Today I work at Google but this was my third attempt to try to join, going back over a decade. Looking back, the first two times I attempted to join as a software engineer, which was probably in hindsight, where I went wrong.
When I was interviewing at Twitter in 2015 for a software engineering role, the Hadoop team engineering manager Joep Rottinghuis suggested my skills might fit better into a different position called Site Reliability Engineering which was new to me at the time. I switched to interview with the SRE manager, an ex-Yahoo! colleague Pascal Borghino and successfully joined.
It turned out that SRE was the perfect position for me, and was the role I had been doing all along, but I just didn't know it existed. I always was curious about the lower levels of software and hardware and wanting to automate getting things working reliably.
As for Google, I successfully interviewed for an SRE position late in 2022 with Duncan Winn and Andrew Brampton, for a start in March 2023. It really helped this time that I was interviewing for the right role which took me some time to figure out, pretty much 25 years into my career.