> Maybe Google scale isn't for me.
Google employs the very elite of the elite. If you're working there you're probably at the very top of your field. Obviously not every can meet that standard and there's no shame in not being the absolute best.
Google employs the very elite of the elite. If you're working there you're probably at the very top of your field. Obviously not every can meet that standard and there's no shame in not being the absolute best.
I feel a little sorry for Google's developers. They're told they're brilliant but asked to write software to deliver adverts and track people. They could literally be curing cancer and putting people on Mars if they wanted, and yet they sit in Mountain View working out new things to do with the data about what I clicked on today. It's a huge waste of talent.
Your typical software engineer slept through the minimum amount of biology coursework required of them and has no special interest in chemistry beyond maybe like, a broscience-level grasp of pharmacology related to research compounds commonly viewed as smart drugs.
If bay area futurism woo is indicative of broader trends among software engineers, this person also has a vague, half-ironic commitment either to superintelligent AI immanentizing the eschaton or brain uploading becoming a hot-swappable replacement for the mortal coil within 20 years. Or both.
A belief that Google's workforce constitutes an addressable vat of brainpower of such raw g that, were it not for the idle concerns of developing adtech, it could turn to curing cancer is a very strange belief.
I'll explain why it sounds preposterous to me, and why the idea that google could change the fate of cancer research or missions to mars if not for its profit motives is patently unrealistic to the point of being insulting to everyone involved in this counterfactual.
1. Why cancer?
Number one cause of death is heart disease. Why not that? Surely the #1 problem is good enough for people currently working on adtech if the #2 problem is.
You said curing cancer, not "applying the numerical optimization expertise of a tiny fraction of google's workforce to the occasional omics problem in collaboration with a research lab" or "headhunting the PI of a lifesci research program to build an initiative at Google" or "throwing google infra at something other than Stadia". Even something far more obvious like "applying deep learning to diagnostics / early detection / etc."
These are the things Google can actually do, and they are the things Google already does. Examples: DeepMind for breast cancer screenings, Public Datasets program support for selected research. Still no cancer cure. So if you'd said that, well, they're doing it, to whatever extent they deem worth the prestige bump.
Unless they decide to become Microsoft and buy out entire sectors of applied biotech, they're not going to radically improve their hands-on involvement in lifesci relative to what they're already doing.
More, just ballpark the numbers. Google has 100k employees — "98771" in 2018-12 as per their SERP infobox. "A lot" of those employees absolutely do not by any stretch of the imagination possess the skillsets required to assist in meaningful ways on high-end cancer research, unless that work is conducted like some kind of wartime effort and the assistance is largely of a clerical nature.
And in the event that Google employees were being unilaterally drafted into this effort as grunts, the very first thing they'd do would be to crowdsource/outsource the bulk of the menial work to cheaper labor sources beyond Google. So their main contribution would undoubtedly be in building the scaffolding required to pass the buck.
2. Why Mars?
This constitutes a complete diversion of Google's autonomous driving and robotics people to an out of the blue project that they're out of position to handle. It would merely sabotage a division where Google is a market leader for the sake of starting up an incoherent, laggard mess in an area defined by maddening bottlenecks and complexity. Google has no substantial preexisting expertise in this area, afaik.
At one point they put up 30M USD in sponsorship prize money for a lunar lander competition, but that's about all that comes to mind. It also went pretty dismally. They had to repeatedly extend the deadline. Eventually the comp ran 11 years and ended in one launch -> one crash on the lunar surface. They threw a mil at the team as a consolation prize.
That project was more of an exercise in reifying the moonshot metaphor than anything else.
One far more recent indicator of how hard it is to make strides in this area is the DARPA Launch Challenge, intended to accelerate radical improvements to launch pipelines. It just closed without a winner. One team barely made it to the launchpad then scrubbed.
In terms of both social good that Google can do with its nearest preexisting R&D and profitability, it's clear that redirection would be disastrous. Autonomous vehicles are the play for them. This has nothing to do with the adtech people either way.
All in all, the relevance of Google to either of these problem areas is about what would be expected, cet par: not a lot. Modern work with any technical bent is hyper-specialized. There's no jump from literal cancer like adtech to actual cancer.
On top of that, adtech is largely a house of cards. You can't ever assume that 'data science' coupled to business requirements and marketing is in any way rigorous or indicative of the current state of the art in independent research. A lot of this work is pure smoke and mirrors operating on greater fool theory. To specialize in that sector is to specialize in window-dressing falsity. So it's not like you'd want adtech data jockeys touching subject matter that actually matters.
Parent comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23124327
I needed that laugh, thank you!
Look, a great deal of valuable software has been created by Google and other FAANGs. But I reckon most of that value has actually been created by the first or the best 5000 or maybe 10K employees at most. Most of the others in Google are enjoying the fruits of their genius, and they don't really have to perform any greater miracle than moving protocol buffers around. Still, no doubt that they are highly competent software developers and passed tough interviews. Not to imply that Google interviews can even distinguish between a genuinely talented programmer from a diligently-practicing-over-a-year leetcoder.
There are other companies besides Google. Who's to say, for starters, that any of the engineers at the members of FAAN, or Microsoft, or the unicorns, are any less elite?
There's an interesting implication in your statement. The inherent assumption is that the metrics which Google uses to hire interviews would be the definition of the best. In other words, if you'd use Google's interview process in the whole world - the filter of that would lead you to the "best of the best" and "not so the best".
I don't know the answer to it but you may want to consider this aspect before reaching the conclusion.
Do all people with a @google.com email address keep telling themselves that?
How do you think the world leading research results that they do without world leading people?
There are definitely personalities around the company who think of themselves this way, but certainly not the majority. I think this kind of language in fact hurts us, because it creates a pronounced impostor syndrome around us, as we all _know_ we're mere mortals.
The reality of a SWE job at any BigCorp is quite mundane, and is more politics than coding most of the time.
Honestly our interview process should be more testing people how to write and comment on design docs and fill out a performance review, because that's what they seem to want the most out of us.
EDIT: Oh, also filtering through 2 pages of new emails, mostly automated, to find the two things that are relevant to your job.