Some People Pay $30 to Get a Referral for Google | Hacker News Reader

Some People Pay $30 to Get a Referral for Google

rooftopslushie.com

23 pointssjunlee15 comments

Not a good first foot forward. You're willing to begin your relationship with a new employer based on dishonesty. Not a good way to start.

I don't even see what people see in wanting to work at Google. If you think you have the technical skills to make it through a Google interview, lots of much better places to work at will pay you just as good as a salary. Google is a corporate behemoth approaching a hundred thousand employees. You're not going to make a difference there like you could somewhere else.

Actually only a few companies will pay as much as Google (Google salary is low but they pay a ton of stock you can immediately sell for cash, so it’s effectively cash). Most people seem to overestimate how fun it is to work at Google but underestimate how much Google pays and how much more it is than most other companies.

I'm sure there are companies that pay as much, but none as well-known and easy to apply to. Google has a massive recruiting machine, and chances are pretty good that they will at least interview you (compared to e.g. Netflix). And they are a household name and have a reputation even outside of the industry as a great employer.

> If you think you have the technical skills to make it through a Google interview, lots of much better places to work at will pay you just as good as a salary.

What about total compensation?

The only places I'm currently aware of that give a similar compensation package are the other FAANG companies which I don't see being much better. The places I'm aware of that offer larger compensation companies (e.g. finance) usually don't seem to me to have as nice an atmosphere.

Number of employees was 107,646 as of June 30, 2019.

Would any google employee really care about earning $30 for the headaches it could potentially cause?

Is there a point to this? You still go through the same process anyway.

If you think you're competitive but your resume is being filtered out. Referrals get you past initial online coding challenges with most companies automatically.

Google's referral process makes you describe exactly how you know the person and why you believe they'd be a good fit for Google. It's pretty hard to answer this well if you've just met, and your likelihood of making it past the initial screen is directly proportional to how well your referer makes this case. After a few too many people e-mailing random Googlers and saying "Please refer me to Google!", they added a checkbox for "I don't know this person" which lets you skip all the free-text narratives, but also means that the referral is effectively the same as if a recruiter had sourced your name off LinkedIn. (AFAIK you still get the referral bonus and they still get hired if it turns out they are in fact good, but the referral itself carries no weight.) I usually recommend that people get referred by the Googler who knows their work best; PMing or e-mailing random Googlers hoping to short-circuit the screening process doesn't really work.

If the applicant has the skills and wants to get a foot in the door then why not? Equal opportunity for all college grads.

Because it doesn't get your foot in the door? This isn't about treating college grads inequitably - it's about incentivizing the introduction of people who a known-good employee vouches for, with respect to their fit for the position, culture, and their qualifications.

I agree. Some are blessed with great connections. Others are not so lucky. This platform just provides more opportunities for those who seek it.

I'd like to know how hard it is for other people starting out these days, what's worked for them. I'm not one to ask as I get hounded by Google/Alphabet recruiters every 3-6 months to co-design a role in entry-management/team-lead (SRM) or SWE/SA-SRE.

I'd suggest focusing on one of Go, Rust, Haskell, Elm or Elixir in addition to the customary C++17 or Java/Kotlin... and get some useful packages up on open repos.

Which, for all it's flaws, is kind of brilliant.

Does Google have the same kind of Old Boys Club as finance, law?

At least everyone has to grind Leetcode, and at some point, some nontrivial compsci knowledge is going to creep in.

This is a great opportunity

Reply on news.ycombinator.com