Hacker News Reader

Comment by justthistime_ | Hacker News Reader

Hopefully this will also happen at lower levels.

The "I'm the smartest person in the world, because I work at Google" attitude is a reason I don't interact with/communicate with/contribute to Google-related projects. Their hugely inflated egos are just off-putting.

View on HN

Googler for close to a year, so take this with a grain of salt.. I had heard of this exact reputation before I joined and frankly it was one of the things that worried me most.

After I joined, I kept waiting for the hammer to fall, to see the competitive mean streak in people and in my team at least, it was exactly the opposite. It's frankly the best environment I've worked in because they are genuinely caring people.

Now, it's not all rainbows and unicorns. I've also run into the aspergers poster child, into the competitive assholes, but I don't have to deal with any of these in my daily life. So, yes, there are assholes, but I don't think this is the norm.

While I worked at Google I noticed a huge disparity between how people responded to other Googlers and how they responded to non-googlers. A more interesting observation would be to find people you know and look for their outside interactions. If you find the same disparity as I did you might want to bring it up with them, sometimes that helps sometimes not.

But are the people you interact with the ones in the big public positions the grandparent is referring to? (e.g. Open source projects like Kubernetes)

My experience with the Kubernetes engineers has been awesome.

They are incredibly helpful, and very tolerant of newbies like me who sometimes ask dumb questions...

There are never dumb questions, only practical and valuable examples of areas for improvement in documentation and/or related collateral (tutorials, cheat sheets, FAQs, etc.).

I actually interact with teams that bring a lot more revenue and is more highly visible to the public. And, again, I may be lucky here, but all the way up to my SVP are nice. I may have been lucky, but I think it's more an issue with people generalizing some issues. I'm not going to generalize my experience either, but I had to offer a different perspective.

Honestly, think about how many companies let their nerdiest of engineers be the public face of projects. The reputation is easy to come by when your front is not a "people person".

Sometime, Google employees also show this kind of attitude in their social life which makes other people hard to just have social interaction with Google employees.

Yes, one of the most annoying things you can encounter is a conversation at dinner with multiple Google employees. They will constantly mention that Google is working on something and then after confirmation with each other that it is still private, refuse to tell anymore details. It seems like it's encouraged in Google culture to brag but in a secretive manner to remind outsiders of what they are missing.

... or maybe they're really excited about whatever it is and want to talk about it, but also don't want to get fired for leaking something?

This is precisely it.

Plus, Google's huge and has very few internal communication barriers --- nearly everything is open to everyone. So it's really easy to get into the habit of casually talking about internal products when talking shop.

Then you notice someone nearby who isn't a Googler, and you go oh shit and stop talking.

And that is almost definitionally a lack of social grace and tact. It's one flavor of what is meant by "low EQ".

It may be usual and common for Google employees to do that. That doesn't make it excusable, and it's a pretty big reason why I, too, tend to avoid gatherings where I know it's going to be a bunch of Google employees. They communicate that they don't want outsiders around? I can oblige.

So that's a lack of EQ... So much so that it's a lack of common decency. Yes, it's a big deal, yes it's exciting but when in mixed company you need to talk about other things if it's indeed secret stuff.

Right, and it's extremely rude. It's the equivalent of the old grade school "I know a juicy secret but I'm not going to tell you" routine.

Ironically, lunches are not like this. :D Since you never know which people in the cafeteria are or are not Google employees, conversation in the cafes is almost never about sensitive work stuff. The infosec focus actually stimulates an environment with a better work/life balance. Totally strange to experience, but 100% true.

The Angular team is full of amazing low-ego developers that are a pleasure to interact and work with.

I can second this, having worked with and talked with many of the team - they are great people, and enforce respect for each other within the community as the minimum bar for being involved in the ecosystem.

I have not had an issue with any interactions with any Google-backed projects.

Deleted comment

AngularJS is maintained by Google.

Googlers are actually quite friendly for the most part. The internal vibe at Google is like the Globex Corporation from The Simpsons. They are elite but once you make it on the inside, far from elitist. Just never mind their secret take-over-the-world plans and you'll be fine. :)

Oh, and if you are a cat person, become a dog person before joining the company.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com