Why I loved working at Google
jng.squarespace.com
jng.squarespace.com
For most engineers most of the time, the job isn't politics or performance reviews. It's writing interesting software with talented teammates.
(Counterexamples of course exist, and a handful of vocal ones certainly like to chime in on threads like this. But if it weren't still mostly good for engineers at Google, Google wouldn't still employ the great engineers it does. But it does have great engineers to this day, so something is still going mostly right.)
What led to me becoming one of the vocal ones is what happens when allocation fails and there's really no resort other than trying to fit in doing something completely uninteresting or leaving. Google seemingly does not acknowledge that the allocation process is in any way flawed.
My mistake was I should have insisted on an allocation upfront as a condition of accepting the offer made to me. After acing the interview, all the power was in my hands and I failed to make use of it.
But I do know it makes me sad whenever I hear that we have any attrition, regretted or otherwise. And I know as an eng manager I try to put myself out there for /any/ engineer who wants a hand, or even just a sympathetic ear. Some cases are just unfixable, but I like to believe we still can repair a good number of them.
I hope things worked out better for you wherever you landed next.
What isn't so good is that since I left Google, several positions have arisen that would very much make use of my existing skill set. Several people within have tried to get me considered for those positions only to get shut down by HR without so much as a phone screen. So I would appear to be on some sort of black list. There are worse things in life, but it does seem silly to me.
Often one arm of the organization does not know what the other is doing, although I am sure Google is constantly trying to improve their internal communications in order to prevent exactly this.
As for your point about the black list... I would say it would likely be closer to a note that has been placed in your recruiting profile instead.
Well, I rather think that verifies my criticism of dewitt.
I would be surprised if Google did not know what projects are problematic, but finding solutions would be another matter.
In the end, maybe it comes down to: what you have written are words, which are only an appearance. I don't have any means of verifying your record as an eng manager, and this comment doesn't contain any reference to direct activity in this case--nor should it!--because that is the kind of action that should happen within Google's private mechanics.
That's the discomfort: greetings and farewells are formal gestures, but all-too-often empty ones. Yours ring empty to me.
Everything about your post, whether you intended that or not, is constructed to make you/Google look good. I bet you wouldn't say your intent was to make yourself look good, right? Then what was your objective?
And in any case, is any of that a bad thing? Or is it just another comment on corporate loyalty?
Consider that in the context of a naive intern's post in this post-PRISM world:
>>Google’s radical approach to transparency and commitment to the mantra of "Don't be Evil" is extremely admirable.
Right.
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Please understand, my reaction is purely contemplative. There is a regrettable urge towards conflict when any ideologies meet, but I like to believe we can still come to peaceable verbal agreements. And forgive the irony of this paragraph, if you can.
However from the perspective of someone who has worked in something like investment banking, I stand by my comment that Google's approach to transparency (at least internally) is headed in the right direction.
>I stand by my comment that Google's approach to transparency (at least internally) is headed in the right direction.
So you admit that your entry omitted any discussion of where Google is headed in the wrong direction? That it was completely one-sided?
>>Dare I call the Google the "holy grail" for many aspiring software developers?
What you are doing, what you have done, is easily termed "gushing." You are so eager to affirm what Google has done for you this summer.
You're even gushing to the person that has come to back you up, when you probably don't even know him. (Or maybe you do, and that's even worse. Is he here to back you up, not to argue of his own accord?)
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I'll tell you what I think is going to happen. This post just might hit the top of HN. You'll get maybe 5-10 new twitter followers. You'll go back to your senior year. Your 1-post blog will languish because you'll be fucking busy (because yeah, you got a Google internship, so you're damn good and that means you should spend your senior year in Toronto focusing on Toronto, not on what the Internet thinks).
I'll get assorted votes in this topic, depending on the crowd that arrives. Depending on how this comment is received. I'm the sort of person that thinks you're not doing good writing if you don't get downvotes, and you should practice by getting downvoted to oblivion so you know how to get close to the real line.
It's just a small bump in the daily discourse of the Internet.
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Where is your cynicism?
(Edit: Did you notice how my flattery of your Google internship (maybe) made my comment more palatable to you?)
I'm not sure why you feel it necessary to be a cynic. I don't see why there is a reason to etch the flaws out in everything. I could caveat everything I say but what would be the point of that? Especially in a section labelled: "What I liked about working at Google".
I also don't see the point in you playing fortune teller - so what if my blog has 1 post? Why does it matter to you what I do or do not do with my life after its been read?
I appreciate your criticism of my writing, and certainly welcome more of it, but if you're going to be passive aggressive about it I'm afraid I don't see the point in it either. From your reply it seems like your suggestion is to "add cynicism".
Lastly, your thinly veiled insults do not make your post more palatable to me.
Then you will forever be a terrible engineer. We seek out flaws!
And I want you to consider that your internship has been a product as much as it is an opportunity for you.
Your employer is not your friend.
>I don't see why there is a reason to etch the flaws out in everything.
>> Then you will forever be a terrible engineer. We seek out flaws!
I understand and fully embrace this! As hard as it is to believe, I choose when to and not to be a cynic. However, I've found that I often focus too much on the negatives at times and need to brighten up.
> And I want you to consider that your internship has been a product as much as it is an opportunity for you.
I ABSOLUTELY agree with this. In my mind Google did a damn good job of it. But why point this out specifically?
An employee's experience at any company is manufactured regardless of position or industry - pay, hours, office environment, management structure... These are all factors of the job. What I'm saying is that Google does a better job of manufacturing this than many others do.
> Your employer is not your friend. I don't believe in this. What about the startup CEOs that literally recruit (and hire) their friends? What about the small businesses of the world that closely maintain relationships with their employees?
I think the point you are trying to hint at is more in line with "HEY. This Big Tech Company created an experience for you just to make you think one way about them but really doesn't care about you at the end of the day. WAKE UP SHEEPLE!"
And I totally understand that. But you also understand that it is an opportunity - you said so yourself! All I'm trying to do with this post is encourage others to consider this opportunity for themselves as well.
I didn't.
>I ABSOLUTELY agree with this. In my mind Google did a damn good job of it. But why point this out specifically?
Because it's your blind spot. Because it makes you a liar. More loyal to Google than you are to your engineering experience.
You didn't say anything about what you coded.
Show us some code, asdfprou. Did Google make you a better coder?
You still believe that _your_ cute little experience is worth "[encouraging] others to consider having that experience for themselves as well."
SHEEPLE don't have anything to worry about. No one's learned your lesson. You assumed that it was given in your first paragraph.
That's why I put this in terms of this blog post's unimportance. No one is paying attention!
>All I'm trying to do with this post is encourage others to consider this opportunity for themselves as well.
But you don't even display knowledge of what that opportunity is. Is it an opportunity to make blog posts like yours? To have a good in-route with Google after your senior year?
You're actually the precise example of what Google wants: young engineers excited about working at Google.
And you have no opinion on what Google is.
As someone going through the process to transfer to a different area, though, I find it a bit more difficult that I imagined it. It's not that anyone is blocking me, it's just hard to decide where to go and which opportunity makes the most sense for the next two years.
Certainly correct, although I have worked at a number of other companies (an investment bank, Microsoft, a startup, and in management consulting) so I was using those as benchmarks.
Thanks for reading!
Sorry OP, your opinion is almost certainly wrong.
Does this mean your opinion about my opinion is almost certainly wrong as well?
Snide comments aside, thanks for reading!
In this parent, you just fought almost as dirty as it is possible to fight within proper, polite terms, and you made a point of doing it.
And then you want to discard that with "Snide comments aside, thanks for reading!"
Disclaimer: I currently work for Google and I like a lot of the things here. The company culture that you see every day really is refreshing and encouraging, but deep down, we are individual human beings with different motivations and drives and want different things. There are many people who join and leave Google every day, an considering the size of the company, I can guarantee that not everyone works on those "moonshot" problems every day either.
Google is a fantastic company, but using a 3 months experience to generalize the entire workforce and culture of a company this size is a bit ambitious.
The two biggest points I think are fairly true:
1) Google engineers are very passionate about transparency, and collaboration.
There are way way less engineering prima-donna hot-heads at Google than other companies. The kind of Linus Torvald-style rants and flame wars are extremely rare internally, and many people are happy to help and mentor. I've worked at IBM and Oracle and there were plenty of shouting matches between alpha-male hackers battling egos.
Secondly, secrecy pisses people off. To give you an example, there was a high-profile flop that started life as a secret project until it was almost ready for release, and it drove a lot of internal disharmony. In fact, one of the reasons listed in the post-mortem for the product flopping was the fact that it was developed in secret. Googlers don't like secrecy.
2) The engineers are world class, period. Jeff Dean. Rob Pike. Etc. 'Nuff Said. It's possible in a smaller company to be a big fish in a small pond. It's part of what drives the big, hot-headed egos of engineering prima donnas. They're the shit, because they might have 10 other junior engineers around them who are far less knowledgeable. You can't really get away with those kinds of attitudes at Google, and that may be part of the reason for the more relaxed, cooperative humility ('googliness'), because many of your peers are just as good, if not better, than you.
The grey areas are this. As Google becomes larger, the probability of a shitty employee being immature and leaking to the press goes up. As a result, Google is not as wide-open internally as it used to be. Some of the bad employees have spoiled it for the majority. Moreover, to my dismay, many of Google's attempts at federated, open protocols have failed in the marketplace. Open doesn't always win, or, takes a long time, and the success of closed silos of competitors I think has taught some Google product teams the wrong lesson, and forced it to compete on the same grounds of its competitors. Hopefully, eventually when things reach saturation and commodification, they'll be a return to setting standards, but I'm cynical. Apple has the whole industry thinking open specifications are bad because you can't make arbitrary changes to them to vertically integrate and suit your needs. And Google's years of supporting XMPP federation did nothing to get AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, et al on board. You can't say Google didn't try, they ran GTalk for years, but none of the big players with 10s or 100s of millions of users played along.
But even discounting this (naysayers will cry foul at the fact that it technically is a separate company), I think organizing the world's information is certainly an extremely difficult problem. And certainly one that Google is attempting to solve in more ways than search.
Also - self driving cars? Certainly you will agree that is not trivial.
That's pretty hard.
To say what Google does is "monetizing searches" is like saying Walmart operates cash registers. True, but hardly the whole story.
Working on monetization isn't, AFAIK, what Google engineers do, that's what Google business folks do.
Google engineers work on things like natural language processing for conversational search, or predictive algorithms for identifying information needs in advance and providing them at the right time without requiring an active search -- and that's just for Google's fairly prosaic mainstream products, not the GoogleX/Calico/etc. moonshot kind of work.
The everyday things you use, like Google Maps, have incredibly sophisticated pipelines behind them. I'm not talking about serving up image tiles, I'm talking about the software that processes satellite, aerial, and street view imagery and stitches everything together into a coherent whole, while doing things like using machine learning to recognize signs, text, objects, building outlines, etc.
It all works so smoothly and so well most of the time that people don't even know all of the work that goes into it. Just parsing a question for meaning in search is a very very hard problem. What Siri does is kind of a joke compared to what's really required to make things work as they should.
Unlike the main office, most people don't have to choose between commuting from SF or living in Mountain View, because Venice/Santa Monica is actually a nice area to live in :). Naturally, the breadth of projects is not as big as in Mountain View, but there's a number of exciting things happening here (computer vision, quantum AI etc).
I bet you have a few surfers there! I'd kill to work next to the beach. Nothing beats a good early morning surf session. (Figuratively, of course)
I didn't work out of any remote office full-time, but I visited seven satellite offices during my time there (nine if you count YouTube/SF). They were all unique and awesome.
Also, at least in my case, I don't get that "satellite office" feeling from the work I'm doing. The people I need to talk to most all sit within Nerf gun range.
I also work at the chicago office and we work on interesting and hard problems that keep me engaged. We are a remote office but it doesn't really feel like that's a hindrance.
There are challenges to being remote obviously but I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything critical.
As for actual work, projects seem randomly distributed, with some weight towards Mountain View since it's so much bigger than the other offices.
I've heard great things about the New York offices as well as the Zurich, Tokyo, and London offices though!
Personally, I've talked to Googlers all over the world and there seems to be a consistency in openness and passion.
What struck me the most going through the office is that the office setup and benefits seem to excel at getting out of your way. If you need something, it's there. You have privacy, you have food, you have people around, you have quiet. Whatever you need is already there.
It seems like in an environment like that it would be easy to get work done because distraction would be at a minimum and context switching would not occur as often.
I'd love to work in an office like that one day.