Warm nuts. If any delicacy can catapult a mid-level software developer into the atmosphere of one-percentness, it’s warm nuts. Walnuts and cashews, all warmed up.

Also, airplane seats that recline at ample angles. Also, it’s the curtain between me and the impoverished masses. It’s the Alaska Airlines flight attendant who delivers said warm nuts to reclining said me.

But mostly, it’s the nuts, as my warm nut-bowl and I float effervescently eastward, together, swathed in a thin navy blanket.

Few professional opportunities could entice me to leave Hawaii. But when a Google recruiter contacted me via LinkedIn, fooled as she was by my list of self-contrived tech titles, I admit: the prospect of bottomless free pizza, metronaps, and an early ticket to human immortality enticed me. Also, I mean, it’s Google. And when Google calls, nerds like me answer.

San Francisco from the air: Time to put away the warm nuts and dig out the resume.

Paul Hohmenn/Flickr.com

As Doug Harb explained in a recent Civil Beat article, moving to Hawaii “for professional reasons” would be like moving to North Dakota for the love of exotic dolphins. It’s one notch shy of “career suicide.”

The average salary for a software developer in California, for example, is $36,000 more per year than here in Hawaii. In Washington state, the average developer reels in $48,000 more per year.

That’s a drastic delta by any standard. Factor in the high cost of milk and oil, poorly performing public schools, excise taxes, H1 traffic, Jake Shimabukuro, the long boat ride to the nearest Trader Joe’s, and you’ll be building a Homesick mobile app in no time.

As Seattle and San Francisco developers click away atop bejeweled keyboards, a startup in Manoa listed a job opening for a Mobile app developer. The right applicant should be passionate, hard-working, able to meet tough deadlines, and well-trained in the fine art of building and deploying iPhone and Android apps.

The average salary for a software developer in California, for example, is $36,000 more per year than here in Hawaii. In Washington state, the average developer reels in $48,000 more per year.

A six-figure full-time offer would be appropriate. The package for this particular job? No health insurance, no 401K, no job security, no laptop or software licenses. Just $200 per app.

After reading the job posting, disgruntled Hawaii developers ventured over to Reddit to let out a communal sigh. It takes time, passion, and intelligence to build intricate, interactive software. $200 won’t even pay for the device upon which one’s beloved application is deployed. And mainland companies pay roughly the same amount per hour just to ensure a developer sits at a keyboard pretending to work.

Of course, it’s not fair to assume that this anecdotal job posting reveals the aggregate perceived value of software developers in Hawaii, but it sure feels like it does in the heat of the moment, and it definitely knocks developers down a few emotional pegs. Enough so that when a Google or Facebook recruiter strolls into town throwing lofty promises of Cristal and mad Benjis, it’s hard not to consider the $200 job listing while weighing the pros and cons of signing the dotted line and vacating paradise forever.

So there I sat, feeling somewhat like a traitor, in a first class seat afforded by Google, speeding across the Pacific toward the golden coast of California. I read but barely absorbed the book, “In The Plex,” an account of Google’s rise to power.

My mind kept wandering back to the issue of money. If I somehow snagged a gig at Google, I could fill my coffers. I could, in turn, stuff myself with warm nuts and visit Hawaii whenever the thought tickled me. Heck, maybe I could even afford a penthouse at the top of Howard Hughes’ Waiea. From there, I could look down upon the homeless masses sprinkled throughout Ala Moana Park, and out farther I could marvel at the vast, untouched ocean. And as I looked outward from my rarely occupied condo, I could lovingly repeat to myself the mantra at the very heart of Google’s empire: “don’t be evil.”

A side-note here: while eating warm nuts, it’s surprisingly easy to transform oneself into a Mitt Romney. A little bit of privilege and a privacy curtain go a long way. Two free cocktails slide down the gilded hatch, and before you know it, you forget that just a few weeks ago you were stuffing your luggage into the same cramped overhead compartments as everyone else. Even a randomized seat upgrade can turn the humblest of passengers into the newest heir to the Hilton throne.

Last week, Patrick Pichette, who earns $22 million per year as the CFO of Google, posted his resignation letter on Google+. In the letter, Pichette mentions life-changing epiphanies while he was “looking at the sunrise on top of…Mt Kilimanjaro” and while enjoying “numerous hours of cycling…(my introvert happy place).”

Those revelations — that Pichette should quit his job and enjoy more personal time with his wife — rang hollow to many. After all, the busy, digitally connected life — a life we’re blessed and cursed with, and a life from which Pichette hopes to flee as he shuts his ears to the buzzing cell towers around him — is a life hand-crafted by companies like Google. And now, in the aftermath of that digital revolution, only the richest of globetrotters can escape so seamlessly. Nestled inside their smooth-sailing jets. While the digital dystopia catches up with the rest of us, one notification at a time.

The assumption among the interviewers: Everyone wants to work for Google. Because working for Google is the pinnacle of professional privilege. It’s the goal of every true techie.

I landed at San Francisco International Airport. The honeymoon period of Google’s courtship had come to a close, it seemed. I picked up my Dodge rental car, drove aimlessly for a bit, then checked in to my modest hotel room in Sunnyvale. I scarfed down as many Toblerones and Red Bulls as my stomach could muster, reread some of “In the Plex,” watched some bad TV, fell asleep. When morning came, I put on clothes that spoke to me. I drove to Google’s campus, and, once there, I endured eight hours of interviews wedged back to back.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that I wasn’t interviewing well. I’m prone to self-effacing humor and stuttering digressions (see above, or below).

Even as a lowly interviewee at Google, I wasn’t talking to an underling stuffed away in a dusty Human Resources department. I was talking directly to the developers, designers, and program managers who make Google Google — the people who work tirelessly to build and tweak the digital products that billions of people around the globe use every day. They use Google to do their jobs, keep track of the news, entertain themselves, and stare at pornography.

That’s how Google does interviews. Interviewing is a core competency for all employees, not just a handful of unlucky ones, and the revolving door of interviews followed mostly by a sea of rejection is everyone’s responsibility. A job inside a job.

Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California.

Shawn Collins/Flickr.com

The assumption among the interviewers: Everyone wants to work for Google. Because working for Google is the pinnacle of professional privilege. It’s the goal of every true techie. It’s the first step toward climbing any mountain — literal or figurative — and, in the end, it’s the shedding of entrepreneurial pursuits altogether. Even if the job requires the uprooting of one’s entire life and wardrobe, it’s worth it. Valuables and variables including wives and utensils and children can be replaced with the Google equivalent — namely, more work hours.

What struck me most was the fact that none of the interviewers asked me if or why I wanted to work for Google. It was almost as if I existed as a wafting aberration. Barely in the room. A ghostly figure desperate to affect the lives of the living, to somehow make an impact on the Haley Joel Osments trotting around the Google offices.

The office lights didn’t help. They automatically turned off at 15-minute intervals or so. Even when I gestured, or paced in all corners of the room, the lights snapped off, never impressed. I was a ghost, begging to push a penny up the wall.

Maybe I was being self-centered here. Or maybe I wanted more warm nuts. But it felt strange that I be deemed the wanting party in this equation. I mean, Google called me. They were asking me in their own subtle way to give up hurricane popcorn, musubi, Sunday morning ridge hikes. I love where I live, expensive and complicated as it is. Why ask me to a prom and then make me beg for a dance?

For the cheap price of a plane ticket and a few Toblerones, their employees picked my brain for eight straight hours. Whether the juice was worth the squeeze — the jury is still out. But they consulted me for ideas and insights as I’m sure they do with all of their job candidates. It’s a consultation I’d usually charge good money for.

Most of the questions the interviewers asked me revolved around the products they worked on. How would I make those products better? What features would I add? What would I scrap? What future threats might the product encounter? They were tough questions, good questions, deep questions. I stumbled through all of them. And I left feeling like the interviews more closely resembled a tech consultation than they did a conventional job interview.

Google is a fickle mistress, alas. More than 2 million hopeful applicants apply to work at Google every year. Only a couple thousand are accepted. Applicants are 10 times more likely to get accepted into Harvard.

The gears of application and rejection are ever-churning. But it seems that Google has devised an approach to interviewing that provides considerable value even if it doesn’t yield a considerable number of new employees.

Because, for the cheap price of a plane ticket and a few Toblerones, their employees picked my brain for eight straight hours. Whether the juice was worth the squeeze — the jury is still out. But they consulted me for ideas and insights as I’m sure they do with all of their job candidates. It’s a consultation I’d usually charge good money for.

And that’s not to mention the affirmation such encounters yield for the interviewers, who play the part of the beautiful Bachelor in interview after interview, asking a thousand desperate nobodies why they should receive one very limited edition rose. The mass field of rejection lends itself to a greater sense of exclusivity and privilege, which keeps the gears churning and the sense of employee loyalty very high.

Sure, the $200 gig in Manoa isn’t a developer’s dream, but at least the bounds are explicit. Even if the pay is measly, you know what you’re giving up, and what you’re getting in return. With Google, I left more confused than when I arrived. I’m not sure what Google wanted, or if I gave them anything.

As you can imagine, I didn’t get the job. It didn’t take long for Google to deliberate.

But before Google called me to break the obviously life-shattering news, my wife and I had already decided that Google wasn’t for us. We wanted to stay in Hawaii for the long haul. To work here, live here, start a family here.

The trip from California back to Hawaii was a cramped one. I was again confined to coach, knees welded together, elbows at awkward angles as I tried to drink a Coke without waking my snoring neighbors. It was close quarters, sure, but I was excited to go home and endure another week in Hawaii: building something, lying on the beach, hugging my wife, petting my dog.