Google Leads List of Desired Employers | Hacker News Reader

Google Leads List of Desired Employers

online.wsj.com

29 pointswoan16 comments

It's interesting that Google is the most desirable employer for the general professional population (which doesn't have the skills to work there) while simultaneously being perceived as suffering from a (no doubt exaggerated) brain drain by their desired employee demographic.

My guess is that this is largely a trickle down effect of the legendary stories about life as a Google employee that circulated in tech circles 7-8 years ago.

The story makes the point that Google spends a lot of time and effort making itself appear to be a great place to work, whether or not it actually is. This is important because it means more people will apply there first before applying elsewhere and that gives Google a first mover advantage.

That being said, any company looks better on the outside than on the inside. I don't know if it is universal but many, perhaps even the majority, of folks I've worked with where they were at their 'second' job, have remarked that some of the problems they thought they left behind, were where they arrived. The grass 'appears' greener but its still grass :-)

I actually found that Google looked better from the inside than the outside...I was pretty ambivalent about applying at first, but started warming up to it after talking to people that worked there, and found I loved it once I actually started work. I suspect that this is largely because my past exposure had been through the Hacker News crowd, which tend to distrust anything that's big and secretive.

Past expectations form a big part of whether you like anything. I've read IAmAs from Xooglers who joined straight out of college and were bitterly disappointed when they found the cubes weren't lined with gold and you couldn't do absolutely anything you wanted. My own expectation was that I'd get lost in the big company morass, and found it wasn't like that either. As usual, the truth is somewhere in the middle...if you expect paradise, you'll be disappointed, but if you expect hell, you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Within Silicon Valley, I think the most desired employers are Your Own Startup, Your Close Friends' Startups, Quora, Square, Palantir, Facebook, and Google, in order of increasing size.

This quote is interesting, perhaps why so many are looking for a tech cofounder?

According to the Education Department, the top majors for the class of 2008 were business, health sciences and social sciences and history. About nine times as many people majored in business in the class of 2008 as majored in computer science.

Yeah, I remember an old boss of mine (then teaching robotics at WPI) complaining about how the number of "sports medicine" majors was 3-4x the number of CS & Robotics majors. The world does not need that many sports physiologists!

I suspect a lot of it is because very few high school students have an understanding of how the real economy works. A lot of them want money as an adult, and they hear that business is about making money, and so they major in business, not realizing that an undergraduate business degree is virtually useless in actually doing things that will make you lots of money. Heck, I went to a liberal arts college, thinking that I wanted to learn things from lots of different skillsets because that's what an entrepreneur needs, and not realizing that basically all those skillsets are useless for entrepreneurship. (Well, except the scientific method. And math. And computer programming. And writing. Hmm, maybe I didn't do too badly.)

I wonder what it'd take to better educate children about how the working world actually operates, so that they can make informed decisions in the future. Ones with high-powered professional parents probably get it at home, but this just increases the income divide. People whose parents work at middle-class, unionized jobs - the ones who really need the guidance to compete in today's economy - are way behind the 8-ball in terms of cultural capital.

I believe there is a strong cultural bias to where people go when they graduate. In France, the situation seems to be the exact opposite to the one in the US: there are 6 times more engineering schools as there are business schools.

France being a country where business is something regarded with suspicion while in the US it has such an aura, which explains this state of affairs quite well.

I remember a story about my old college that said anyone who had too many credits and hadn't selected a major automatically got assigned to Business School - Advertising.

I'm astonished that Nokia made the list as it was by far the worst company I've ever worked at. They did no code reviews at all and buggy software was released so managers' bonuses would not be affected.

Nokia is really huge with a lot of groups spread all over the place (world?). The group I worked for/with at Nokia (Qt) did code reviews.

Wasn't Qt originally from Trolltech?

I think Nokia's problem with software quality was company wide. After I left to work somewhere else, the CEO of Korea Telecom told our sales team that "Nokia is finished in Asia" and went on to complain about "Nokia's crappy software."

Yes, I was part of Trolltech which was acquired by Nokia. Suffice it to say we were 'Nokia' and did code reviews.

The perks are a lovely set of golden handcuffs designed to keep workers at work as much as possible. Some of the ones I know work so much they use their badge to go in to the bank.

Google doesn't have all that many low-level employees. They are mostly only hiring engineers, who are likely get more money and perks than Apple's retail employees, or the people, who load trucks for Amazon.

It is also worth a lot more for Google to recruit the top employees than many other employers. Hence, they can spend more money on PR and perks to make themselves a more desirable employer. If Google spends 5% of their employment costs on perks, it will go a lot further than Walmart.

I get the feeling some of these companies listed are cool for certain professions but not others. I hear from friends at one of the MN based companies that it truly is awful for IT, but cool for other jobs.

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