I was working at EA at the time. I got into the game industry because I loved making games. But I wasn't on a game team at work (which was good, because it meant I had a sane work schedule). And EA's employment contract basically forbids you from doing hobby game stuff in your free time since they would own the results.
So here I was "in the game industry" and spending zero time actually making games. I posted a rant complaining about that.
Some random redditor said, basically, "I work at Google. If you're a decent C++ programmer, I'll put in a referral for you."
Meanwhile, my wife and I had taken a trip to the Pacific Northwest and decided we wanted to move to that area. I started looking for jobs at other game companies in Seattle. I flew out there to interview at ArenaNet. Since I had a referral, a Google recruiter expedited an interview at the Seattle office while I was in town. I wasn't very seriously considering Google, but I wasn't about to say no.
I bombed the ArenaNet interview. (I think the main sticking point was a question around the time complexity of adding an element to a growable array. I said it was constant, but couldn't effectively explained amortized complexity to them and they didn't seem to understand that amortized complexity existed at all.)
Wonder of wonders, I just squeaked through the Google one.
I ended up on a random project doing front-end programming in JavaScript because I had UI experience. I didn't care for the product and programming UI in JS is, uh, not my idea of a good time, so it wasn't super fun.
However, I randomly took a one-day improve class that Google offerred. There, I met another Googler on another project and we started talking about language nerd stuff. He later ended up forming a team to work on Traceur, which was a project to prototype language changes to JS. They were ramping up, and he remembered I was into language things, so I asked me to join.
That project wound down later so I went looking for other projects to join. Dart was ramping up then and went there. It's been a blast.
But, literally, if I hadn't posted a comment on reddit and taken this improv class, my whole career might be different. I might have left Google to rejoin the game industry or something else entirely.
