131–140 of 157 posts
All big tech companies are approximately the same, since people job hop a lot and these places have tens of thousands of engineers, it’s basically the same people at all of them anyway. I am not sure why people have these starry eyes views of them
I think I'm a good engineer, but I don't think I have the intelligence to get into google. Most people can't. There's definitely some sort of difference between an engineer who can get in google and one who can't as displayed by the interview. Most companies that interview people outside of FAANG tend to have easier interview questions in my experience. Some even forego algorithms all together. For googlers who worke…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok sure I’ll give you an honest and candid answer. It’s basically analogous to top schools. Yes the average engineer at Google is going to be better than the average engineer at some random company because google generally has a higher hiring bar. Similarly your average student at Harvard is going to be a better student than your average student at Random State University. As a result you will on average learn more t…
Thanks for being candid, is this inline with your experience? Have you worked at a smaller company and google as well? Your logic is really sound but I'm also asking this question for the purposes of gathering anecdotal experiences as well. Your answer is great, btw, I just noted that you used the word "average" over a personal example so I wanted to get an idea of where you're coming from.
Google showed me the fine engineering at large scale. And the key is the people as they are behind everything. That’s why I changed my view on who was the key person for google success. I used to believe Larry and Sergei, then urs, now I put on Laszlo Bock.
they are ok at it, far from great. netflix is a good example of engineering at scale.
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I wrote a partially finished article: https://docs.google.com/document/d/10wylnn8qHD4clDyrEIhYyP1F... It's not even touching the techniques and approaches yet. I was too lazy. Here a summary of my understanding: * Relentlessly hire the best, train them and give space for them to grow and shine. This is the basis. It's not that a less quality engineer cannot grow, it's just too costly to do that at large scale. * Buil…
Interesting, thanks for sharing. Any plans for extending the document?
You can keep the link, in case it's updated in the future.
Google showed me the fine engineering at large scale. And the key is the people as they are behind everything. That’s why I changed my view on who was the key person for google success. I used to believe Larry and Sergei, then urs, now I put on Laszlo Bock.
they are ok at it, far from great. netflix is a good example of engineering at scale.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being a TVC (contractor) this option is close to impossible, as I would need to go through a typical 5+ rounds of interview process - the same as for outsiders. This is a different discussion, however, and this process is completely broken, unfair, discouraging and illogical even for Google. My main point in answering the question was around restrictions to, mainly, house-brewed tech stack and overall attitude of oth…
Sorry the TVC experience is nowhere close to the full Googler experience.
Not Google, but another Big Tech company. Visibility is very important to getting a promotion at a large company. Selling your work is important. To move up, you must be playing the "choose a good project or team" game for at least 6 months before you try to get promoted. Preferably for a year or more to hit the right checkboxes for multiple cycles. If you fail to do so, you can do absolutely amazing work but rigid p…
I wonder if your advice can be applied in non-google setting? For example, in some general enterprise company.
At Google for 9 years, startup before that. Roughly half my time at Google I worked on individual products, and the other half on open source infrastructure (common libraries, compilers, linters, IDE plugins, etc). The biggest thing I've learned is how software changes over time. Previously I thought of a good program as like a crystal. Write it correctly the first time, and it doesn't need to change much, if at all.…
The way I've often describe software to clients is likening it to Formula 1 cars. With a normal car, you turn the key and drive, and it should definitely work for anyone. With a Formula 1 car, the tyres need to be warm, the driver needs to be experienced, and there are so many reasons why a working car can stall that careful monitoring, maintenance, and revision needs to be done long-term by an experienced team.
Sure, the software on your computer might run like the former, but in the background that huge pit stop team has been plugging away for years, and will continue to plug away with optimisations and fixes.
I think I'm a good engineer, but I don't think I have the intelligence to get into google. Most people can't. There's definitely some sort of difference between an engineer who can get in google and one who can't as displayed by the interview. Most companies that interview people outside of FAANG tend to have easier interview questions in my experience. Some even forego algorithms all together. For googlers who worke…
I’m not sure why many people seem to think this, there are like tens of thousands of engineers at google, and there are other good companies out there that also have tons of engineers, you don’t need to be that special to get a job at google. As long as you can get your first interview all you need to do is be able to solve data structures and algorithms problems and talk about software design. Let’s not put google o…
In ten years of writing software, I've had a handful of emails/messages from FAANG recruiters, and they've never ended up in an actual interview. I won't name names, but I was offered an interview and we agreed a three week timeframe to prepare for the phone screen, but that screen never came.
In another 6-12 months I might be lucky enough to get an email from someone else, but unless I spend my entire life on Leetcode to prepare for an email that "might" come it's likely that I'd fail it anyway.
Let's also not pretend that these interviews are easy. If we assume that FAANG interviews are around Leetcode medium to hard level, it still takes a significant amount of ability to do well, even if you can write a Max Heap from scratch and can traverse a BST. Even if you're had time to warm up for these interviews, you can come across a hard problem that rules you out for that company.