Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs - Episode 29: From Papa John's to Google (Part 1)

Episode Date: June 11, 2021

In this episode, Conor and Bryce talk to Chandler and Patricia and Chandler tells us about his career path leading up to Google.About the Guests:Chandler Carruth leads the C++, Clang, and LLVM teams at Google, building a better language with better diagnostics, tools, compilers, optimizers, etc. Previously, he worked on several pieces of Google’s distributed build system. He makes guest appearances helping to maintain a few core C++ libraries across Google’s codebase, and is active in the LLVM and Clang open source communities. He received his M.S. and B.S. in Computer Science from Wake Forest University, but disavows all knowledge of the contents of his Master’s thesis. He is regularly found drinking Cherry Coke Zero in the daytime and pontificating over a single malt scotch in the evening.Patricia Aas is a C++ programmer with a “thing for building browsers”. She works for a company she co-founded called TurtleSec where she teaches courses in Secure Coding in C++ and does consulting and contracting. She has been a professional programmer for 16 years, and started off her career working on the original Opera browser. Since then she has made embedded products at Cisco and another browser at Vivaldi. When she has time she works on her own open source (pre-alpha) Chromium/Blink+Qt based browser called TurtleBrowser.Date Recorded: 2021-06-05Date Released: 2021-06-11ADSP Episode 28: Steve Jobs & Sean ParentPapa John’sSilicon Valley TV ShowLinux WineTransgamingLLVMIntro Song InfoMiss You by Sarah Jansen https://soundcloud.com/sarahjansenmusicCreative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0Free Download / Stream: http://bit.ly/l-miss-youMusic promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/iYYxnasvfx8

Are you thinking about getting a plant but worried you don't have the skill set? Well, let's talk about a second option, kids. I feel like there's some steps to be taken. It's a really rapid escalation from like, I'm nervous about plants. I'm going to reproduce. Oh man, that is definitely going to be the intro to this podcast. Oh no, oh no.

Welcome to ADSP The Podcast, episode 29, recorded on June 5th, 2021. My name is Connor, and today with my co-host Bryce, we have on two guests, Chandler Carruth and Patricia Oss. And in this first episode of our multi-episode series with them, we focus on Chandler's career path leading up to Google. Due to the hectic start of this episode recording, we did not actually get Chandler and Patricia to introduce themselves, so I am briefly going to do that before we hop into things. Chandler Carruth leads the C++, Clang, and LLVM teams at Google and has for many years been an active member of the LLVM and Clang open source communities. Patricia Oss is a C++ programmer with a thing for building browsers. She works for a company that she co-founded called TurtleSec, where she teaches courses in secure coding and C++ and does consulting and contracting, and over the years has been involved

in building the Opera and Vivaldi browsers. So with that said, let's hop into things. You're right. So people make fun of this because only in in california do you like solve working from home and like not having a good office space by working outside all year it's like it's like all year long yeah you cannot do that in toronto you cannot do that yeah easy easy flex chandler easy flex we've got great weather here and it's going to last for approximately two months um i've been to toronto i i question the claim that toronto has great weather at any point during the year that's not true it is phenomenally gorgeous out right now yeah same here the weather is absolutely fabulous right now just teasing us because like vacation is still a month out and so by the time we get to like july which is like where we most norwegians do their vacations it's going to be raining all of

july so it's that is like the the the thing that you take uh for granted the most in california is that like you can just rely on it not raining for a large chunk of the year like the the the sum total of problems i have with my outdoor desk and i have to have a big plastic i actually have a like like like i have an enormous i'm sorry i'm gonna i'm gonna you can cut this out of the podcast if you want i'm gonna i don't think you understand the nature of the podcast this is gold keep going i'm gonna make fun of of like men and dudes for a bit because I got to. I have a big man grill cover because it's like a grill that's so large that you cannot physically operate all of it at a single point in time. I don't know why.

There's some dudes that seem to like feel that if the grill isn't kind of excessively large it's just i'm sorry i'm sorry but i have to come visit you like whenever like we come out of this pandemic i want to see this yard you need to make me something on this grill no i don't have the grill. That's the thing. It's like a reasonably sized grill. Because, like, I don't feel the need to compensate, okay? So I have a reasonably sized grill, but I needed something to cover my outdoor desk. And, like, if you've got a desk with, like, a tall monitor on it, it's kind of shaped like a grill, but just a really freaking large grill. And so I got an enormous grill cover. I had to special order it i think from china or

somewhere i couldn't even order it on amazon it was very sketchy how how this arrived but like this enormous grill cover and it's hilarious because the only reason i need it like like there's i'm in california there's no rain like like there's no weather at all i did it because of pollen oh you got pollen it has a layer of pollen on it it's like slightly yellow grill cover because of all of the pollen it's just absurd and so you know like this is this is what i need for for my my you know california experience is anti uh is my allergy medicine this is gold this is gonna be like our best podcast ever. This is the Chandler Carruth you did not know

that you needed to know, but now you know him. I don't know. I think it's going to compete with Sean Parent talking about the times that he dueled with Steve Jobs. I was literally just talking to Kate Gregory yesterday. Sorry? Are we talking pistols or what? Almost.

No, but I guarantee I'm fairly confident that Sean Parent probably has at least one story about doing somebody with pistols. We'll ask him about that next time he's on. I was talking to Kate Gregory yesterday and she was talking about how Sean's stories are so amazing

and I was like oh have you heard of the Steve Jobs ones and she was like no and I was like you gotta check out our episode 28 it's uh yeah we started by just rambling ourselves and now we're just bringing on people with amazing stories have we really done 28 of these? yeah

we're definitely beating J people with amazing stories and uh yeah yep we're definitely beating jf bastion what a okay but to be fair jf has two small children and uh and his his podcast co-host has i believe three children and one of them is uh or two of them are a set of twins so i think that that they have a little bit more planning preparation to do to put together an episode than us, the two bachelors. I have six plants, though, Bryce, and those take a lot of – I got to water those every once in a while, so I don't know. I don't know.

Chandler looking up and rolling his eyes no no i'm looking at the uh the the one indoor plant like container which which has a dead husk in it see you don't look after your plants and they die apparently no see see i'm of the i'm of the philosophy that i'll just pay somebody to look after my plants oh my gosh I don't make that price money I don't know what that will say about me as a potential future parent but not anything

good okay so I all of my plants my entire life I killed every single one of them so this was like a worry of mine when I had children it's like how the hell am I going to do this thing when I can't even keep a plant alive? You know, this is worrisome.

But one of the great things about kids is that if they're hungry, they will scream your head off. Now, if my plants were screaming, they would be alive today. What you're saying is it's the plant's fault. Yes, they would be alive today. So, so I... What you're saying is it's the plant's fault. Yes, they should be screaming more. Somebody should make, like, a little, like, like, a thing that you put into, like, the soil, and when it's too dry, it just blasts,

like, some really annoying sound. I'm sure there's someone with an Arduino that... Yeah, I'm sure someone's done that uh see also too i feel like we should turn this into an infomercial uh with patricia are you thinking about getting a plant but worried you don't have the skill set well let's talk about a second option i feel like there's some steps to be taken. It's a really rapid escalation from like, I'm nervous about plants.

I'm going to reproduce. Oh man, that's definitely going to be the intro to this podcast. Oh no. Oh no. All right, so we did have an actual topic right yes I know what the topic is I even have notes that I saw

I saw the twitter dm thread and I know that I probably read it at the time but during the work week like I'm in like project manager mode. So I was just like, OK, Chandler, Patricia, sounds good. So I don't even know what I don't remember, at least what I'm getting myself into. OK, what are we talking about? OK, so so the back story here is that we're like my company.

We're like super tiny. We're three people. And so we're hiring for like the first time. We're doing like public hiring. And I've never really done this. I've participated in interviews where I was just like the girl that you pull into the room. So it's not all dudes. And that was the extent of my experience of doing this. And so now I have to do all of it. But, you know, there are stages to this.

And next week, I'm coming to the stage where I'm actually going to be speaking to potential people. And I did not have much of an idea what to do. So then I asked on Twitter, what do you ask people to try to figure out if they're nice humans and human-wise fit in? Not tech part, we'll put that aside, but is this a human you want inside of your company kind of thing um and so so then Chandler wrote like this thread like I think it's like four tweets uh and and one and and then I I said oh had done so so so so today we are going to interview chandler

and by we you we mean you patricia i have i have no notes and no questions and help me because i have no idea what i'm doing. So the thing is Chandler knows what he's doing, but he's going to be answering the questions. So should we ask Chandler? Have you, I assume you've been, you have a certain amount of interview experience, interviewer experience. But what's interesting is I have a feeling that Chandler has not been interviewed that many times in his career. Oh yeah. So what's your interviewee versus interviewer experience Chandler has not been interviewed that many times in his career. Oh, yeah. So what's your interviewee versus interviewer experience, Chandler?

All right. So let's start there, I guess. So I have – I'm trying to think. I believe that I have interviewed for three jobs. No, four jobs. Wow. In my entire entire life i've done four job interviews that's not four successful like that's just four in total and that that's not even that's not even four tech job interviews that's four no no that's four tech job interviews okay four tech jobs okay but those are the only interviews i've ever done for a job, to be fair. So when I was graduating from university, I was an idiot. To be very clear, I'm not being sarcastic.

I was an idiot. And I had no plan because I was doing a startup and I thought that this startup was going to be totally awesome. It wasn't. But that's neither here nor there. And so I didn't actually plan when I graduated for a gainful employment of any form. And I thought this would be kind of no big deal. I wasn't stressed about it. And so I just kind of wandered over to the university's kind of IT department where I had been working as a student worker for the past three years. And I was a student worker at their IT department, like on a team. Like I even sat in like cubicles and coded and such.

And they had told me they were hiring a full-time position for the job I had been doing. Um, and so I was like, this is, I'm pretty sure I just got like a fancy shiny computer science degree. Um, this is like a pretty, pretty straightforward it job. This was not like a super difficult job is working on the, you know, university website. Um, and so I showed up and interviewed there. It was the first job interview I'd ever really done. And, you know, I knew everyone already because I'd been working there. And so I knew every single one of my interviewers.

They asked me questions that I kind of expected them to ask me. I answered them. It went fine. And then I didn't get the job. You interviewed for your own job and you didn't get it. Literally, I interviewed for the job I was already doing

and was rejected. You're giving a lot of people that listen to this podcast hope, Chandler. If this is where Chandler started out, there's hope for all of us so the next job i get i have to admit i didn't have to interview for um so the next job i had was i delivered pizzas for papa john's um after i moved back home um because i did not have gainful employment and and my my very very dear mother if she ever for some reason hears this, my very dear mother took me back in but did insist that I have some form of gainful employment.

And the only job I could get where I grew up was delivering pizzas at Papa John's. I didn't have to interview for that one. I simply had to show up and have a car. If folks don't know how delivering pizzas for a chain like Papa John's goes, I want to be very clear. It is a nightmare. So this is how a chain pizza place works. They're required, usually by local laws and ordinances and things, to have a certain number of employees that are actually paid minimum wage and work in the kitchen. This is usually one or two. In my restaurant's case, it was two. Every other employee is typically a delivery driver. And the reason for this is that delivery drivers by law are tip receiving employees. Because you are eligible to receive tips as part of your job in the U.S.,

they don't have to pay you minimum wage. They get to pay you like half of minimum wage. And they can still compel you to work in the kitchen anytime that you don't have deliveries. And so this is why in rural middle of nowhere, where I grew up, we would have two people working in the restaurant making pizzas when we actually needed about four or six, and we would have two people working in the restaurant making pizzas when we actually needed about four six and we would have eight people uh delivering pizzas with scare quotes because the rest of the time they just worked in the kitchen and this is this is how i got a job working in the kitchen for about uh six six eight dollars an hour um uh and then every now and then like the highlight of your night was that you'd get

you'd finally come up on the rotation to actually deliver some pizzas um but you had to drive your own car that they did not compensate you for and you had to put an enormous papa john's lit sign on top of it with magnets that scratch the paint and it's huge so it hurts your mileage and so your gasoline is actually even more expensive we didn't have fancy electric cars in the middle of nowhere and it's the middle of nowhere and right so i have to drive a long way to deliver these pizzas it usually takes about 20 to 30 minutes of driving to get from the restaurant to uh the first house you can take maybe two orders maybe three orders on a really good night you can get three orders in a single delivery run to collect tips from. And you'll get tips like a dollar because they bought $10 of pizza.

And very helpfully, Papa John's, the company, not the, and remember like the way restaurants in the US work, you have a company called Papa John's. They do not operate restaurants. What they do is they allow people to pay them to use the Papa John's brand and ingredients and recipes in the restaurant that they run privately. It's a franchising operation. This is so broken and dystopic. This is normal in the U.S., right?

This is actually how – this is capitalism at its finest okay and so so anyways long okay so you okay you you you failed your interview for your university you didn't interview for your pizza no i didn't have to interview for that so so how did you like there's like a dot dot dot and now i'm huge in google i i well so i actually have to finish a little bit of the story so i'm driving i'm delivering pizzas this is like you know a nightmare that i'm living in uh at some point i go down to visit my uh uh uh you know future partner uh uh and we are still together right and so i visit I visit her. She was, she went to the same university. She was a year behind me and she was doing a summer program there.

And so after I graduated, I went down to visit during the summer. And, you know, I was there for one night, you know, basically squatting in the dormitories of the university because it's not like I could afford a hotel at the time. And then I had to go back and go back to work because it's a two and a half hour drive.

And so I start driving out of the university. There's like a hill right out of the university. I'm driving the car out of the university and it makes this really weird noise. Oh no. and then it starts to roll backwards down the road so now so now chandler will lose his job as the pizza driver because he no longer has a car and i literally like so the car broke it was going to cost about uh fifteen hundred dollars to fix my car. I'm at this university. I don't have a place to live. Oh my gosh.

And I'm losing my pizza delivery job because I can't pay to fix my car either. And so I roll my car into one of the parking lots in the university because I can't drive it anywhere and walk back to the dormitory and and begin to squat for real and so i actually like uh um also if by some miracle uh uh my partner's roommate ever hears this uh you you are you are a saint to put up with me squatting in

your uh she didn't have her own room in the dormitory either right wow um this is gold man i swatted there for about a month and at one point i was you know uh uh basically the only way we could buy food was i had i had a credit card um um it wasn't even my credit card i couldn't get a good credit card it was was my mother's credit card. This is such a horrible story. But I was walking and I was kind of unsurprisingly bored because I did not have a job. You are homeless. You are jobless.

And you are spending your mother's borrowed money. Yes. And she didn't have money either. She had no hope of paying off this credit card right this was there was not like a solution available but i was walking around because i was bored and i knew everyone in the computer science department i just graduated from there i was walking around and i ran into one of my former professors um dr david john and if he ever hears this like he literally saved my life um so i just ran into him and uh he

asked how i was doing and you know you know that point in time when you're like you're at you're really at a low point and and you just run into someone that you met when like things were fine and they ask you how are things going there's that like you have that awkward pause like what do i say how can i like i know i don't want to lie to you but like do you want the answer to that question so i i i answered him i tried to kind of you know brush it off but still be honest like well you know things aren't aren't going so well you know i'm actually stuck here because you know i don't i i couldn't get that i couldn't get a job um and and he blinked several times and he was like did you consider going to graduate school and i was like well why would i go to graduate school i need a job like i i like that's not and and he like blinked and paused

and gave me like and again like like he saved my life so i i say this with with all the love in the world right that he blinked and kind of said like to and again i was an idiot it's like you understand that they will pay you to go to graduate school and my brain exploded like this just changed my world and so that's when i applied to go to graduate school um and i i got into graduate school um at the end of the summer um started grad school um had no intention of graduating though because i was an idiot and so i was like oh no this will be fine because now i can keep working on this startup. Like this time, having two years of graduate school TA paychecks to do this startup, this will, this will let us let it really take off. It didn't.

So, so then I worked at the startup for two years while I was in graduate school. And in my last semester before I was supposed to, to graduate, our startup got the big break. And this was actually our biggest break. There was a venture capital event, a venture capital firm in Mountain View, California, that was working with a group of angel investors. Now, I don't know if everyone knows what angel investors are, but for startups, right, you have different phases of investment. And venture capital is like really big money. And so it comes later in the thing. But when you have an idea,

you're just trying to get kind of what they call seed money to start your startup. You often get angel investors. And these tend to be, instead of a big venture capital firm, angel investors tend to be individuals, basically wealthy individuals. What's that guy from Silicon Valley with the Three Comma Club? What's his name?

He's an angel investor. I mean, and let's be honest. We are talking about tech money. So they're rich white dudes, right? By and large. By and large, yes. And he is white and rich. You're thinking of Russ white dudes, right? By and large. By and large, yes. And that he is white and rich. You're thinking of Russ Hanneman, right?

Yeah, I think so. I'll find a Russ Hanneman clip and I'll cut it in because he's a character on the show for sure. Nice, nice. Russ Hanneman, true pleasure to meet you. All of a sudden, I'm 22 years young, and I'm worth 1.2B. Now, a couple decades later, I'm worth 1.4. Don't do what you should do. Do what you want. So, I promise, this is actually the story of my next job interview.

There's some buildup here. Okay. You have to understand this is getting cut into two podcasts. What I'm calling this first one. Oh boy. Do I have some, I do. I have some latitude on to like Chandler Chandler and Papa John's or like

the Papa John Chandler. Chandler hits rock bottom. Sure. True. This was, this was, this was pretty bad. So me and the person I was trying to do this startup with, we got this call from this firm.

And basically, the venture capital firm was working with a group of angel investors to put together kind of a roadshow of early stage video game startup companies uh basically uh like a like a like an industry fair you know like if you go to a conference you go to like go to the like the the like fair area like the expo area go to all the different booths exactly like that except inverted each of the booths was actually people trying to start up a company. And the attendees were the angel investors. They're basically shopping for companies. So was this startup game related?

In theory, yes. We were going to build cross-platform video game middleware. So that instead of people taking their Windows game and porting it to mac and and other platforms using things like uh uh what was it trans gaming uh basically wine but commercialized uh to run your your video game on mac and on linux um instead what we would do is we'd give you a C++ toolkit of middleware and this would allow you to write your game in this totally cross platform way and you'd just use build scripts

you'd build for all the platforms it was going to be great by the way did I mention that I was an idiot I had never worked in the games industry I had never done any professional software development I had been rejected from the only job I had ever interviewed at. But somehow I was going to, like, displace the, like, dominant players in the video game middleware industry.

But, you know, that's the hubris of youth. Angel investors. The explosive. Yeah, they apparently were, they were apparently like getting this ready and the people running the event looked at the lineup of companies and they said like, this is boring. All of these companies are either like unsurprising or terrible. Please get something more interesting or this event's going to be boring.

And so they were looking around for like weirder farther out uh options and they found you know us in you know north carolina um like doing a video game startup and so they called us and and we're like would you like to come in and pitch at our at our investor thing we're like well yes of course we would outcome the credit cards um right we uh bought plane tickets flew out rented a car figured out where mountain view california is uh drove up to uh uh uh this like building at the time i didn't know i knew nothing about anything right I was just complete naivety. This was KPMG's offices in Mountain View. It's like one of the most famous venture capital firms in the world. Didn't know who they were.

We drive in. There was apparently some miscommunication. And they were just going to let us set up a booth. But we thought we were going to get to pitch. And only five companies were going to actually get up and pitch and like do their do their spiel for the angels and then they they were most companies are just going to have booths we're going to get to actually do uh but we thought we're going to do a pitch and we pulled up the email where they said that we were going to get to do a pitch on on and like like on a laptop and showed it to them there weren't cell phones like

this was before the iPhone. I'd show them this thing. And they're like, well, okay, I guess we'll do a sixth presentation. Amazing thing was, the only really amazing part of this whole startup thing was that I got trained, the university I went to had a very bad computer science program. Sorry, folks. But it had a very good business program, like a really good business program. And so they had trained us how to actually pitch really well. So we didn't know what we were doing, and we had a terrible idea, but we could present it really well.

And so we actually went last because they squeezed us into the presentation lineup and just stomped on all of the other presentations. Just blew the whole thing out of the water. With a terrible idea. Fantastic. It was a terrible idea. Okay. So they asked us to actually come back the next day

to a group of investors that were thinking about investing in our company. We were super excited. So we canceled flights, booked new flights, extended our hotel stay. that were thinking about investing in our company we were super excited so we like told we like canceled flights booked new flights extended our hotel stay out came the student credit cards again uh and and so we showed up and then we drove to this like menlo park palace of a house it's like a like it's a house that has its own like business extension to it. And in the business suite, it's not just an office. It's two or three offices with a

conference room. You have conference rooms in your house, but apparently, if you host angel investor meetups, you do. So it's something you do. So we set up and got ready to present. We're just waiting. There are six investors there, and we're trying to decide, do we start?

No, no, no, no, no, no. Wait, wait, wait. We have to wait. Wait for half an hour for this other investor to show up. And finally, he rolls in with an earbud. Because back then, the way you could talk on your phone in public was you had one little earbud in. Bluetooth light blinking. It was very 2000s.

He rolls in, listens to his pitch, looks just straight in the eyes and says, I'm going to try and help you out. You will never get this off the ground. And he went on to say, you've never worked in the video game industry.

You don't know what you're talking about. like like you've never worked in the video game industry you don't know what you're talking about the opportunity you've identified is actually real this would be a fantastic business proposition but like i can't invest in you right you you're just not going to be able to succeed at this idea even though like the background of the idea makes a lot of sense. And so we went back to, I went back to North Carolina and I had about three months left in my, uh, master's program. I had not started writing a master's thesis because I had never planned to graduate. I had planned on doing a startup. I had not talked to a single potential employer. Oh. And I just found out that it was going to be impossible to get this startup off the ground.

Best thing that could have happened, though. Best thing that could have happened. The person was right. He was completely right. So I went back and started writing my master's thesis. I basically wrote nonstop for about two months. Wrote one of the worst master theses i have been for years trying to get my hands on this thing no i think i found it a few years ago

and i sent it to you and you told me like never share it with anybody you're right i did um it'll be in the show notes folks Oh, gosh. No, please. What was the name of the thesis? I literally do not remember. What was it on? It was on programming language design, obviously. Oh, well, it's relevant. Yeah, I had brand new groundbreaking ideas that had never been thought of before. Remember, this was like in in 2003 2004 never

been thought of before of what if we represent programs in a structured data format rather than in text this will be groundbreaking for the record i have since learned that like there was research about this dating back to the late 60s anyways uh i'm not defending my... Actually, I did defend my thesis. That's another story. That's a whole different story. Sounds like you're going to... This is going to become a recurring group here.

This is... I can stop story time anytime you all want. But the key thing is interviewing. Yes. You managed to graduate and you got your degree. Well, ish but yes so so okay so so in the last few weeks i had my thesis finished and i was trying to defend it but i then realized that i still did not have a job and i did not want to repeat i did not want to repeat. I did not want to go back to Papa John's. And so I applied for a job at Apple because in between, like, you know, my video game startup company, Terrible Ideas, I'd played with the open source LLVM project and even managed to get an internship out of it.

I didn't ever interview for that. I just, like, kind of got an internship out of it and did like a google summer of code for it um and they posted to the lvm mailing list that there was a job opportunity at apple working on working with lvm that's why i applied for this uh i didn't meet any of the qualifications and so i applied for it anyways as as as you as you as you teach people uh patricia right this is the correct thing to do. Yeah. Never pay attention. Well, don't let the listed qualifications and a job keep you from applying for it. There's so many anecdotes where, like, you know, there's some technology that's two years old and they've got some posting saying looking for five years of requirement. And then the person that wrote the open source library is like, I wrote this and I've only got two. So you might want to revisit.

Might have to adjust. Yeah. That was the thing when we posted our ad that I didn't want to put in anything. So the whole theory of the ad part of it was to not require anything we weren't prepared to train for. So we are not prepared to train you to become a programmer. So if you cannot program, then we cannot have you because I can't teach you to program.

But this is like, so the position is basically a programmer with an interest in security in some way. And then I was like like you don't need any experience in security that we we can train you for but you have to be a programmer so you have to know how to code so and outside of that we don't care about programming language whatever just come and you know that that's you we'll we'll see we'll evaluate whatever we get so the idea here was to keep the list as short as possible to encourage more people that are more hesitant than chandler uh to to apply

to be fair this was not like confidence or boldness this was desperation sheer desperation this was fear of papa john, basically. Yes. And so the week before I defended my thesis, the interview got scheduled. And so unfortunately, so I remember I was like, I kind of started halfway through a semester. And so this was actually coming up

on December. And so this was coming up on winter holiday season in the US. And the recruiter at Apple was very clear that it was essential that I interview before everyone left for the holidays. Because he thought that the kind of budget for hiring might be going away and there might be pressure to hire before so i needed to get to california interview at apple and they were going to make a decision hire or not um uh before people left for the holidays and so i i was going to so the the scary thing for me is you know this is the week before i defend my my master's thesis which is really bad, and I know that it's really bad.

And they need me to interview that week. So I'm going to defend my master's thesis on Monday morning, or Monday afternoon, and they need me to interview on Wednesday so that they can make a decision by the end of that week, because that's the last reliable work week before people start going off to holiday. This is also why I was defending my thesis that week. It was the same reason, right? And so the week before this, I'm on the LLVM IRC channel. And I mentioned that I'm going to be in California because, like, Apple is interviewing me and they're flying me out to California on Tuesday to interview.

And I get a private message from someone else in the LLVM community who works at Google. And he's like, did you submit a resume to Google? And I was like, no, why would I submit a resume to Google? I don't think that Apple's going to hire me. Why would I, like, try and get hired at Google? And Google isn't even using LLVM. What? How is this even relevant?

I feel like you keep falling into massive opportunities. Like, you just, like, walk, and there's, like, a hole, and you're, like, poof. I'm a paid graduate student. Poof. I'm on Google. It's like, what is this? I really don't know how this happened. Like, and so I say, like, whatever. And so I sent him my resume.

I didn't think anything of it. Continue to get ready to defend my thesis. Okay. So Monday, I defend my thesis. There's a whole story about how I actually got through that. Anyways, but I defend my thesis Monday afternoon, like 1pm, right? By 3pm, I'm like sitting around waiting to hear back from the committee about how many edits they're going to want. Uh, the committee comes back and they want no edits translation. They did not read the thesis. Um, uh, they, they, they want me gone. Um, and, and I understand that frankly, I was not a good student. Um, and 6 p.m., I get a phone call. And the phone call is from the recruiter at Google. And I was like, hi.

Oh, and I've messed up the previous story. So I was supposed to interview on Thursday at Apple, not on Wednesday. Thursday. And then they're going to make a decision on Friday. So I'm on the phone at 6 p.m. on Monday with the Google recruiter. And they're like, no, no, we want to interview you too. I was like, I mean, okay, but Apple is interviewing me on Thursday of this week. And they are saying that they will have a decision on Friday.

And I can't say no. If it's the only job I have, I will have to say yes. Like, there's no question. The alternative is pop the job so so the google recruiter says like no we can make this work i've booked so we'll just take over the first half of your flight i have a flight booked for tomorrow to california we'll interview on wednesday you can then like switch hotels and then interview at Apple on Thursday. And then we can both get back to you on Friday. And I'm like, you can do that?

Again, I was an idiot. I knew nothing. I had no idea how rare this was even at Google at the time. But of course I said yes, because Papa John's, right? And so I still have to do a bunch of work for my thesis. So you have to like print out your thesis on very special paper in a very special format and like put them in special folders and you have to have a certain number of copies and you have to have your graduate school committee sign like all of them and then you have to submit them to the graduate school by a certain time in order to actually get your degree. And so I spend basically every waking hour from that moment either putting things into a suitcase,

that was easy, I didn't have much, or printing my thesis. I take the thesis to the graduate school, walk out the door to like my friend's car that's waiting at the curb to drive me to the airport so I can make it to my flight. Make it to my flight, and then I get the two other job interviews that I've ever really had. Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed, and stay tuned for next week's episode

where we find out what happened at Chandler's Apple and Google interviews. Have a great day.