Hacker News Reader

Comment by marktangotango | Hacker News Reader

I once consulted at a Big Corp that also focused on hiring and burning through fresh college graduates. I imagined the culture must have been a bit like google as a result. This was a large health care company in the midwest. They didn't have the prestige to hire from Stanford or CMU, but they could get some of the best grads from second and third tier schools.

They'd hire these kids in and put them to work on their legacy monstrosity, expected 50 hour work weeks, mediocre benefits, and mediocre pay. The result was a lot of really talented people literally wasting years and not advancing their skills, and not getting to use any current, marketable technology. It was also a highly toxic environment as these same capable people crucified each other in code reviews and one-up-man-ship.

Obviously google must not be quiet that bad, but I'm also sure they have a lot of really talented people wasting their abilities on internal CRUD apps.

View on HN

Yeah, both of the big Midwestern HCM shops have that reputation, though one considerably more than the other (one also being a bit more forward-thinking with things like SMART on FHIR, so there are places you can still do interesting development, I would imagine).

On the other hand, they're a bit like any ERP system -- if you can stomach spending years inside the horror show of their systems, you can do quite well as an independent consultant for health systems just making the products work. But if you have a particular love for computer science qua computer science, yeah, not the right place to land.

This is... very, very much unlike Google. Almost the opposite; Google puts a lot of work into figuring out how to keep its employees happy. And, if anything, it has the opposite problem than "working on a legacy monstrosity" - there's enough internal mobility that it's hard to convince people to work on something lame. (Obvious bias: I work there a day per week still.)

Google puts a lot of work into figuring out how to keep its employees happy.

I'm not sure how you can say this for a company that's notorious for using closed allocation.

Worst horror story I've heard, here on HN, was an EE who was also good at Python. He sure thought he was hired to do hardware, but found himself stuck writing Python to test hardware. Not wanting to end his EE career, he of course had to resign.

And, yes, I know in theory you're able to quickly transfer out of that first position if it's not a good fit, but like the anecdote above, we've heard too many stories where that doesn't work in practice.

As others have noted, the whole thing for non-VIPs seems expressly tuned for new college graduates, who, in the case of this closed allocation policy, generally won't mind working on "whatever" for 18 months.

First - I've never entered Google as a fresh grad, so I have no idea what the experience is like. More of my students have entered after their Ph.D. than after their B.S., so again, more bias. All but one of the fresh Ph.D.'s who went there are still there, and seem generally happy with the way their careers are going; one left after a few years for a startup.

But, to more directly address your question with the information I do have, there are a lot of things that make a job good or not good. When it comes to a lot of the other things - benefits/perks, ease of getting things done, low overhead, responsive management, good culture, smart colleagues - Google does very well.

w.r.t. the actual job spec and happiness - all I can say is that there's likely to be a bias in hearing from people who were dissatisfied. But, again, my colleague set is biased towards seniority and people who've chosen to stay, so either way, you're getting an uneven view. :)

This response is much more measured than the previous one. The grand parent was clearly talking about fresh grads, yet you chose to respond as if you're exceptional experience was more relevant. If PhDs have a douche rep, this is an example of why.

There's a lot of objective evidence that Google is successful in being a good place to work. I assumed it wasn't necessary or productive to re-hash it. They're consistently ranked at the top of various "best companies to work for" lists, blah blah -- and while we all know those are partly a PR game, there's also some truth behind it.

The note to which I responded was by someone who had never worked at Google, and was making a large assumption based upon their experience at an unrelated company ("a large health care company in the midwest"). Many of the things in that note are factually incorrect as a basis for comparison ("mediocre benefits, and mediocre pay", said no Google or Facebook engineer, ever).

The point raised by hga has more to go on -- I don't know how common it is to be stuck doing things like that -- which is why I gave a more careful response to it.

(As an aside, I don't think it adds much to the discussion to make a personal attack or a categorical attack against people based upon their education. I welcome criticism, but it's certainly not fair to judge all Ph.D.s based upon my response, as much as it's not fair to assume that everyone in Kansas City misuses apostrophes based upon yours. :)

Oooh, you read my comment history, aren't we clever? Who so ever dissembles and back tracks twice(!) to explain and justify a banal internet post, they may have something to consider.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com