My Google job was tedious and pointless • Hacker News Board

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#31

Post by cromwellian » Tue, Oct 17, 2017, 5:36 PM UTC

Recruiting is outsourced at many companies. I'm not sure why this person thought it would be a hugely interesting job. Perhaps if they were an engineering major and were working on ways to automate recruiting searches, or improve the false positive/false negative rates, it would have been interesting, but it doesn't sound like this person was hired for anything but to man the phones.

From that standpoint, it seems like #firstworldproblems. Someone who lacks the skills to be a SWE gets hired at one of the most prestigious companies, most likely has awesome benefits and a comfortable job, but boring and unfulfilling. Contrast that with the millions of people in who work for far less salary and benefits, in low end service sector jobs, and it just seems tone deaf to me.

I understand the feelings of not having a good fit for your work and wanting to do other things, but there's a huge difference between "I need a change cause I find what I'm doing boring, even if the pay and benefits is good" and "This is the WORST! Clearly, I was owed an interesting job at a candy unicorn factory, and since I didn't get the toys I thought I would, I'm suffering worse than a Soviet gulag here."

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#32

Post by maxxxxx » Tue, Oct 17, 2017, 5:37 PM UTC

mulletbum wrote: post #25

maxxxxx wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think an executive should ever complain about an election. They should focus on making their company successful and a good work place.

Why not? When the election is making their company have a difficult time becoming a more successful work place? I think it's a company, people can say what they like, if Google doesn't like it as a whole, they can fire said employee.

They have all the tools to make their company a better place no matter who is elected. Complaining is just a cheap way to excuse not doing anything.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#33

Post by rising-sky » Tue, Oct 17, 2017, 5:38 PM UTC

user5994461 wrote: post #26

Apocryphon wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guess you'd expect a company with Google's level of innovation to make any process less tedious.

Well, the author says all he has to do is type 2 letters to send invites and rejection, maybe with a few words to make it look personal. The process is streamlined, that doesn't make it more interesting.

Sounds like the recruiter would rather type the entire correspondence.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#34

Post by snorkel » Tue, Oct 17, 2017, 5:38 PM UTC

foobaw wrote: post #9

Most of the responsibility, minus the technical interview, seems like it could be done by an AI sometime in the future anyway. No more complaints afterwards!

I found Google's dev interview to be especially difficult, I personally hate doing hours of whiteboard coding (sorry, I tend to code on computers instead, silly me) ... So I wasn't hired, but those who worked as devs there told me that's a blessing because after all the rigorous interviewing bluster they'll assign devs to remedial code refactoring anyway. I'm not a rockstar coder above doing the housekeeping work but doesn't sound fun either. Why hire top coders then assign them intern busy work? I wonder if the strategy was to just drain the local talent pool of top coders so competitors had less of a candidate pool. Just odd to set the interview bar so high, and for what purpose?

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#35

Post by ocdtrekkie » Tue, Oct 17, 2017, 5:38 PM UTC

vkou wrote: post #19

ogre_magi wrote: post #12

I worked at Google in a more technical role but I sympathize with this guy. The culture was awful and empty. It was sugar-coated candies and colors and happy, happy, happy like it was meant for a kindergartener. The politics were thick and covered everything. Executives got on stage at a company meeting and cried about the election. It was a cult, and not in the good way that a startup can sometimes be, but in a stal…

As someone who was deeply disturbed by the United States electing a jingoistic, misogynistic racist and abuser, I really appreciated that I got some fucking emotional support from my colleagues. Never mind that he ran on a platform of throwing a significant portion of the company out of the country. Step into the shoes of someone holding an H1B for one moment, please.

I'm friends with someone who's entire department (Disney IT) was laid off in exchange for bringing over H1Bs from India, where the people who had worked there for decades had to train their (much lower salary) replacements in order to get their severance pay.

I'm well aware this isn't how H1Bs are supposed to work, and that many H1Bs (particularly in the Valley) are properly used, but there's definitely some other shoes you can step into on the H1B issue.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#36

Post by georgiedown » Tue, Oct 17, 2017, 5:39 PM UTC

vkou wrote: post #19

ogre_magi wrote: post #12

I worked at Google in a more technical role but I sympathize with this guy. The culture was awful and empty. It was sugar-coated candies and colors and happy, happy, happy like it was meant for a kindergartener. The politics were thick and covered everything. Executives got on stage at a company meeting and cried about the election. It was a cult, and not in the good way that a startup can sometimes be, but in a stal…

As someone who was deeply disturbed by the United States electing a jingoistic, misogynistic racist and abuser, I really appreciated that I got some fucking emotional support from my colleagues. Never mind that he ran on a platform of throwing a significant portion of the company out of the country. Step into the shoes of someone holding an H1B for one moment, please.

If you need emotional support from your work colleagues because the country has elected a president you don't like, you have a problem.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#37

Post by yahna » Tue, Oct 17, 2017, 5:39 PM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #24

cromwellian wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, a lot of people were upset over the election, and given what's happened over the last ten months, those feelings seem to have been justified. But yeah, god damn a company for having a culture where people don't go around acting like jerks towards one another. God forbid we grow out of Kindergarten and get back to the real world where people are unhappy and take out their frustrations by raking their cowor…

Given that a bunch of current and former Googlers have claimed that employees all the way up to the executive level keep and share lists of people they won't work with, there are alleged witch hunts, and people have made the statement they will quit the company if someone else isn't fired, it's hard to see how Google's culture has grown out of kindergarten. (Sources: Various internal G+ leaks during the Damore thing,…

> Yes, I know Breitbart sucks and is massively biased

but you still used them. I'm forced to assume everything you said is fake news.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#38

Post by jerf » Tue, Oct 17, 2017, 5:40 PM UTC

cromwellian wrote: post #16

ogre_magi wrote: post #12

I worked at Google in a more technical role but I sympathize with this guy. The culture was awful and empty. It was sugar-coated candies and colors and happy, happy, happy like it was meant for a kindergartener. The politics were thick and covered everything. Executives got on stage at a company meeting and cried about the election. It was a cult, and not in the good way that a startup can sometimes be, but in a stal…

To be fair, a lot of people were upset over the election, and given what's happened over the last ten months, those feelings seem to have been justified. But yeah, god damn a company for having a culture where people don't go around acting like jerks towards one another. God forbid we grow out of Kindergarten and get back to the real world where people are unhappy and take out their frustrations by raking their cowor…

I work at a Silicon Valley company where nobody cried about the election (even if they were upset), and we don't go around acting like jerks towards one another.

You're definitely positing a false dichotomy here and I'm not even sure how you came up with "either people are crying over Trump xor they are assholes to each other every day".

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#39

Post by waisbrot » Tue, Oct 17, 2017, 5:40 PM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #24

cromwellian wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, a lot of people were upset over the election, and given what's happened over the last ten months, those feelings seem to have been justified. But yeah, god damn a company for having a culture where people don't go around acting like jerks towards one another. God forbid we grow out of Kindergarten and get back to the real world where people are unhappy and take out their frustrations by raking their cowor…

Given that a bunch of current and former Googlers have claimed that employees all the way up to the executive level keep and share lists of people they won't work with, there are alleged witch hunts, and people have made the statement they will quit the company if someone else isn't fired, it's hard to see how Google's culture has grown out of kindergarten. (Sources: Various internal G+ leaks during the Damore thing,…

Why should anyone have to tell you that a Breitbart story is untrue when you already know that they lie constantly?

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#40

Post by aresant » Tue, Oct 17, 2017, 5:40 PM UTC

While the fluffy headline promises a revelation about Google, this article is actually a poignant lament on the future of work automation.

The piece's author holds a humanities degree in Psych/Neuroscience.

I point that out because while we've accepted that blue collar jobs are/were "going to be automated" or "going overseas", there's still a pervasive trope that an undergraduate degree provides some protection and is of value unto itself in the workforce.

But - as evidenced by his systematic experience of key-pressing - his position @ Google is a stop gap, in the same way that the humans in Uber's vehicles are a tolerated inconvenience.

This while the people the company ACTUALLY values, at present, are the engineers - tasked with devising new ways to automate, regulate, and systematically eliminate human fallibility from the equation.

Solving the problem of what to do with the millions of us that take steps to educate ourselves, want to contribute, but realize that we're a poor facsimile of the machine that will eventually eliminate our jobs, is the central question of our generation.