Slightly OT - Salaries

[evymetal]

Hi, obviously we are all into free software and the like here, but we all need to survive - so out of interest I was wondering if anyone knew what the likes of Google pay software engineers in the UK / US (medium level of experience, MSc etc).

[pmasiar]

Jobs at google are highly competitive so my bet salaries are too. It means above average.

You may find this blog post interesting: Get that job at Google (http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-google.html)

Also, get a Google App Engine account and create some toy app in it. My gut feeling is that GAE provides free web app hosting for a reason, and the reason is, Google wants to weed out developers before spending any resources on interview. So for a developer, there is no excuse not to have GAE app under the belt when applying for a job.

read Free webhosting by Google: App Engine (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=749285) thread

Good luck!

[evymetal]

Thanks - though the question is more to get a view of the landscape than for an immediate application.

I applied for a Google App Engine account (A couple of days after launch), but I've not received an invitation yet. I know I could start developing with the SDK, and probably will when I have a bit of free time that's not being spent on Game Baker ;-)

I hadn't thought of the "scouting potential googlers" part of it, but I think that the main reason that Google are giving away those accounts free is that they get all the analytics - I mean that is really useful - I'm working for an online ad network at the moment, and I really wish that we had that level of information about our ad publishers - for example there is one type of clickfraud that is really tough to stop unless you have the full server logs (obviously I'm not going to give that away, but a fraudster would need to be a fairly good developer to be able to implement it, let alone come up with it).

plus - it ties your development into Google (until some bright spark comes along and creates an open source version of google app engine to run on your own cluster - something else I've been meaning to look at (based on Hadoop (http://hadoop.apache.org/core/) etc.).