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Comment by euroclydon | Hacker News Reader

I've heard Google doesn't assign new hires to a team right away, so the hiring process might just be a big talent search, where teams then interview newly acquired talent for a position on their team, after they are in-house.

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That's almost certainly why there's no urgency in the hiring process, but it doesn't really excuse it.

I can verify, anecdotally. A friend of mine got a full time offer from Google a couple months ago and accepted right away. He's been told won't find out his team until just before starting in June (or July?).

That's not always the case. That suggests your friend is going to be working on something secret in some way to me.

I doubt it, as he only just submitted his preference ordering of what to work on (backend, search/ads, UI, etc.).

These things change dramatically over time, and as you can imagine, mitigating circumstances and experience can make one candidate's experience vastly different from another's.

One thing I'd like to remind everyone about is that I'm writing about a time long gone. Trying to guess what Google today does based on what Google did 5-6 years ago brings to mind the adage: "Past performance is no guarantee of future results."

These days there are multiple levels of hiring committee, plus comp, plus Page. Sure some parts are "automatic" but they add useless weeks onto a slow bureaucracy meanwhile goog loses great candidates to companies which move faster. Sure there's a luxury of being the "best place to work" but the cream of the crop are the least willing to wait.

I've heard that engineers work on a starter project for the first few months. The starter project is often assigned a few days before the new hire arrives.

It can happen that new hires don't have a team, but most hires come in knowing where they will start.

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