For my informational interview, I interviewed Leeor Baskin, a personal acquaintance and an engineer at Google.
He was originally a corporate attorney before deciding to change careers. He is mostly self-taught in C and PHP with online courses like
Harvard's CS-50 and Coursera. He also did the 3-month educational retreat at the Recurse Center in New York.
At about the halfway point in his time at the Recurse Center, Leeor felt ready to begin applying for jobs. His job search lasted about
four months before he was offered a position at Google.
At Google, he works on a team of 5-6 people. They have daily standups and longer meetings on a weekly basis.
He says projects come up organically, usually from whatever they were working on previously. Typically a project takes his team
several weeks to complete. He says that Google has a more formal system of mentorship for newer programmers, but he didn't participate
in that program and can't speak to that experience. He says individual tasks are usually assigned based on skill and interest.
The primary languages they work in are Java and C++.
One interesting thing in the interview is hearing exactly how some of the skills I'm studying will be utilized in a professional setting;
for example, the expectation that every piece of code I write be submitted in tandem with its own unit test.

Advice: Leeor said that it is never too early to start practicing for technical interviews on top of the mock interviews in the Thinkful
curriculum. He recommended Corsera as a good resource for this, as well as the exercises on the website LeetCode. He also described the importance
of 'Big O Notation' in the techncial interview process, a concept with which I was previously unfamiliar.
Lastly, he recommended I read the book "Cracking the Code Interview", by Gayle McDowell. He said even though the coding problems in that
book are in a language other than JavaScript, the author provides links to alternate versions of the exercises in several programming
languages.