"Microsoft" represents hundreds of different places to work, and I'm pretty sure Google does too. Different teams at large employers can be worlds apart. The corporate culture that they all have in common is a thinner stripe than most people think, especially when it comes to how you really feel about your day-to-day work and your ability to get things done.
Why I Don’t Work At Google
31–40 of 76 posts
Re: Why I Don’t Work At Google
#32Any time someone makes such a statement, I can't help but think of this:
Re: Why I Don’t Work At Google
#33I think the correct title would have been - "Why I won't work at Microsoft, again.". I don't think it's a valid argument against Google without having any data-points. I've seen many Startups also don't finish their features/products and throw away when they realize this is not the right thing to do. Overall, don't generalize too much. Experiences are different for different people at different places.
Right, but look at google's recent history: more and more people, and in some way, less and less signal generated. This is some truly unavoidable thing I guess, unless you do some radical stuff like splitting apart your company in different pieces, like anti trust itself would do? Also for me is truly disturbing the idea of being able to select people that will do great stuff just using an interview. You can just che…
I disagree on the less signal part of your comment. To me, it looks like more and more signal. Since search, we've seen maps, mail, reader, chrome, android, app engine, big table, google docs, wave, google voice, a google branded phone, google fibre to the home for those lucky enough, prediction api, charts, dns services, @font-face directory, google home page, and others many others.
Sure, some of those have been buyouts. But overall that is a lot of signal as far as I'm concerned.
Re: Why I Don’t Work At Google
#34This seems to paint the world in overly broad brush strokes. There are good teams, and there are bad teams, and there's bound to be a bunch of both in any organization. You have the same problem with startups: there are good ones and bad ones, and it's usually not possible to tell one from the other until you join them. Why not just try, see what you get, and then you can transfer or quit if you end up on a bad team?…
And from what I hear, it's quite easy to move around teams at Google until you find one that suits you.
Re: Why I Don’t Work At Google
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe because the publicly available reports of their interview process don't seem to emphasize "getting stuff done" as much as she prefers, but instead emphasize other attributes. She believes that if it's not emphasized in the interview process, it's likely to be underemphasized in the organization as a whole. Since she believes that attribute to be more important than its proportion of apparent emphasis, the p…
I would say that interviewing for engineering knowledge (coding, algorithms, software engineering) is pretty straight forward, but interviewing to figure out if a candiate can get 'real' work done is very difficult. I don't know of any magic way of testing for that. There are some good signals, of course, such as: 1) pre-interview open source reputation and release. 2) References from people you trust and respect. 3)…
It is actually pretty easy, you look for developers that understand minimum viable product and can explain their development methodology to produce software in such a manner.
Re: Why I Don’t Work At Google
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe because the publicly available reports of their interview process don't seem to emphasize "getting stuff done" as much as she prefers, but instead emphasize other attributes. She believes that if it's not emphasized in the interview process, it's likely to be underemphasized in the organization as a whole. Since she believes that attribute to be more important than its proportion of apparent emphasis, the p…
I would say that interviewing for engineering knowledge (coding, algorithms, software engineering) is pretty straight forward, but interviewing to figure out if a candiate can get 'real' work done is very difficult. I don't know of any magic way of testing for that. There are some good signals, of course, such as: 1) pre-interview open source reputation and release. 2) References from people you trust and respect. 3)…
There is a way to test to see if someone can get stuff done, but that usually entails hiring someone for a predetermined time (6 mos, a year, 2 years) and then evaluating whether they meet your standards at the end of that time period. If they do, they stay on. If someone really wants to work for your organization, I can guarantee that they'll do everything in their power to get stuff done during this time period.
Re: Why I Don’t Work At Google
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google and Microsoft both do a great job shipping certain kinds of products. The teams that work on these products have influence, autonomy and ability (without middle management or PM interference) to ship products. For Microsoft it's Office tools, development tools and operating systems. We may not like those products, nor wish to work on those teams irrespective (I'm a UNIX hacker, there's no way I'd be happy at M…
I don't work for MS, but I must admit I'm impressed with Bing. Is it better than Google? Maybe not, but it's still impressive. And they certainly seem to rev changes to it just as fast as Google is doing nowadays. We'll see how Office online plays out. And don't forget that MS Online Services has like 40million paying customers. They also do something called XBox Live and even Hotmail has gotten a little better over…
> I don't work for MS, but I must admit I'm impressed with Bing.
That's not surprising, given the person running Bing is Qi Lu. There's a reason they brought in an outsider: they just couldn't afford to screw this attempt up.
I've had the enormous privilege of working in his organization at Yahoo (I still have no idea how I was able to fool my interview panel into hiring me straight out of college and into that group).
That experience gave me an extremely highly bar in terms of choosing engineering organizations to work for. There's only a couple of non-startup companies I am willing to work at after this experience: most everyone else - including non-search parts of Yahoo - just does not get how to run an online service and are unwilling to listen to a young punk like me :-)
Re: Why I Don’t Work At Google
#38Damn, I really, really agree with this: I know that while it’s important to write quality software, it’s equally important to just fucking finish it.
Real Artists Ship.
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Re: Why I Don’t Work At Google
#39This seems to paint the world in overly broad brush strokes. There are good teams, and there are bad teams, and there's bound to be a bunch of both in any organization. You have the same problem with startups: there are good ones and bad ones, and it's usually not possible to tell one from the other until you join them. Why not just try, see what you get, and then you can transfer or quit if you end up on a bad team?…
I agree. It seems as if she's taking whatever she's experienced in Microsoft (which is one company) and applying that to any other company with multidisciplinary teams and a large bureaucratic layer.
She should, at least, give working in Google a chance (maybe a couple years or so?) before writing something like this.
Re: Why I Don’t Work At Google
#40Can't you ask questions about the team during the interview, to gauge whether they get things done or not?
Google hiring is done at a company level, so for most hires, you don't actually know what team you'll be working on during the interview. You are typically given some idea at offer time (I was told my manager's name, my manager's manager's name, and the department), and you can talk to people you might know at the company, but if you're remote or don't know many Googlers it can be tough to get more information. It's…
I've heard that a new employee can expect his or her first project to last about 12-18 months - can you confirm or deny this?