I worked at Google from 2010 to 2012, just under two years, as an SRE. Google was a great company to work for and the people I worked with were all awesome.
I ultimately left Google because I felt bored working there. You admin systems and fill out resource request through web browsers and work with proprietary stacks all day. It didn't take long to feel my skills as a Linux professional start to atrophy. The longer I stayed the more concerned I became about passing interviews in the rest of the industry as I became a Google engineer.
I often miss the tools I had at Google but it's exciting building those tools at smaller companies and working with industry best practices.
The GS payscale is a bit unforgiving for very early career technical folks, but regular pay raises, step increases, and grade advancement catches up later on.
Although congress has been pretty stingy with the "regular pay raises" over the last few years.
ie. they have such an extreme scale that often what's best for them is also unique to them, so doesn't really work/apply/be-appreciated anywhere else. They want sharp folks. But because so many, and because folks at top are so sharp, and because their scale is so gigantic, they want sharp drones. Color inside the lines, just really really really fast and perfect. Getting something 1% wrong costs them millions more than otherwise. Which is different than the mindset of the vast majority of other companies where getting something even 91% right means making millions of dollars more for the shareholders, than otherwise. The rest is details.
Google seems perfect for two kinds of programmers/engineers:
1. you are 20-something, white or Asian, fresh out of college, Jewish/Stanford/Ivy/otherwise-2nd-gen-pampered-background, male, maybe still in college or 1st startup AND you are willing to move anywhere they want, do anything they tell you, you have no spouse, no kids, no ill parents, no local geo investments, no major illnesses, not multi-careered, you're still impressed by Shiny/Words, etc.
2. you are 30/40-ish but now established as a Major Name (Linus, Vint, Guido, etc.) and/or owner of a company Google wants to buy, and therefore $M+ talks loudly
if you don't fit (approximately) into one of those two boxes, then Google is a non-ideal fit for you
META: downvote me all you want HN, I do not care what the GroupMind's Allowed Opinion algorithm here thinks anymore
Since this guy has no clue, let me clarify as someone who worked at Google until recently:
Any Google employee who spews something like "Google is perfect if you are 20-something, white or Asian, Jewish/blah blah background male..." will be (with high probability) asked by his[1] coworkers WTF he is talking about, and would he please shut up or learn to open his mouth without insulting his coworkers. If the behavior continues, it may or may not result in disciplinary action, though the consensus seemed that there aren't enough disciplinary action. (I guess it depends on who you ask.)
Contrary to popular conception, Google employs a lot of thoughtful people and they want to make their workplace a better place to live and work.
[1] I'd normally say "their", but it seems "his" here is more coherent with my... "observation of reality."
Mountain View. (DISCLAIMER: It's a vast office space, so different part of the organization might have different cultures. My perception is from my personal experience as well as from reading through internal Google+, mailing lists, etc.)
Ding ding ding! That's me to a T. I'm in my early 30s, with a family, and just started in MTV this past Monday. I spent 11 years at a small company in Cleveland, and had reached the top of the engineering ladder there. Had the opportunity to move out to Silicon Valley, where I have much more varied career prospects if I decide Google isn't for me after my shares vest.
On my team are two very experienced engineers (one's been at Google for longer than all but 38 employees), and it will be a great opportunity to learn from some really great people and grow my skills, which had been stagnating due to lack of challenge at my last company.
There was never any pressure at my last job to work crazy hours, so that wasn't really a factor in moving per se; but Google is big on work-life balance, which is super important to me.
good point. reasonable. the making of generalizations does not outlaw other generalized groups or categories.
an entire side discussion about Bayes predictions could be entered here. where having a few rough rules would yield a 90% beneficial prediction. add a 2nd rule or exception boosts your yield to 95%. add a 3rd rule/exception boosts your yield to 97%. and so on...
observation of reality. not theory. not wish/want/should/ought. actual reality.
trust me, if you're smart and wise then the older you get you should be getting more and more reality-based in your decisions. not theory. not ideal. not PC. reality.
Your race has nothing to do with whether or not it's a good place to work as far as happiness goes. I am about as anti-PC as it gets. I can see you are a jaded individual but that's no excuse to post garbage that has no credible evidence backing it.
If you click the "Tech" tab, they self-report as 59% White, 35% Asian, 2% Hispanic, 1% Black. Note that the ethnicity data is US-only (the gender data is global).
Interesting link (even if it is a rather depressing confirmation of typical white tech-worker douchebagginess).
The wording of:
> When I transferred to my second team there, Desktop Support, diversity lightning struck: I was a black woman reporting to another black woman in a technical role. Moreover, our team was predominantly black.
strikes me as a bit funny. Clearly "diversity lightning" implies an interesting chance outcome, facilitated by the possibility of there being similar people around, but "a black woman reporting to a black woman, in a predominantly black team" is stretching "diversity" to mean non-white (or more probably, non-white, non-male, non-gay).
I completely understand (in an entirely outside-looking-in way) the authors perspective -- but in my book a "diversity success story" would've been if the co-workers at Google hadn't been close-minded fucks, pardon the expression.
Now, I still think positive (hiring) discrimination is one of the best ways to achieve a mixed/diverse team, and that in turn is one cornerstone for a diverse and tolerant culture.
But sometimes you find yourself in the cultural stone age, and it's hard to see a good way out. Sounds like Google California was one such place -- not just due to Google, but apparently due to something (real equal opportunity) missing from higher education in the US in general?
Also note the survey of non-Google experiences in that article. Google vs the rest of the for-profit tech biz is one question, business vs non-profit?/charity is another.
Basically it comes down to her not feeling comfortable being around a majority of whites and asians and she feels that she has to change her whole personality just s others like her more.
She also prefers to be around blacks, preferably black women.
This has little to do with Google though.
Google is rather corporate and thus it's only for people willing to adapt a corporate personality during the day - often in combination with a rather conservative physical appearance.
Cornrows and overly casual probably wouldn't fly too well in the head office, no matter if you're black, white or asian.
Agree. I've spent a lot of time in tech, biotech and hanging around the medical community and it's no secret that certain racial & ethnic groups are overrepresented here in the US vs the standard population.
Why that is and if that's something to be concerned about are separate questions which I think are out of scope here, but it certainly doesn't necessarily imply that you need to conform to have an enjoyable work experience.
I'm glad that you spoke your mind however unpopular even though I disagree with some of your findings/conclusions but it's really brave of you to stand up to the downvote goons on HN that all they care about is social engineering, suppressing free speech and stifling constructive debate.
Excellent. Thank you for taking the time to pull some data out of the anecdotes. There are all kinds of tricky issues with this, as this is a small dataset, but by identifying categories you've created a template that could be used to further actual research.
I think you're on to something here. Id pay the same I pay for lwn for someone to collapse articles into under say 1k or 2k characters, very rarely more meat exists..
Why is the hiring process such a big issue for people already working there? Do they feel it reflects badly on them? Or that the quality of new co-workers is bad? Or lack of new co-workers?
I think it's because it sets a poor first impression or creates inaccurate expectations. It may cause a feeling of letdown once you get in the door and see what you will actually be doing. Once, I had a position where the interview process had me thinking I was going to be doing much more exciting things than I actually did. The strange thing about it was that if I had realized that I was going to be doing that work beforehand I might have been okay with it. Instead the letdown tainted my experience there from day one and I never really got on track and left soon after. I wonder if that is what is going on here.
I think if you put 3 months or longer for job that you leave after 11 months, you can feel that your return on investment is not something you imagined. I would be disappointed if I would put lots of effort to get job that is not "dream job" I thought it will be. That is what people do I imagine, jump lots of hops to get there but then it is normal job you can get somewhere else without making all that effort.
Maybe they made a referral of a person they knew would be great, but they didn't make it through the interview process. After that happens once or twice, it could be somewhat demotivating.
What I'm wondering about is that they mention long hiring process as a reason for quitting the job. They finally made it to the end and they quit because of that?
I'm in that boat right now so maybe I can shed some light.
Bad hiring practices represents a lot of organizational dysfunction, some of which impact your every day work, and since the hiring process is your first contact with the company it's often the first thing to come to mind.
Bad hiring practices also cause you to be interviewing candidates. A lot. "Google-style" tech hiring is characterized by generally meaningless interviews with very, very low acceptance rates. This is not just frustrating for candidates who fail, but also the people who get to interview them.
When I was at Amazon I was in this situation - a combination of poor hiring practices and organizational dysfunction meant that all of a sudden I was literally spending 5+ hours every single day interviewing people. It was brutal and demoralizing - doubly so when a candidate everyone liked is rejected for seemingly arbitrary/bureaucratic reasons. The sheer gauntlet of back-to-back interviews candidates are subject to also means that for every one candidate, many engineer-hours are spent interviewing them. The impact of diverting this much time towards interviewing candidates instead of actual work is easily felt.
5+ hours every day? That's astonishing! Were you interviewing for your own team, or for the company? Why did you put up with it? Were you the hiring manager? If not, surely you could have insisted on a reduced interview load?
I was only interviewing for open position on my own team, it was pretty insane - and I didn't end up putting up with it, it was the thing that finally convinced me to leave Amazon, though there were of course other reasons.
To summarize the situation - we were a pretty scrappy team of 3 engineers that gradually took on more and more work as the scope of our work increased. There was an org-wide hiring freeze put in place because of the general doom-and-gloom right after 2008, so our demands to hire more people to cope with the increasing workload were repeatedly refused.
Come ~2011, the company starts breathing again and finally lifts the hiring freeze, at which point 7 engineering positions suddenly opened on my team, and the 3 of us became nearly full-time interviewers. I was gone within a few months, my other coworker soon after, and the most senior engineer on the team transferred within the company.
I'm not sure what the salient lesson is here - don't try to hire for 7 positions simultaneously with only 3 interviewers? Don't put a hiring freeze in place when there's obviously more work to be done? Something.
There were also lots of problems with the recruitment and hiring process itself:
- the quality of candidates we were getting from HR was very poor. Each of us wasted incredible amounts of time phone screening candidates who were wildly mismatched with the role, or straight up not qualified. Our phone screen fail rate was easily >90%, and this not only was disappointing for the candidates but also kills your interviewers' productivity and morale.
- Amazon has the "bar raiser" system. The standard on-site interview at Amazon was a full-day (6-8 hours) of back-to-back interviews, including lunch. One of these interviewers is a designated "bar raiser", who is usually a more senior, particularly trusted (or just political) person. This person can veto even an entire room full of "yes" decisions - and this happened with some regularity. It is absolutely devastating for team morale when an arbitrarily appointed person - who usually isn't even on your own team - vetoes a candidate that everyone on the team liked. This naturally resulted in us interviewing even more people, and more frustrated because we knew even if the candidate passed with flying colors there's still a chance they'll be caught by the bar-raiser's decimation and arbitrarily be rejected.
That last part is the situation I'm in at my current place - I'm at a smaller company where one of the original high-level engineers insists on interviewing everyone. He's also a fan of gotcha brain teaser problems - so even well-qualified candidates who interview well with the rest of the team will get into a room with him and he'll veto the candidate when they fail his teaser-of-the-day.
> I was gone within a few months, my other coworker soon after, and the most senior engineer on the team transferred within the company.
Translation: Amazon suffered almost 100% knowledge loss on the systems your team were the exclusive owners of. The cost of this kind of thing is staggering and yet I've seen companies discount it again and again, over decades. It's insane.
And as to your current gig: run. You'll never be able to grow a decent team with an idiot in charge, and you've got an idiot in charge. Get out, if you can. Nothing but good teams build good products, and if you can't hire a good team because you've got an idiot with a veto you'll be stuck building mediocre (at best) products.
It's a pity there is no actual demand for quality software developers. If there was, this kind of nonsense would be abraded away by market forces with incredible speed. The fact that it persists demonstrates that hardly anyone really cares whether they get good developers or not.
"You'll never be able to grow a decent team with an idiot in charge, and you've got an idiot in charge."
Perhaps the gentleman concerned is simply someone who helped start the company and hasn't quite understood the need for routine staff turnover in what is now a much larger organisation?
> - the quality of candidates we were getting from HR was very poor. Each of us wasted incredible amounts of time phone screening candidates who were wildly mismatched with the role, or straight up not qualified.
Adding my own personal anecdote to this: about 75% of the time, when I get contacted by recruiters for major West Coast companies[1] the positions they are scouting me for are inappropriate to my skill set, background, and interests. Sometimes wildly so.
[1] Which is probably once every two months or so.
Personally, when an employer made me jump through hoops, asked too many personal questions, or just pissed me off during the hiring process; I happily accepted the job.
I never forgot what they put me through though, and showed zero allegiance to the organization. I put on a smile, and kissed the right people, but in reality; I was a horrid employee.
I don't think companies realize how certain employees hold grudges? That HR idiot who calls every phone number on the resume, and talks for too long should be fired.(I know they're suspose to keep it brief in most states, but as a past employer, they have kept me on the phone for too long. I have had HR dudes call me when they were out at dinner--drinking--heavily.. I had one lady ask me, "Does the girl do drugs? She seems like the type?" I was floored. The women in question had a slight speech impediment, but overqualified for the position.
I would like to do away with resumes. I always felt a test would make the process fairer, and would do away with nepotism, padded resumes, and all the other BS we have had to put up with? (By the way--it is illegial for an employer to check your credit score in California.)
That might not cause you to quit immediately, but it might be an indicator for other problems and you might become more acutely aware of those when you start.
Also, now you have "I passed the Google hiring process" on your CV.
I've had beers with a lot of people who had given two weeks at various employers, and in many cases where the person was a little disgruntled, their narrative went all the way back to the beginning of their employment.
Which to me means that the way you treat them during the interview and their first weeks at work end up being part of the calculus of Stay or Go. I've really taken this to heart, and I'm profusely embarrassed if for instance their equipment is not there day 1 and I'm working order.
There are a fair amount of companies that, during their hiring process, will basically say "Oh, you have an offer from Google? Forward it to us, add 10% to the base, and we'll hire you without further interviewing."
From reading the posts in the article, it seems like the long hiring process raised expectations: people were willing to put up with it because they thought working at Google would be great, and were all the more disappointed when they found out they didn't like it there.
I used to work as at Google and it was my worst job ever.
It was not for Google directly though, but via a temp agency for a Google project.
Google rented an office building just for the project with temp agency HR on site and a few Googlers that were mostly in management and supervising things.
Contracts were structured in a way to avoid having to pay benefits and to be able to maximize pressure on the the employee with extremely short notice periods.
The turnover was enormous, almost everyone hated working there and 30-40% of the employees were reminded weekly by HR that they're on probation and will get fired if their performance isn't better next week.
I am sorry you had this experience, but I would argue that this isn't the same as working for actual Google. This jives with other accounts I've read from contractors (and I think I read somewhere that about 35% of staff are contractors at this point, but that seems really, really high).
> The relocation and hiring bonus’ stated values were pre-tax! That was a huge unexpected blow to the pocketbook.
(Perhaps off-topic) Isn't that the default? Doesn't every company do that -- pay you the bonus and then Uncle Sam (and friends) take a cut depending on the tax situation?
They set the post-tax amount without knowing the exact pre-tax amount, so whatever the pre-tax amount is they will just pay it. Even if tax rate varies person by person there will not be a huge difference.
I checked one of my offer letter (not from google) and the wording is like "an amount of $XXXXX grossed up for U.S taxes".
For relocation costs, those are deductible from your (Federal) taxes under certain circumstances (something like, if you move more than X miles to be closer to a job). If it is just a bonus that is just taxable income.
In the US, if they gave you $1000 straight-up for moving costs, you'd probably see something like:
1. Company gives you $1000.
2. $750 hits your bank account after withholding.
3. You spend $1000 to move.
4. You file taxes, claim $1000 deduction for moving expenses.
5. You receive $250 refund.
AFAIK Facebook will let you to choose between taking lump sum (a fixed amount of pre-tax money), or getting flight tickets and moving service ordered for you, plus after-tax reimbursement for other related cost.
Has anyone else noticed a trend where people get hired by Google and just disappear completely? The Factor Language guy vanished after getting a job there, and now the project looks dead. I can think of some other examples, but maybe I'm just noticing outliers.
I left in 2010 so I was thinking the same thing. Folks who have since gone to Google have mentioned that they have added counseling for folks which could help. And as I pointed out to some folks while leaving, the people who care about these sorts of issues will leave, new people will be hired and the ones who stay won't care about those issues, and so you will have successfully evolved the culture/environment away from something the company was no longer interested in providing. As far as I can tell it hasn't killed their ability to hire new employees so the net effect is all positive for Google.
The whole point is that everything's changed. These people are griping about lack of free food in the office, bad pay and lousy benefits. They also complain that Google is "constrained to thinking in the browser." Too bad they didn't stick it out to see the self-driving cars, and none of these people were working on Android.
Google hired the grand challenge winners back in 2007. Google has always had amazing world changing side projects. They just don't seem to go anywhere (yet). Google has been talking about satalites for free worldwide internet access since before SpaceX existed.
Don't get me wrong, they're doing amazing stuff. The drone delivery system they built is cool.
It's just that, aside from maps, it seems like they have a hard time pushing through to completion.
I know several people who worked on Android, and then left, because the architects were repeating known failure patterns from the past, yet failing to recognize it. Those patterns are some of the worst pain points for current Android developers.
(No, not device fragmentation -- that was unavoidable.)
Please, as peonicles says, do share what these failure patterns are. I am kinda curious, as I thought the Android API is pretty good, and makes you make applications that don't block GUI by default.
Curiously some these people were hired during the no-poaching conspiracy to suppress programmer wages. I wonder if that had something to do with the salaries?
2009 short-tenure Xooglers were that window where new hires joined post- IPO-stock-pop and so had an underwhelming equity compensation, especially relatively to slightly more senior coworkers.
I turned down an offer to work at the Googleplex last year because there was a very creepy groupthink/hivemind atmosphere when I did my round of 6+ interviews there. Also combined with my favorite question to ask interviewers: "If you could make one change and it wouldn't be vetoed, what change would you make?" And every one of my interviewers said some variation of "I wish my work challenged me" with one guy very poignantly saying it as "All the low-hanging fruit has been solved, and only certain engineers get to work on the really tough problems" and then I couldn't wait to get the fuck outta there.
I had two interviews with Google in 2011 (senior dev position in corporate engineering), got rejected after the on-site interview in Munich, Germany.
I'm not sure why, I think I did really good back then.
Their recruiters keep calling 1-2 times a year since then, but nowadays I can't even imagine applying. It's a huge preparation effort with unclear chances and benefits. Just can't afford it.
A few colleagues that have worked at Google over the years have expressed that depending on which office, project or position you are in, the experience was greatly impacted for better or worse. Everything from boredom, perceived growth and office politics seems to vary greatly even if offices were merely a couple towns over within the same state.
Sometimes I feel that human beings are tough to please. Once they get what they want, soon it loses its shine. Perhaps it's OK, may be that's what keeps us going. But does that impact our happiness levels? Not sure.
All you need to do to thrive at google is love 5 star gourmet food. It's not uncommon to see in-house smoked bacon for breakfast, and then have quail for lunch. And then wild boar sausage rolls for a late afternoon snack.
There is this thing: the google 25. Yeah it's worse than freshman year - you're gonna get fat bro.
Are you still at Google? Their current food is okay, but I'd never be tempted to describe it as "5 star gourmet", and rarely see food like you describe.
Like everything else about Mountain View, the food at Google's Mountain View office sucks. That office is also in a swamp, and the "city" of Mountain View offers nothing of any interest to anybody, unless colossal, endless traffic jams catch your fancy. I have no idea why anyone wants to live or work in Mountain View, for Google or otherwise.
The food at Google's MTV office is excellent. Mountain View is not SF or NYC, but it's no wasteland either. Castro Street is fun. But the traffic is real and horrible.
As an MTV noogler: It's not 5-star gourmet, but it's better than most restaurant food, and certainly better than any fast food you can get. There's lots of healthy options, too, which I really appreciate, as someone trying for a noogler negative fifteen. (Really I'd like to lose 30-40 pounds; it's hard to be active in Cleveland especially during the winter. I'm planning on biking to work regularly.)
I ultimately left Google because I felt bored working there. You admin systems and fill out resource request through web browsers and work with proprietary stacks all day. It didn't take long to feel my skills as a Linux professional start to atrophy. The longer I stayed the more concerned I became about passing interviews in the rest of the industry as I became a Google engineer.
I often miss the tools I had at Google but it's exciting building those tools at smaller companies and working with industry best practices.