit-is-this-place-real feeling of my first few months at Google HQ.

is it available to all employees and do they all get on a single waitlist or do executives get a preference.

It was certainly executive-level pricing :) To answer your question, I don't know. The wait list was well over a year, and it was many many times more expensive than other childcare options in the Mountain View area, and utterly unaffordable for me on a senior SRE salary.

> to know that the cost and difficulty of arranging childcare is one of the things that drives people to exit the workplace and become stay-at-home parents, or perhaps part-timers in a less 'all-in' place than google.

oh got it. Top comment made it sound like it was cheap/free of cost

as did the Google recruiters and HR people I spoke to before accepting the job :)

Another comment in here says it could be up to 4-5k/mo. Idk about googler parents but thats pretty much an entire 2 week net-income paycheck to me.. IIRC my friends with kids pay something like 2-3k/mo I think for their daycare but I'm in CO not CA.

we pay 2k/month here in chicago, so that number kind of makes sense to me.

I'll bet many people were willing to pay that if executives and managers had there kids there. Daycare can provide unique kinds of networking and job-security/promotion options.

As someone who was there start of 2007 to end of 2010, this resonated. My first two years were very different to the last two.

I lost 50 pounds in under 200 days, and then another 20 over the next year.

Here's what worked for me:

  * Calorie counting to work out baselines
  * Accept the feeling of being hungry and learn to relish it ("I'm losing weight if I'm hungry")
  * Do light weightlifting at home
  * Exercise naked in front of a mirror for positive and negative reinforcement

VP of Product

Director of Product

These titles both exist...

Directors of Product and VPs of products are no different than Directors of Software Development and VP of Software Development.

Directors and VPs are on the management hierarchy.

My interview for Google as an SRE in late 2009 consisted of well over half design questions around improvements of a system with lots of users.

One of the best series of questions I've ever gotten in an interview. We probably spent close to an hour just on one major aspect of the service.

At least part of the complication is that overseas equivalents of 401k funds that may be mandatory to contribute to are often considered to be bank accounts by the IRS.

There are some great aspects to Google Compute, but I hope this change results in catch up on features needed for corporate adoption compared to AWS.

The lack of a billing API and the lack of centralized management are really painful if you're trying to adopt it across an organization.

There is a billing API: https://cloud.google.com/billing/

There have been some recent introductions of account and key management that help too.

Excellent, thanks. Hopefully we'll see tools like Cloudability support it then.

I'll check it out again, really the frustrating management aspect was the lack of org oversight over multiple projects started within your domain.

My understanding is that they didn't do a write API due to fear of automated spam and poor S/N ratios.

It's not just that, looking through my current and past entries some of these records just aren't correct, and don't even match the data provided on LCAs etc.

Not right, but not entirely wrong either.

The process for an internal, expedited H1b transfer is significantly simpler than an H1b from scratch.