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My Google job was tedious and pointless

washingtonpost.com

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Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#211

Post by bkeroack »

wheaties wrote: post #204
bkeroack wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter-example: Michael Church (who was also aggressively banned from HN, not coincidentally)

One uses sock puppet accounts and has been banned from Wikipedia, the other does not...

Oh I'm not defending him. Some of his points were interesting but he seemed determined to piss everybody off to the point of no return. However that stuff happened after he got himself fired from Google.

My point is that Google is not particularly tolerant of dissent, or at least a specific type of dissent. Even back then (it seems worse now).

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#212

Post by majewsky »

peoplewindow wrote: post #156
dkobran wrote: post #62

While the job doesn't sound like it involves "cool things that matter" and paints a pretty believable picture of working at a large corporation, I do find it interesting that this was published by thr Washington Post. Being owned by Amazon, a direct competitor to Google on many fronts (the war for cloud computing market share is/will continue to be huge), it seems suspicious that this is truly unbiased coverage. It s…

It does seem an odd choice to publish. Sourcers (that's what Google calls people like that regardless of what his job title was) have existed for a long time there. I was recruited to Google by someone just like that. And yes it's clearly a very boring job: they're basically human search engines. Quite what the author thinks he'll gain by publishing this story is a little beyond me though. It doesn't sound like he wa…

> Sourcer

If I were the manager of that department, I'd up-title them all to "sourcerers". :)

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#213

Post by away2017throw »

nradov wrote: post #74
snorkel wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't work at Google, but code refactoring is critically important in the real world. It's not intern work.

Why not, like, test refactoring skills? Mind blown!

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#214

Post by bhandziuk »

dkobran wrote: post #62

While the job doesn't sound like it involves "cool things that matter" and paints a pretty believable picture of working at a large corporation, I do find it interesting that this was published by thr Washington Post. Being owned by Amazon, a direct competitor to Google on many fronts (the war for cloud computing market share is/will continue to be huge), it seems suspicious that this is truly unbiased coverage. It s…

For every story like this out of Google there seem to be5 of the same sort out of Amazon.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#215

Post by johndoe489 »

I've been coding for 20 years but some random fresh face out of university goes into HR and looks over my CV and decides whether I'm suitable for an employer or not. Neverlmind that they can barely tell the difference between Java and Javascript. I mean what the fuck, you've got a university diploma, which I don't even have, and THAT's your job? What a waste.

Your job is tedious and pointless, end of story.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#216

Post by fortythirteen »

waegawegawe wrote: post #22
tclancy wrote: post #5

The headline is a bit deceptive given it's written by an internal recruiter; I imagine anyone not working as part of a business' main thrust could find the same problem. That said, it does sound horribly tedious and pointless. Of my two interactions with Google hiring (both failures on my part, both pre-2006), one was enjoyable but messy and the second was brusque and confusing.

This was my reaction too. Mike Rowe would probably look dimly upon the author's complaints. Sometimes, companies hire people to do unpleasant jobs, and convince them to do these jobs by paying them. But, it's tough to have that conversation from the position of privilege one sits in when one gets paid even more to do an interesting job, because of the scarcity of people capable of performing in that role. Presumably…

> Sometimes, companies hire people to do unpleasant jobs, and convince them to do these jobs by paying them.

What I got was that the requirement for overt enthusiasm over a mundane job became too much. I don't think Mike Row would see it the same way if a sewage technician was forced to pretend their job was "making a better world one bowel movement at a time" or face being ostracized.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#217

Post by cromwellian »

jrs95 wrote: post #188
untog wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If Jewish immigrants had been engaging in the amount of terrorism we've seen in Europe recently...yes, I would be just as flippant. Do you think that white people in America engage in too much mass shooting, and consequently should have additional regulations applied to them regarding gun ownership?

No, and if you took a closer look at the stats you'd see that it's not even true that they're disproportionately responsible for mass shootings or terrorism generally.

The probability of you being killed by a terrorist or a Muslim in the US is tiny compared to your chances of being killed by a native born or white (assuming you're white). The percentages are so small, it makes such an outsized concern obviously racist because from a rational risk assessment point of view, it changes nothing.

>So what? They don't have some sort of magical automatic right to be here just because one of their relatives is.

We have generally held it is good policy to keep families together. And the times when it was not allowed (e.g. Chinese Exclusion Act) were specifically done for RACIST purposes, not rational ones. Tons of Chinese men were prevented from being reunited with their wives because of that, and still more single ones were prevented from marrying locals by anti-miscegenation laws.

These kinds of attitudes are basically the ones that allow you to be manipulated by political parties and have your attention diverted from real issues. Xenophobia works unfortunately, as studies and social experiments from the 60s and 70s show, blaming woes on "the other" is a tried and true tactic. You can take tiny issues related to foreigners or other tribes and blow them up so large they dominate the discussion.

Immigration and terrorism are not the largest issues facing this country, yet they completely dominated the election.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#218

Post by bllguo »

briandear wrote: post #196
bllguo wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't know about "poignant" - this reads like "I chose the wrong career and it's Google's fault" - but 100% yes, this is one of the biggest societal issues we face. The author may have realized a bit late that he doesn't enjoy HR, but he still deserves a chance to pivot. That's getting harder in our economic system and with automation and outsourcing.

I remember looking at Hacker News in 1895 and remember the fear of automation was just as noteworthy then. Weird how increasing automation over the past 200 years has led to record low poverty and a higher standard sign living that would have unimaginable.

Once we resolve the issue of people being automated out of their careers then of course automation will be a net positive on society. You don't have to tell me - I work in machine learning and data. These are basically growing pains that require a societal paradigm shift.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#219

Post by alex_hitchins »

weberc2 wrote: post #78
alex_hitchins wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Executives are people at the end of the day, they will have emotions and feelings (hopefully). I'd hazard a guess it wasn't the fact a Republican won, rather than who won. However that is total conjecture on my part.

I agree that executives are people, but we regard lots of normal, human behaviors as "unprofessional", and our standards for professionalism are traditionally higher for higher ranking employees. In particular, I think there's already a lot of negative misinformation circulating about conservatives generally and Trump supporters specifically (mind you, I'm neither), and no one is helped by executives propping up thes…

What is considered 'professional' today might not be tomorrow. I for one would welcome more genuine personality in the corporate world and can think of many things I'd like to see become considered acceptable.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#220

Post by sumeno »

jondubois wrote: post #192
nejenendn wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jealous after bailing after six months? Are you sure it’s not pity? How many times have you quit in a row?

I'm almost 30, the longest company I worked for was almost 2 years; it was a startup and they're doing very well now - I would have stayed even longer but I wanted to move to Europe. Other than that I never stayed longer than 6 months at a company and I'm really glad because most of these companies were stagnant or failed. I've quit my job probably about 10 times now. Employers don't care at all how often you change…

If you find yourself unhappy at every company you work for after 6 months the problem might not be with the companies you work for.

Your coworkers probably aren't jealous of your inability to stay at a job for more than 6 months.

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