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Comment by hello_moto | Hacker News Reader

> (although they seem to have nothing to do with what any developer does day-to-day)

Depends on what you do at Google.

Google Guava is a data-structure/algorithms-heavy great Java library.

Dart and Golang are programming languages. I'd imagine you have to know how to write a compiler etc and the standard library definitely has sections for data-structure and algorithms.

They pay tons of money and prefer people to stick around and do different things within the company so I guess that's why they set the bar high for that specific section of skillset (algorithms and data structure).

Some people are willing to go through that for the Money, Prestige, and hopefully the experience. Some people don't. That's life.

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> Depends on what you do at Google.

I imagine they have multiple PhDs working on those projects. For your bog standard SDE these interviews have very little to do with the day-to-day job.

In all honesty, there are not that many "bog standard SDEs" at Google. That's not what the company is hiring for: it wants engineers who are comfortable with complexity, whether measured in technical challenge (Tensorflow, Dart etc.), robustness (cloud, GSuite) or extreme scalability (Gmail, ads, search etc.) A PhD is clearly not the only path to that skillset, but it's not unusual either.

Separately, I'm sorry the original poster had a crappy experience: that does sound awful. It happens, unfortunately, and I'm glad they drew attention to it.

Disclosure: I work at Google.

> That's not what the company is hiring for: it wants engineers who are comfortable with complexity, whether measured in technical challenge (Tensorflow, Dart etc.), robustness (cloud, GSuite) or extreme scalability (Gmail, ads, search etc.)

How confident are you about that assertion?

A lot of Googlers are doing generic web/app work that happens elsewhere from those I've talked to. Not HQ tho so maybe it's different out there

A lot of the requirements around generic web development at Google requires deep knowledge of things. Not always algorithms specifically, but I've also never been slowed down because someone wasn't familiar with a concept I was working on (or able to catch up very quickly).

No no one is writing basic CRUD apps at Google. At that scale there are optimizations needed at every level. I know people who work on the cutsom kernel for the servers to front end people for apps.

Since we're on anecdotes: I've interviewed people who wanted to leave Google because they were bored of not having any interesting work to do.

If you truly believe that "no one is writing basic CRUD apps at Google", then their marketing has been incredibly effective and explains why their interview process remains the way it is

They definitely are, including internal tools and the like. My friend works on one like that.

This is like claiming nobody at Amazon or Facebook works on CRUD apps, lol.

I'm sure Amazon definitely has boring jobs.

What exactly is your deal here?

I think Facebook is known to have more interesting jobs.

> I think Facebook is known to have more interesting jobs.

If influencing democratic elections is your idea of interesting, sure.

I stand corrected. But in all honesty, that smacks of privileged elitism. Do these pop quiz, brain teaser interviews really prove the person can be successful on the job at Google?

I actually think this is a big issue for Google, and maybe why there is so much time burned on internal threads.

There aren’t enough good problems to go around and a lot of folks who were promised the world end up bored, working on just another mobile app or whatever else.

This may have been true 15 years ago when they were a small company. Google now employs ~60K engineers and the majority of them are "Bog Standard".

Disclosure: I worked at Google twice.

May I ask: why did you work for Google a second time? Thanks.

The first time I was a new (post) grad and I didn't much like it and left for a startup within a year.

I figured I'd give it another go with more experience, so the second time I was hired at L5 (expected to be leading teams). Liked it even less the second time, but stuck around for about 2 years for logistical reasons.

In my experience at Google and other large companies, the team you join ends up dictating your experience. I would be open to a third stint at Google, but would be very careful about vetting the team (especially the leadership).

Having said that, I don't think I like the culture at Google. Especially the second time, it felt very mercenary and there was cutthroat competition. It didn't feel like I was working on a cohesive vision, but just moving protobufs around. I think I preferred Google when Eric was CEO, maybe because it was smaller, but it felt like Larry was running Google with too much emphasis on the bottom line and not enough on product or vision.

Thank you, that was pretty interesting.

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