Google Gets 75,000 Job Applications in 1 Week, Setting Record
businessweek.com
businessweek.com
http://www.aaronboodman.com/2010/10/wherein-i-help-you-get-g...
Sorry but I dont think that's even close to being accurate. Google makes thousands of hires each year, a vast majority of them will be through normal hiring processes (from their competitors or college) and definitely not acquisitions or high profile. You only hear about the acquisitions and high profile hires because normal non-high profile devs hires do not make good news/blog articles. Creating a startup in hope of getting bought out by Google is like wishing to win the lottery.
http://crbug.com/?q=GoodFirstBug
https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/developers/contr...
Shameless self-promotion: If you do this and Google still wont talk to you, RockMelt is hiring - http://www.rockmelt.com/jobs.html
You should also know that they're super cool about letting you get into the AUTHORS file, you just have to write good code that they can use, and they'll insist that you add yourself as part of the patch.
I think they'd get more high-quality folks if they let people work from home. I'd rather not move to Pittsburgh or NYC, but would like to work on Google stuff. It really interests me.
Edit: I never sent them a resume or initiated the conversation (they called me both times). Also, I don't do start-ups and am not a big open source contributor. I do write and publish code that I find interesting, but that's it. I write code because it's fun (it's a hobby), not because I want to be rich or famous.
From http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2010/11/10/how-to-land-a-job-at... : How do you go from one of thousands of resumes, to the one person the whole Analytics team is dying to bring on board?
By doing the job.
What does that mean, really? Look at the product and share your insights. Do you have smart suggestions on how to improve the product? If not, you may have picked the wrong dream job.
At the very least, it would allow you to filter the chaff, and enough care could be given to a dataset as small as 75,000 documents to take care of preprocessing, some manual curation, etc. and yield some decent results. If you wanted to, you could even compute PageRank scores in R on your laptop for a dataset that small (and that would probably be the only computationally intensive part of it, after POS tagging and ML model fitting).
As a bonus, the effort would go a long way to help your recruiting in the future.
To give just the easiest and most recent example of how that approach breaks: the increasing deluge of content farms and SEO spam in Google results. Many folks consider that non-optimal but Google defends it because their data "tells them" it's optimal. Now picture that approach with people. Rank things by some measurement and only things that measure well by that metric will rank high, shutting you out of great opportunities. The false negative, etc. Related anti-pattern is the concept of Local Maxima.
C'mon, I'm not one to usually come rushing to Google's aid, but from Matt Cutts' comments on HN and recent blog posts on the official blog is seems to me that they are working hard on this problem, which would imply they don't think the status quo is optimal.
Secondly, it should be possible to do something as simple as filter out obvious content farm sites in under a week tops. Or give all users a quick and easy to do it. Perhaps have a default blacklist of known content farmers, and then give users the option to remove things from the blacklist when doing their own searches. You might be dealing with a huge company if something as simple as this takes 20k employees more than a week, tops, to put into production. And I'm being generous with the week estimate, because it could be done even faster than that under more agile conditions. And a 'default blacklist of known content farmers' is not even the only solution which could be implemented quickly, you could also do something like add another variable to the PageRank algorithm which has a down weighing effect on any page under a domain known to be a content farmer/spammer. Supposedly, they are already doing this (IIRC) but again, the basic idea could be implemented and put into production quickly, if it hasn't already.
I don't think that bodes well for them.
"you can divide our industry into two kinds of people: those who want to go work for a company to make it successful, and those who want to go work for a successful company."
Google is a great company. It's also a big company ($200B market cap, 20,000+ employees). Given their size, it's a tautology that they'll appeal to the larger number of people who want to work at a great company rather than the people who want to build a great company.
my brother poster points out it's a false dichotomy, but it's fair to say we all fall in some percentage in one category and the rest in the other. No one would be comfortable showing up to work tomorrow obsolete. No one would be happy never growing in their work.
IBM hired Ted Codd, AT&T Ken Thomson, while Google is currently Rob Pike's employer. Clearly you would not expect all employees to do basic research (not even at the Institute for Advanced Study!), but I think we ain't seen nothing yet in terms of Google's research legacy. (The kind of which you won't find in a start up.)
I think this shows they truly are doing things right w.r.t treating employees right and creating a great environment to work.
OTOH, they'd have to be insane to just give random new hires free access to their infrastructure.
So, if you've got some computing problems that would benefit from scale or data, maybe the best route is to get a proof-of-concept working on EC2, and then try to collaborate with Googlers.
This is distinct from the startup->Gacquisitionoogle route, since I'm more interested in projects than companies (except my on co.)
There are safeguards in place to make sure experimental jobs don't stomp on production critical ones.
What if one wanted to run a compute-heavy job with enough machines to give access to say 10 TB of RAM?
The idea would be to do a few hours of actual computation over a few days of clock time.
I'll have to think about whether I can phrase this as a MapReduce problem. Unfortunately it's a side-project, so I can't spare many cycles for it.
-harryh, googler from 2004-2009
Edit: emphasis
I also wonder why Google would announce such a thing. My take away from this is that it's pointless to apply, since there are too many applications. Do they want people to stop applying?
The vast, vast majority of these applicants have no shot of working for Google, much less of being then poached by Facebook.
Not enough dedication to prying people's lives open, one privacy setting reset at a time?
I wonder what type of work-load their HR department is under.
Regardless of how tough it is to get into Google, founding a successful startup is still tougher. Plus, if you're only looking to get bought by Google, you'll be overlooking many other options, and will decrease your negotiating leverage accordingly. If you want to work at Google, apply to work at Google, and if you want to found a startup, found a startup. But don't confuse your motivations for the two of them, because you'll be doing a disservice both to your startup and to your chances of working at Google.