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Life at Google

tbray.org

63 pointswglb37 comments

I was looking forward to, well, you know - some content.

It's basically a short "list" of things that are cool at Google each followed by a comment along the lines of "but I can't really go into detail".

To be frank, Tim is pretty good at doing this - writing posts with very little content but vaguely cheering on the corporation. I unsubscribed from his RSS feed over a year ago, and at no time when I come across his blog since do I feel like I missed anything, or feel compelled to resubscribe.

In his defense, his posts are known for brevity. That's why he calls them "fragments". Some are just a couple sentences long. That doesn't negate that there may be very little content in the post, but it's consistent with what he has stated he would do all along.

I am working at a second largest IT company in India, in terms of revenue and I get zero-internet access from 9am to 5pm. During the rest of the hours, I get the so called 'restricted' internet access, where I cannot check web-mails, nor can I download any executables, and I don't have admin access to install anything. Even to install the network printer I need to raise a request to the computer division. I feel sad.

While the situation is sad, would you say this increases or lowers productivity? (your own / of your company)

"We’re at a weird time in the history of the growth of the Internet. At this (perhaps anomalous) point, the business leverage resulting from the focused application of human intelligence is so high that all these benefits and all this freedom, considered through a pure cold profit-and-loss lens, are cheap at the price..."

In other words, Google has created an army of superbly intelligent people who are deeply committed to their mission of covering the surfaces of every neocortex in the world's brains with little text advertisements.

If this were a classical legend it would be a tragedy of Olympian proportions.

Better as a black comedy, methinks.

I don't know, man. I hear people ragging on advertisement all the time. But the history of western media is the history of text advertisements. Subsidy from advertisement made the newspaper something the everyman could buy with the change in his pocket. In modern times, advertisement still supports most of the media that people choose to consume.

I know ya'll have read your "no logo" and everything, but you got to acknowledge that advertisement has done some good. It's hard for me to imagine what the last two hundred years of history would have been like without it.

How big would the internet be if people couldn't use google ads to pay for their bandwidth costs? How many small net businesses would never be able to reach their customers? I know Patrick uses ads to get customers for his bingo card creator. Thousands of other businesses do.

I just can't hop on the "ads are evil eye pollution" bandwagon.

I'm not hopping on the text ads are evil bandwagon, I'm hopping on the "Optimizing text advertisements is a rather surprising way to employ the talent of a generation of smart people" bandwagon.

That had way less content that I imagined.

I still hope it does turn into a series and he can give us some more information.

There is nothing here that you couldn't figure out even if you aren't an employee of Google. An example of the insightfulness: Look at Google’s age in years and current size and do some arithmetic; insane growth is an everyday constant. Groundbreaking.

Is he trying to break ground, or just share some thoughts on his first day? I don't understand why there is an expectation that this blog post would be an in-depth investigative journalism expose.

Not an expose but maybe some information beyond "they have sensible security".

Unless you have some reason to care about tbray personally, the post is basically useless.

This feels like spam.

This topic is soooo 2003.

That’s what Google is. I mean, why can’t everyone lavish these sort of perks, and this sort of environment, on their employees?

Not all businesses scale well. Software is one of them. Once you develop them the cost of adding more users - or selling more ads is virtually zero. Music was another. High speed trading maybe is also in this category.

The real world is outside Google:) Does anyone know how many employees are at Googleplex or take a guess?

Interesting. I've read many horror stories about people wanting to get a job at Google and going through the interview shredder.

Apparently, once you're in, it's a paradise. Well, at least compared to what you had to go through.

going through the interview shredder

My experience was that the interviews were easy and fun once my interviewers got over the embarrassed "this is really stupid, but I'm supposed to ask you this really trivial question...".

The recruiter I dealt with, on the other hand, was collossally incompetent, and ranks among the top reasons why I declined Google's job offer.

That's sad.

After you join Google you never have to deal with the recruiter again and the interviewers become fun people to work with.

OTOH an incompetent recruiter can result in a bad job offer and I can understand why that could be a big negative.

I think I got the right offer despite the recruiter's screwups; but you're missing my point. Even if I never had to encounter that recruiter again, it started me thinking "do I want to work for a company where people can continually screw up and not get fired?"

Did you, in addition to not taking the offer, make sure that someone above that recruiter knew about the issues described?

It is hard to fix problems if nobody reports them.

Yes. I asked to complete a survey about my interviewing experience, and I wrote about my recruiter at great length. (I presume that someone read the comments on those surveys...)

Someone surely did read the comments: the recruiter and/or one or more members of the HR department.

In all of the companies I have worked in as an employee or with as a consultant, the HR department always has by far the weakest staff. I have also observed that the number and degree of problematic staff in non-HR departments is largely correlated with just how weak the HR department is. This makes complete sense, of course, since it is the HR department that is supposed to address such problems and it is the HR department which usually plays the largest role in disciplinary decisions and firing decisions. The department holding onto firing decisions will always have the weakest staff, and for the simple reason that they aren't exactly going to fire themselves, now are they? :) The rest of the company's staff problems simply fall out from that. Not that I am suggesting that Google has notable staffing problems, rather simply that no matter where you go, even Google, the HR department (or whichever department in reality owns hire/fire, usually HR) will necessarily be the weakest in the organization.

As far as I can tell (based on the yearly-or-so "are you sure you still don't want to relocate to work for us?" emails), most of the recruiters at Google are contractors and many of them, in fact, are fired ("contract not renewed").

Can you elaborate? What did the recruiter do wrongly.

What did the recruiter do wrongly.

The two biggest issues were (a) not understanding that a DPhil qualifies as "Master's degree or better", and not bothering to ask what it was; and (b) changing which job I was applying for three times without asking me.

When I turned up in Mt. View for my interview, I was greeted with "so, you're interested in a job doing X", to which the only response I could provide was "... I am?" My first interviewer did a heroic job of rearranging my interview schedule to make it more appropriate, but obviously there's a limit to how much you can fix on the interview day itself.

This happened to me on my interviews as well.

I don't think it's incompetence per se. They just interview people all the time and try to apply the usual Google techniques of scaling (which involve acceptable failure rates). Recruiters are sometimes staff and sometimes not.

A good engineer would have caught the problem right away, but apart from your phone screen, no good engineer looked at your resume until maybe five minutes before you were in the building. This isn't carelessness as much as mental self-protection. People are super busy there and they still do a lot of interviewing.

The system works best if you are a generic Stanford grad with no fixed ideas about what you wanted to be doing. If you are even a little bit unusual the gears can suddenly seize up.

I agree; my interviews, and interview process, were not painful at all. And, actually, from what I remember, I wasn't really asked any trivial questions. They were generally interesting and challenging without being impossible "a-ha" problems. The process did drag a bit, particularly as it seemed to require a dozen levels of committees and approvals to actually make an offer, but I wasn't really expecting a company of that size to move at lightning speed, and at the time I wasn't aggressively looking for work so it wasn't really an issue.

I'm sure other people have had different, less positive, experiences. I'm also quite sure that there's a selection bias among those who feel they need to publicly talk about their interview experience. But, yes, it's a big company and there's bound to be mistakes and mishaps and bad interviewers and recruiters.

What I really want to know is what "tbray" sees as the next google. Now that he is inside he surely must have a different perspective on what could be dislodging/game changing for the mammoth company.

I think you are ascribing powers of omniscience to him that he, perhaps, does not have.

No, unfortunately that's not going to happen. Instead, he's going to become incapable of seeing any future of the internet other than "more Google".

This seems to happen to all their employees, with the exception of Brad Fitzpatrick.

There's a good contingent internally that haven't drunk the kool-aid, Brad's just the most visible externally. It's a reasonably huge effort just to keep the hubris in check internally, and it doesn't always work out.

"Brad's just the most visible externally"

Which is the other problem... People enter Google and disappear from external sight. I don't think Google has a "don't blog" policy, maybe it is that they just see "google = internet" and decide there is no value in having a public facing side.

I wonder whether this will happen to Tim

Many OSS contributors disappear because they're encountering satisfyingly challenging engineering problems as their day job for the first time. It takes a special discipline to actually _use_ 20% time at all (not because of team pressure, just from the ease with which one can focus on the large problems at Google). I've had that problem myself, and am considering putting said discipline in my own written goals.

I wonder why Tim has gone to Google - he doesn't seem to elaborate why he chose Google post-Sun/Oracle.

In previous posts, he has indicated that google has tried to get him before, but he did not want to relocate. The offer this time was that he could work without relocating--he still gets to work from home in Vancouver.

OTOH, that makes the parts of this post about the Google campus even sillier.

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