Yesterday my car was at the dealership. The dealer has a shuttle service that drops you off at home or work, and so there were four random people in the car besides the driver. Out of that semi-random sample of Silicon Valley folks, three out of the four were working on search! The other person could have been in search too, but he was cranky and/or hard-of-hearing, so he didn’t really talk much.

Of the remaining three, there was me and a person working on Windows Live Search (just down the road from Google at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley). The third fellow was trying to get a search start-up off the ground. The start-up fellow didn’t want to mention his company’s name, but he was very proud of the fact that he was building a team of programmers in Romania. He said a friend of his had recently interviewed with Google and hadn’t gotten an offer, despite have an 800 on the math section of the SAT. He was convinced that getting a job at Google was all about who you knew. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I’d gladly trade the 800 score (if that was all I knew about the candidate) for someone that got a 720 on the math, but worked well in a team, communicated well, took the initiative, could work independently, cared about the company’s mission, had good industry knowledge, listened, executed well, etc.

The Windows Live guy was cool, and he asked about the recent “Best Place to Work” award from Fortune. I said that they do take pretty good care of us at the ‘plex. I thought about inviting him up to lunch sometime, but wasn’t sure whether it would be good etiquette or not, so I played it safe.

Stuff like that doesn’t happen in many places other than here, and it was a fun ride in the shuttle.