P.S I like how Google is finding out they're just the same as pretty much any other large organization :).
1) Any question I had, someone could either give me the answer, direct me to the book (yeah, that long ago) that had the answer, or do the back and forth so I could figure out the answer with the knowledge I already had.
2) Rip the sh*t out of my code in a way that, while humiliating, made me a much better programmer.
You went in thinking that you're the smartest kid in the room, but while I was there, the mean IQ was 132. It was a place with a bunch of smart _adults_ who also had a significant amount of knowledge and experience, and very few hoarders of that information. After all, how can you show how smart you are if you keep quiet when someone is wrong? My niches were that I had K&R memorized (that's really embarrassing now, but "actually, free(NULL) is legal," beats a full house) and my proof of concept client code made its way into SDKs.
Joel Spolsky talks a lot about the same time era, basically Microsoft pre-Internet. Many of us ex-MSFTies idealize it to a certain degree, but that's fine–take and keep the good and drop the bad. Many of us are engineering leads/CTOs/flounders elsewhere, and the rigor present in the hierarchy of ability-to-execute helps to excel in other companies or industries.
But most of us secretly would like to go back to a few thousand nerds in a rainy forest and hack products all day. :-)
Only 132? Are you serious? How did the IQ-105 people get hired, and what were they doing — opening envelopes in the mail room?
People really went after the lateral-thinking questions and the estimation questions to find "smart" people. "How would you calculate how much rain falls in Washington in a day,"[1] "How many gas stations are there in (IYFStateOrCity)," and "How would you make a desk calendar with two cubes,"[2] were all fun ones.
Now, by making your questions similar to those on IQ tests, you select people who tend to do well on IQ tests. Funny, that.
[1] I got a boost on this one by spitting out,"weigh the clouds on their way in and out of the state," right away before building a slightly more feasible estimate. :-)
[2] The trick is just like the Jimi Hendrix song, if six was nine.
The problem Microsoft is facing is that they basically accomplished their mission statement. "A computer on every desk, all running Microsoft software." That is an accurate description of the world circa 2000. What the hell do they do now?
Google is likely to face a similar problem in the next few years. "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." For all the flack they're getting lately, they've done a remarkably good job at it. People expect to have whatever information they need at their fingertips, and they get mad when they don't. You wouldn't see the vitriol toward bad search results that you do now if the Internet was like it was in 1998, because nobody really had an expectation that they'd be able to find what they were looking for then.