google

Hi ho, it’s off to work I go.

Mid-September time I’ll be moving to Switzerland to work for Google in their Zurich office, in the SRE (site reliability engineering) division. That means I’ll be a part of the team that ensures the Google services are always available and fast. It’s sort of sysadmin work on steroids – there is a fair bit of programming involved to develop and maintain the administration infrastructure, doing performance tests, gathering statistics etc.

I’m actually not going to Zurich straight away. There are 3 months of training in Mountain View first, and so I’ll be moving there in the new year. I don’t know how much time I’ll have in that 3 months, but after that it should not be too hectic and I’ll be able to spend some of my 20% time on autopackage and other projects.

One thing that has kind of annoyed me is that there is very little information out there on what the Zurich facility is like. Once I settle down there I hope to post some trivia so people who are thinking of working there and are trying to find out about it don’t have to make do with [the Heidi Song](http://douweosinga.com/blog/0601/2006Jan13_1). If I ever get fired, no prizes for guessing why