Google orientation week has gone well. There are three more lecture sessions on my calendar today, then I’ll go pretty much straight home. I had originally planned to stay Friday night and go back Saturday, but there’s not much to do in Mountain View, and I’m eager to get back home to Ava.

I suppose the real test will come when I show up at my Seattle desk and start figuring out what I’m actually going to be doing, but so far I feel like the orientation curriculum has done a good job of ramping everyone up at a steady, manageable pace. I’d probably enjoy myself more if things moved more quickly, but it’s better than being overwhelmed right up front. We’ve had overviews of the dev tools and the whole data-center architecture, an explanation of the search system, and practical exercises with the custom source-control and build tools. There is a lot of learning ahead, of course, but at least now I know what the general layout is and where to start looking for things.

Google really seems determined to take care of its engineers. It sounds almost too good to be true, but they’re walking the talk.