“Jim Reese was hired in June 1999 directly into his current
position. He was the first full-time sysadmin. Jim’s job is to
monitor security newsgroups, patch and update kernels, and write
tools to manage a cluster of thousands of machines. This last job
is what takes up most of his time. There will be 10 000 machines by
the end of the year.”
“Even though it is long hours and hard work, he really
appreciates the kooky congeniality and the academic atmosphere that
is encouraged by the company. Jim counts among a dozen or so
employees who have (or almost have) a Ph.D. in something. There is
also the satisfaction of knowing that he had played a major hand in
helping Google grow from 5000 hits a day to over 17 million. This
is going up by a rate of 20-30% per month.”
“For future Google employee hopefuls he has this advice:
install Linux and play with it. Read everything you can get your
hands on. Everything you need to know is on the Internet somewhere.
If you don’t know Linux, you won’t be hired at Google. If you
have any questions, contact bill@google.com.”