Why (and how) we've switched away from Google Maps

As for the questions, they certainly don't ask any that are in the article. Steve Yegge's article covers the exact category of questions they ask:

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goog...

I don't remember the exact questions I was asked, and signed about 80 pieces of paper saying I would Never Speak Of Them, but they are of the style where you must know X and then use pieces of X to solve completely unrelated problems. (X could be, for example, quicksort.) Graphs, algorithms, and data structures are essential, but nobody is going to ask you "implement a binary tree"; that is way too easy to study for. (I'm guessing that discrete math questions are also common; but because of the position I was interviewing for, they replaced those with testing and refactoring questsions. Which was good, because I was never good at discrete math.) I had not seen any of the questions they asked before, and two of them were interesting enough to keep me thinking about them for several days. (I was disappointed to discover, while implementing my solution to one, how easy it is to brute-force problems involving English words. There just aren't very many words. But the idea is what counts, and brute-force is not going to get you hired :)

Since I've been hired by Google, people have pointed me at a lot of "popular media" articles or videos about Google, and not many have matched my experience, but then again, I haven't actually started work yet.

(The linked article also talks about Bank of America intervewing, which doesn't have a standardized process. I know because I worked there and asked different questions, 100% chosen by me, every time I interviewed someone. So while one person at Bank of America may have asked "What animal are you?", that's not some sort of company policy. So it's a bit disingenuous of the article to name-drop Bank of America there.)

Across the world, I can't answer. Here in Western Australia, one of the largest single states in the world, there's been digital mapping for two decades now, predating the rise of Google maps.

Data from MODIS satellites is downloaded direct from the sats as they pass overhead and streamed to those with an interest. The better quality data comes from the aerial surveys performed each and every summer over populated areas which produce several thousand digital scans of wet negatives (they may have recently moved to high res digital in the planes, I've been out of the details for a few years).

Google didn't develop their mapping tech initially, they purchased the starting technology from Keyhole, a US based company (iirc), it's worth noting that several international companies had equal or better offerings that were considered including our locally developed technology from ermapper which is now owned by Lecia.

http://www.erdas.com/company/news/newsreleases/07-05-21/Leic...

As for volunteer contributions it's been our experience that if you provide data access and annotation tools then many competent people that care about ground accuracy (forestry services, land owners, search & rescue, exploration crews, etc) will happily add value.

It is very rare for OSM to be completely bare in a major metropolitan area (especially in the US). It could be that the addresses are gone, but at the very least the road network will be there from the TIGER import.

> I'm not a cartographer, I have no interest in being one. I certainly am not signing up to integrate OSM into what I'm building and be on the hook for user complaints about missing map data, and have to do that myself.

You don't have to be a cartographer to add data to OSM. You sign up, point and click or drag and drop. It takes minutes and you don't have to have any particular knowledge before hand (especially cartography). Having said that, I completely understand not wanting to be on the hook for user complaints. That's why Google charges thousands of dollars. Some people (the writer of the blog post in particular) aren't interested in paying that.

> Not to mention, contributing to OSM in the strictly legal way is not at all trivial - for legal reasons you simply cannot consult any other map, so basically you'd have to go out, walk/drive/bike around your area with paper and pen in hand and "map" it yourself. That or trust you have perfect memory w.r.t. your city. The bar for contributing back is high, can we blame people when they'd rather just have a map that worked?

This is not true. Mapping with paper and pencil on foot or bike or car is a great way to get outdoors and thousands of people use this technique to add to OSM every day, but you can also use any one of the dozens of aerial imagery backgrounds available to help you create data from memory.

Obviously developers won't start driving around in cars to map things out, but I wonder why the map-oriented communities haven't supported OSM? And surely map-oriented developers could start an initiative to highlight less-well mapped areas?

Now if only I could use Twilio and Google Payments here. We can't even buy music from iTunes, despite everyone having iPods and iPhones for almost as long as they've been around, and Apple stores in most major malls.

Although osm contributing can be a lot of work, its very easy for lots of people to add some data, esp. about where they live or grow up. Is there a coffers shop, school, or path near where you grewbup that's not on the map? Every little contribution helps. People are often proud to see their home correctly represented on the internet.

Many of your complaints are mostly valid if there is a totally accurate alternative map available, but its not the clear cut. In many places osm is of better quality than Google maps, and considerably cheaper than the national mapping/ordnance survey agencies. There is no perfect solution.