291–300 of 397 posts
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My interview experience with Google a couple years ago was godawful and horribly mismanaged. Just reinforced my conviction to never work for a large company.
Do share, please (if you feel comfortable).
Just reading this brought back memories of working at LinkedIn, and why I'll never again work for a company who has institutional performance review processes. That pretty much excludes all big tech companies and I'm perfectly fine with that. The cookie-cutter performance review process is impersonal and has absolutely nothing to do with helping people do their best work. In my case, I had a manager who simply didn't…
I had one large company where performance was really one bit - ranking was on a scale of 1 to 5 and, as I was told, "nobody is a 5 and if you were a 1 or 2 you'd already have been sacked". So everyone was either a 3 (meeting expectations) or 4 (exceeding expectations in some areas). I did manage to persuade my line manager (the CIO) to give me a 5 on something but he then felt the need to mark me down somewhere else…
Off-topic mini rant: This is something that pissed me off about college too. Grading on a curve just serves to mask flaws. Either the professor is shit, the course is shit, the test is shit or the students are shit. Shifting the goal posts so that the top score of 54 / 100 is now an A is just dishonest.
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From what I've seen the performance review process in large companies allows you to mask a personal vendetta as a performance issue (and you'll get away with it). Your manager can say "based on feedback everyone says you suck" and you can't really do a whole lot to look into it. You don't know where the feedback is coming from, or if it's even valid. At a smaller company a manager seems more responsible to look at pe…
I don't know how common it is, but some companies have a process whereby your peers supply the feedback, and a management team reviews it. Surely this must address the issue of a manager who doesn't like you, right?
First, nobody has an incentive to provide negative feedback except for serious cases (i.e. you cannot work with this person) or for political reasons. It's a prisoners dilemma with indefinite iterations, so each player's incentive is to provide positive feedback.
Second, in my experience, it's only reviewed by one person rather than by a management team, which opens it up to an array of biases on the manager's part. If a manager thinks that someone is a great team-player, and a reviewer says that that person is a petty tyrant, they're likely to doubt the reviewer's motives rather than updating their beliefs.
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> So the real rule when looking for new jobs is to avoid places where they hire first and do allocations later, as your picture of what the company is at interview time might be completely different than what you'll find on day one. Oh hey that's actually a whole lot of big corps ... most prominently Google, isn't it?
My interview experience with Google a couple years ago was godawful and horribly mismanaged. Just reinforced my conviction to never work for a large company.
Working there had its ups and downs. I will say, that company could actually produce stuff, unlike some places I've seen. It was also really, really nice to have a cubicle, but they were "compressing" those when I left. I have no idea if they've moved to the stupid open-office plan or not since then, but I kinda doubt it actually. I really miss having a cubicle... I used to think they sucked, but after years of other office arrangements, I now long for a cubicle again (though a walled office would of course be much better, just like it'd be nice to live in a $10M mansion and have a private jet).
Anyway, the interview process at Intel back then was grueling and ridiculous, with a bunch of managers coming in and grilling me with questions on all kinds of stuff, a lot which I had no idea about (like device physics). But a couple years ago I interviewed with Google. That was probably the worst interview experience I've ever had.
Lastly, I've interviewed at and worked with some other large companies. Their interviews were nothing like Google's.
Google's interviews are not like other companies', and are not representative of large companies at all. Google's interviews are unique to Google, and have been roundly criticized by many.
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A much bigger reason is to demoralize you and convince you that you deserve to be fired, so you won't even think about a lawsuit. PIPs aren't really good documentation of bad performance; in fact, a badly-written PIP can actually backfire on the company because the wording is usually full of holes a good lawyer can drive a truck through. Basically instead of the company having proof you were a poor performer, you now…
Not that I like anti-discrimination or wrongful termination laws anyway, though I am willing to compromise. I suggest a compromise to only include certain kinds of jobs like manual labor under employment anti-discrimination laws, where workers are actually commodities that are measureable and interchangeable.
If you work for someone else, I have bad news for you ...
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Do share, please (if you feel comfortable).
Sure. Set up a date over email for an initial phone screen with the recruiter. Left work early to make the appointment at home. Recruiter never called. Asked WTF, got an apology and another appointment for next week. Recruiter missed that one, too (really). Finally made a connection a few days later, got bizarre questions like "estimate 2^14 (or something) in decimal". Did poorly on that, so they forwarded me to anot…
But as I said above, don't paint all big companies with the same brush. Google's interviews are not at all like the interviews I've done with a bunch of other big companies. In many big companies, the different groups work entirely differently anyway; when I interviewed at Freescale, it wasn't any different than interviewing at some small company really, and the small workgroup I ended up working in was a great team to work with, and again didn't deal that much with the rest of the company anyway. It was a great experience except for upper management screwing it all up after a couple of years.
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FTFY: the PERSON you go to lunch with...
FTFY, guy and dude are pretty much asexual references for a person you don't know who you had a personal interaction with, at least in California. "Who did you have lunch with? Oh, some dude." Try not to language police here. You're not bringing anything to the discussion.
I was once a fan of Mayer when she first took over Yahoo, until she led a crusade against remote workers. As a remote worker myself I can tell you this crusade sent ripples throughout the industry. A lot of tech companies (especially outside the bay area) want to emulate the cool kids like Yahoo, Google, and Apple, and even the company I work for started questioning its WFH policies. So no, I don't feel sorry for her…
>this crusade sent ripples throughout the industry Were there any other companies that followed yahoo's lead?
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You're right, the 80 percent female just matched the gender ratio of the broader industry. /s
1. Just as much as the 20 percent male did. This is middle management, and the ratio is roughly 50%. 2. How is the gender ratio of the broader industry relevant here? If everyone discriminates, is it okay to discriminate? Maybe these women were just better at their jobs than the male candidates. Anecdotally, the average woman I've worked with is far more competent than the average man I've worked with. Are you willin…
I was once a fan of Mayer when she first took over Yahoo, until she led a crusade against remote workers. As a remote worker myself I can tell you this crusade sent ripples throughout the industry. A lot of tech companies (especially outside the bay area) want to emulate the cool kids like Yahoo, Google, and Apple, and even the company I work for started questioning its WFH policies. So no, I don't feel sorry for her…
Sadly, that used to be the most productive day of the week for me.