Google Is Now a 'Tier Two' Employer, Says Recent Comp-Sci Grad

<i>"For full time specifically, you get equity at a startup. If it IPOs, you make millions if you're one of the first 100-1000 employees."</i>

Not really. You can make millions if you're a founder... As a regular employee you have more chances to make millions by going to Vegas than with stock options.

When I got out of school 4 years ago, people were already making the same arguments. While Google isn't perfect, I can't imagine a place I'd rather work, where I can really dig into technical details of things while having freedom to set my agenda in many ways, very smart coworkers and predictably high compensation. I don't think any of those things have changed in 4 years.

Talking about top CS schools/going to Stanford is really irrelevant. I went to Carleton College, which has a nice little CS department but not really well-known, and got a liberal arts education. Because I did some open-source work and maybe because of some academic projects, I was able to get lots of interviews and offers, all in the same range as people are discussing today. All Stanford does at a company like Google is get your foot in the door--small, poorly run startups may hire on that basis, but that's it.

My one piece of advice for people who want to get into the tech industry: Choose one open-source project and contribute to it over a long period of time (ideally starting in high school, but never too late). The short time span of college courses and lack of large projects (a semester is not long) means that you can't really develop the skills that you need to be effective by that alone. Large, open-source projects give you real experience in structuring code to be maintainable, working with others and receiving feedback, and understanding and changing existing code that other people wrote. It might also get you some nice internal references.

The student mentions that Google's pay is "average" and the housing stipend is taxed more than wages, bringing the overall compensation down to on par with other employers in the valley. Fair enough.

He then says that other more prestigious startups are paying more and allow employees to be on the ground floor and have a bigger impact - I'm curious to see a list of these companies.

I also wonder if "fresh out of grad school" versus "worked at Google for 2 years + grad school" gets you into these startups. I still believe seeing Google on your resume gets you a second look.

According to one recent grad. Why is this even an article?

The writer of this article has a pretty faulty premise: it's all about the money. After close to a decade of working as an employee in startups, some that failed and some that succeeded, my view is that the last thing you want to do is join a startup for the money. You join (and more importantly, stay) because of the other benefits: the independence, the impact, and the camaraderie. Unless you're working on the next unicorn - and realistically, you're not - you're not going to come out with much cash. Google and Facebook are exceptions, not the rule.

I eventually left the startup space to see what the rest of the world is like, and I can tell you that the money is much better out here.

This is a pretty bizarre single data point. However, if this sentiment is actually popular amoung "top CS students" these days I wonder what companies they consider to be tier one.

TIL that even students from top CS program have no idea about taxes if they think that housing stipend is taxed higher than ordinary income.

He is not alone though - compensation director at Box tried to convince me that higher salary is significantly better than lower salary + bonus because of higher taxes on bonus.

"Recent Comp-Sci Grads say all sorts of things that vary in cleverness," says recent TA.

I would rate big companies i.e. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and startups all at tier two places of work, when you take social and pressures of work into consideration. Good companies to work for are any that 1) do something you are interested in. 2) Don't require you to work longer than 40 hours a week.

The problem I see is big companies, and startups is the amount time they require their employees to work, which is normally over 40 hours and can be upwards of 60 hours average per week.

Paying 100k at 40 hours a week is $48 an hour.

Paying 100k at 60 hours a week is $32 an hour.

I work with undergrads always tell my best students to avoid Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Google companies. Longer hours means more stress. Big companies get employees to work longer by offering food and games at work. I tell them find a company that does cool stuff and only asks for 40 hours a week. I tell them I know working for interesting research companies getting paid $80k and working ~30 hours a week. Which is getting paid more per hour than the person working at a company earning 100k and doing 60 hours per week.

I checked up and Google isn't too bad from what I can see online. Some say 40[1] Others say 50-60 [2] Places like Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft are worse places to work.

[1] http://mashable.com/2012/05/10/reddit-users-google/

[2] http://www.quora.com/How-many-hours-a-day-do-Google-employee...

If not Google, who are the tier-1 employers?

The article fails to answer then who is in Tier 1?

Not a convincing article. Google is a great employer. May be people's expectations have risen.

Lower prestige? I think this is true. People may not be consciously aware of it, but due to the company's core business model, i.e. basically adware and spyware, non-billionaire employees will almost certainly incur a hit to their social prestige account.

That's a common criticism of google; that everyone there is so educated and qualified, you have PHD comp sci people writing unit tests.