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Comment by hueving | Hacker News Reader

Google has gotten so large so quickly in the past 3 years, that I wonder how much damage has been done to their engineering culture. A lot of "less than stellar people" have joined in these recent years according to several of my friends that work there (in infrastructure and some ML groups).

It seems the push to golang is entirely to sustain large projects with average engineers. Maybe somewhere high up they decided that it's better to just have a massive engineering workforce rather than only hiring top talent? At what point does brain drain start as the best people get sick of dealing with mediocrity?

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I've only been there 13 months but I've found the quality of previous and new hires are ridiculously high. Given the number of talented people applying every day I think Google could increase hiring by 100% with no appreciable drop in quality.

Google has a lot of imperfections addressed elsewhere in the comments here but the engineering culture is extremely strong and one of the best parts about being there. I think the overall "Googley culture" is suffering but it isn't for technical reasons.

Then again maybe I'm one of those C players who snuck in the past year.

>I've only been there 13 months but I've found the quality of previous and new hires are ridiculously high.

Seek out the people that were there 6+ years ago and compare their quality with the average Googler. You'll likely notice a difference.

Google now has over 50,000 employees. It's not possible to get that big that quickly without a reduction in hiring rigor. There wasn't a sudden influx of geniuses to fill that demand.

They're pretty much the same raw talent, just with 6+ extra years of navigating the Goog and collecting all the arcana that makes you an effective engineer there. Of all of the complaints I have heard from older and newer Googlers, not a single one (in person or on Memegen) has ever complained about a drop in engineer quality. If anything it is a continuing frustration over how high the hiring bar continues to be and how we can't get referral bonuses for any of our friends.

Doesn't that suffer from survivor bias?

As some point you have to hire someone to take out the trash. They can't all be Einsteins.

Funnily when I got to visit the Google office in London people just left their trash on the floor of the cafeteria for the cleaners..

I think his comment was mostly figurative.

Except no, I saw stuff like that too when I was there along with childish crap like throwing gum in the urinals and googlers acting like entitled jerks towards the cleaning staff.

I met some great people at Google, but I'd be remiss not to mention I also met too many #IAmGoogle sorts (who were all dudes BTW).

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