(I guess a decade later, was IPv6 important? Still not sure about that one. But it seemed important at the time.)
I eventually went full time at Google NYC in the early 2010s - I remember the internal uproar when Reader was sunsetted =)
Google hired Guido van Rossum around the same time. I worked down the hall from Rob Pike, they had already hired Peter Weinberger (the w from `awk`), and I shared a 4-person office with Gren Stein, who was then director of the Apache Software Foundation.
Just know that my mentor was hand-holding the hiring process which basically prided itself on false negatives and still probably does.
And they were still in the era where's they'd just keep interviewing you until they "got enough signal" so people would be back 3 and 4 times.