My First Week at Google (2005) | Hacker News Reader

My First Week at Google (2005)

social.clawhammer.net

53 pointscoffeeaddict139 comments

There is an interesting line in the end

> All in all, I guess this is the result of a company that has more money than they possibly know what to do with. I wonder how long this utopian "do no evil" culture can last. Wealth creates power, and power corrupts. And boy, have I seen a lot of power this last week.

> "May you live in interesting times."

Now, juxtapose that with the authors other recent post: https://social.clawhammer.net/blog/posts/2024-01-10-GoogleEx...

Interesting times in deed!

Man, I remember* getting "coffee encrusted filet mingon with a vanilla glaze" at Charlie's back around this time, and thinking both "this is amazing" and also "this can never last". Also I remember many years later when they were instead serving stuff like hot dogs. RIP the good times!

* likely corrupted by memory's distance

> "this is amazing" and also "this can never last". A

I think a lot of people seem to want to tie these things to greater tech industry trends but I don't think it applies (people that claim x, y z was a ZIRP etc).

I feel like that ignores the fact that most companies were never this generous! I never even got bananas at my last company!

It's weird to see so much ink spilled about free food at Google, which is, in monetary terms, a pretty trivial perk. Compared to things like their generous 401(k) match, many 401(k) contribution options (pre-tax, Roth, after-tax), their health plan which includes an HSA that gets seeded with a chunk of free money each year, tuition reimbursement, and so on which probably adds up to an order of magnitude more dollar value than some coffee-encrusted meat. Yet, everyone talks about the food, maybe just because it's an unusual perk.

HSA seeded with money is indeed amazing. I learned recently that HSA’s benefit from a triple tax advantage: the money goes in pretax, the money is withdrawn without tax, and any investment gains are tax free. Which - if you’re willing to do the paperwork - means you can just save the HSA money forever and pay yourself back out of it when you retire to cover medical expenses you previously incurred.

I never understood the food thing, to me it comes with the implication of them wanting you to stick around longer. Not inherently a bad thing, but there's definitely companies that I've interviewed for that told me up front that I was expected to work 10-12 hours and they would provide free meals to cover those hours, as if it was even remotely making up for it.

These kinds of things are a canary in the coal mine indicating an overall tone of the company that reflects through more tangible benefits and culture.

It depends. As an intern, working an extra hour to get free dinner and a bus ride home was absolutely worth it. But it's not as if they were forcing people to stay (for either the work or the food). My experience was that people with families generally didn't stay, which absolutely makes sense given their different priorities and life situation.

AFAICT the free food didn't really contribute to people staying longer. The campus was often a ghost town by 4PM and one of the common complaints was people filling up multiple takeout containers with tasty meats ... to bring home to their family!

For me it just meant I was more likely to eat when I needed to, like right after a 45-minute commute.

When I was there I heard stories from other parts of the company where the workers felt like they were obliged to stay until after their boss left (and the boss would leave at 7PM or something). I didn't really understand but later I found out a lot of people felt trapped by the visa system.

When I worked at google I typically would show up pretty early, and leave pretty early. Over 10 years I don't think any manager ever commented about my hours. Note: I could typically choose "good" managers and I knew to stay away from Android, Nest, and parts of Cloud.

> Nearly every Google technology you know (maps, earth, gmail) started out as somebody's 20% project, I think.

"Google Maps began as a C++ desktop program developed by brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen at Where 2 Technologies. In October 2004, the company was acquired by Google, which converted it into a web application."

"In 2004 Google bought Keyhole Inc., which was partially funded by the Central Intelligence Agency's venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel. Keyhole had developed an online mapping service that Google rebranded in 2005 as Google Earth."

"Gmail was a project started by Google developer Paul Buchheit, who had already explored the idea of web-based email in the 1990s, before the launch of Hotmail, while working on a personal email software project as a college student. Buchheit began his work on Gmail in August 2001."

It's definitely hard to see how those constitute as '20% projects' for engineering, maybe the author meant 'somebody' in a very broad sense, including the corporate development teams.

Recent and related:

FAQ on Leaving Google - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39034277 - Jan 2024 (291 comments)

> I wonder how long this utopian "do no evil" culture can last.

Apparently, about 12-13 years.

I tried to join Google in that era, unsuccessfully. (I got surprised by a weird whiteboard interview, with an interviewer who seemed to implicitly assume they were better than me, and came off as dismissive.)

In hindsight, I wonder whether I would've 100% liked a company driven by software engineers (other than the apparent aspect of recent grads with senior-sized egos).

At the time, I would've thought that would be a total fit for me, since I was full of application ideas, a diversity of skills to help execute on the ideas, and drive to see it done.

But I've since worked in a place that hired a lot of PhDs from top schools/advisors as engineers, many of whom had no non-academic experience yet, and then they weren't managed towards the definite this-isn't-grad-school goals of the company.

The minority of us who had experience in startups and/or in Big Tech companies -- where the company had to determine a product, make it work, and ship it -- were baffled by this, and then alarmed.

It wasn't the PhDs' fault. I suspect that most of them just needed a few of the right nudges, and to be spared the wrong nudges they were being given.

But if you do have to make a working product, or even just collaborate between teams to build two pieces that will fit together, then hearing "giant research playground" today sounds like a warning sign to me.

(Though, in Google's case, they did ship some great things, so obviously they weren't stuck entirely. Their big problem today might be the big-corp careerism they seem to have locked in, starting with interview rituals, and continuing with promotion criteria and bigger dollar signs.)

>I tried to join Google in that era, unsuccessfully. (I got surprised by a weird whiteboard interview, with an interviewer who seemed to implicitly assume they were better than me, and came off as dismissive.)

>In hindsight, I wonder whether I would've 100% liked a company driven by software engineers (other than the apparent aspect of recent grads with senior-sized egos).

The same thing happened to me and left feeling the same in the early 2010s.

(Great experience however and any interview after that was a walk in the park)

If you called it a great experience, in all candor (not just as upbeat techbro cultural convention), then you had a different experience than me. :)

Sure seems like pessimism is becoming prevalent in the US tech industry. I'm reminded of Tony Soprano explaining his depression to his psychiatrist: "It's good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that and I know. But lately, I'm getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over". I think that attitude is going around and it's quite sad. VR and AI show incredible promise to me and I think we have plenty of innovations ahead of us

Xoogler who was a noogler in 2016, left in 2023: it's surprising how much survived through 2016, and how little, if any, is left now. I'm guessing more was gone by 2016 than I realize. The last tales I heard of intrinsically motivated engineers banding together to build _products_ was 2014-ish.

Can't believe they fired this dude. The talks his co-presented are legendary

(2005)

I should have been able to FN charge google for my interview process. Fuck you google... with failing me because I didnt have a college degree but was good enough to design several of your datacenters.

You may have designed it, but can you tell me how many ping pong balls it would take to fill up one of the rooms? We are only interested if you can answer trivialities.

(/s of course)

(And I’m assuming you could, too!)

Google typically didn't ask fermi problems like that. Although, actually, sphere packing problems are pretty interesting, mathematically...

A common classic era Google question would be roughly "find an O(n) or O(logn) solution to a problem that most people would solve quadratically, and write pseudocode for your solution, handling important edge cases, while also intuiting the special details that your interviewer is fishing for (because they learned it in their PhD)".

So many people I knew at google were great math and science folks who ended up writing CRUD apps. Really depressing for them.

My final question after 3-month panel interviews:

"How do you do a global replace in vi?"

I blanked and said "I'd google it"

They said "thats the best answer"

(they also asked me what a type of comapny Google was... I said "Most think youre a search company, but really, you're an advertising company" 2008.

When I interviewed at Twitter in 2009-ish, they asked what type of company I thought Twitter was; "You're a global sentiment engine"

Go ghosted by both after saying I ranked super high on their metrics... (goog actually stated they were going to give me an offer, then called the next morning telling me they were rescinding offer)

my muscle memory says ":%s/foo/bar/g" but honestly, I wish it didn't.

Yoy can replace slash with any character as long as the parser can figure it out.

riiiiight in fact I usually use something else because I'm editing a path with /

IIRC this dates back to at least https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_(text_editor)

> details that your interviewer is fishing for (because they learned it in their PhD)

Haha, that was my third interviewer! Some random computational geometry problem. But it worked out for me as I happened to have read Preparata & Shamos as an undergrad.

The best thing I can say is that I saw many people who would have made great Google employees but were turned away (or turned off) by the interview process. I really only got hired because I exploited knowledge about the testing process and my timing was good.

Ah yes, halcyon days before the interest rate crisis.

(2005)

i.e. back when Google was a desirable place to work at and not a big corporation which loves killing projects and firing people.

Just checking if this is still an accurate description of the culture at Google today?

> Google is the opposite: it's like a giant grad-school. Half the programmers have PhD's, and everyone treats the place like a giant research playground. While the company is hush-hush to the outside world, it's 100% open on the inside. Everyone knows what everyone is doing, everyone is working on pet projects. Every once in a while, a manager skims over the bubbling activity, looking for products to "reap" from the creative harvest. The programmers completely drive the company, it's really amazing. I kept waiting for people to walk up to me and ask me if I had declared my major yet. They not only encourage personal experimentation and innovation, they demand it. Every programmer is required to spend 20% of their time working on random personal projects. If you get overloaded by a crisis, then that 20% personal time accrues anyway. Nearly every Google technology you know (maps, earth, gmail) started out as somebody's 20% project, I think.

I left Google in 2020. It is not like this anymore. I heard its gotten even worse.

I've been at Google since 2015 and it is nothing like that. I've never met another Googler that actually has a 20% project (though there are many internal tools that are widely used that are stated as being unsupported as they are only 20% projects).

I don't think so, though the team culture might differ orgs to orgs. Engineers still have a relatively strong voice compared to other companies though.

Not at all. The MBAs have taken over at this point and expectations are far too aggressive for anything like 20% time to exist. The rule of thumb is that they give so much work that even if we only complete 80% of it, that should be considered "meeting expectations".

I've heard people refer to 20% projects now as "120% projects".

I was in Google / Nest in ~2018 or so. I knew 20% projects existed, but I'd heard they were considered a good way to not get promoted. I knew a few people that had a 20% project they were working on, but it was the exception, not the norm.

Google is just another big software company with solid pay and benefits. There is nothing quirky, unique or special about it otherwise. My Googler buddies describe their work as pedestrian and while Engineers still retain more power than the average company, this is counterbalanced by upper management incompetence which destroys/misaligns most good initiatives leading to a lot of work being done with limited results.

No one likes working on lame projects, I feel like canceling projects is a symptom of the engineering driven product culture of a place. Maintenance and flat growth is not something I personally like to work on.

These products aren’t canceled because they are doing great

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