Google's service might not be evil, but their NDAs sure are.
One C. Scott Ananian will be interviewing at Google in a couple of days, and posted in his Livejournal about the non-disclosure agreement that he has to sign before he can even be interviewed. This is unusual in and of itself, because usually you sign an NDA after you sign on with a company which tells you what you can and can't talk about and the length of time that these restrictions would be in effect. Google's pre-interview NDA has no time limit on it, and covers not only what they discuss during the interview but the compensation and benefits packages, who he'll be interviewing with, and even the fact that he went on an interview. The NDA also requires the signer to never again mention Google in any public manner after signing.
Some brave soul posted the verbatim contents of the Google pre-interview NDA to a weblog in case you'd like to read the original text.
This is pretty hair-raising stuff.. sure, Google is one of the hottest companies on the planet but I don't think that there's any reason for them to pull any of these "If you tell anyone that you interviewed with us, we'll have to kill you" shenanagins. I wonder if the dust-up last year with the guy who left Microsoft for Google had something to do with it.. as I recall there was a nasty legal battle involved in that situation.
I wonder how the NDA affects their Summer of Code program, come to think of it...