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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

#281

Post by [deleted] »

BearGoesChirp wrote: post #232
vkou wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Step into the shoes of someone holding an H1B for one moment, please. Step into the shoes of the person who was demanding a fair market wage until the company used an H1B visa to bring in someone who accepts far worse conditions because the threat of deportation is always present.

[deleted]

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#282

Post by throwayit »

snorkel wrote: post #34
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…

I actually find refactoring legacy code to be one of the most challenging things I do at work.

While I definitely wouldn't want to do that for all 40 hours of work I wouldn't classify refactoring as "remedial".

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#283

Post by dang »

rdiddly wrote: post #252
dang wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 This kind of thing breaks the HN guidelines, which ask you to "please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." Your interpretation was far from the strongest plausible. As a result, we got a wea…

LOL - "hellpoints"

For some reason I had the image of one of those scenic highway stops, except it's the highway to hell.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#284

Post by Asooka »

johan_larson wrote: post #71
bistro wrote: post #6

Wouldn't working as a recruiter be tedious at any company?

If the recruiter is given specific hiring criteria that are hard but not impossible to satisfy, I could imagine looking for people who fit those requirements and persuading them to sign up would be a satisfying job of search, selection and salesmanship. But that's not what these Google recruiters are doing. They are trying to find any vaguely qualified people they can who are willing to dive head-first into the meat-…

Sounds like these recruiters could be replaced by a simple google search...

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#285

Post by weberc2 »

TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #157
weberc2 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mind you, America is a vast and diverse place; California/Silicon Valley/Google are at an extreme end of the spectrum, and they also get a disproportionate amount of attention. Rest assured, much of America is saner.

I see what you're getting at, but "saner" is biased language. Cali/SV/Google all lean one way because they've been benefiting from the way things have been going. The thought that large swaths of the country have been experiencing a declining quality of life just doesn't register to them. That doesn't make them "insane," just uninformed.

It's definitely figurative language and I understand that it's charged, but I don't think it's "biased" in any sense of the term that might illegitimate my opinion. I don't think "uninformed" accurately conveys the phenomena we're seeing in our country, particularly since much similar ignorance flows out of institutions that ostensibly know better--notably the academy and media.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#286

Post by txcwpalpha »

evgen wrote: post #269
txcwpalpha wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just yesterday I had an interview with a Facebook recruiter and afterwards all I could think about was that the recruiter's entire job could have been replaced by an AI. And not one of the smart, modern, cutting edge Siri types of AIs, either. The entire process could have been just as easily accomplished by a robocaller bot that's been around for decades. The interview process was a few generic, form-filled emails t…

It could have been automated, but having the human make the call leads to a slightly decreased level of people madly trying to google up answers to 'what is the expected exit code for a program that had no errors?' so that the next phase of the process is not a complete waste of time for all parties involved. The recruiters are just trying to see if there is any chance that you might actually have the skill set claim…

Yea, that's all well and good and I used to do recruiting for my old company where that was the case, except that wasn't even what was happening here. The Facebook recruiter himself told me that he was simply recording my answers down to be reviewed by someone else. He didn't seem to know what a "good" answer was versus a "bad" answer, and he didn't care. The questions he asked weren't about nor related to my resume, they were just generic "tell me about a time when you worked on a team with other people" type questions, and the recruiter wasn't really more than a notetaker for my responses.

I get that having a "human element" makes the process seem slightly more personal, and I would hate to be a part of a recruiting process that literally is just robots, but in the case where your job can literally be completely replaced by nothing more than an online HTML form or a robocall, what are you even doing?

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#287

Post by weberc2 »

alex_hitchins wrote: post #219
weberc2 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe, but that's inconsistent with the demands for greater professionalism and accountability that we've seen our society place on executives and other authority figures in recent years. Notably, any comment that can be remotely perceived as questioning the progressive narrative is equivalent to violence, white supremacy, Nazism, etc. I care less whether we expect greater or lesser professionalism from executives so long as "professionalism" isn't a partisan proxy war.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#288

Post by weberc2 »

cromwellian wrote: post #128
weberc2 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In what way did the executives "prop up rumors"? They were responding to employees and their families who got trapped outside the country by the travel ban executive order. What's rumor about that?

I was speaking generally, as was the post to which I responded. I don't know the particulars of the Google executives' comments.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#289

Post by balls187 »

snorkel wrote: post #34
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…

> Just odd to set the interview bar so high, and for what purpose?

Check Google's stock price.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#290

Post by mnm1 »

nejenendn wrote: post #266
Balgair wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, I wish that were true! I'd love to sit in one place for 2 years. I can't seem to find a job that will last more than 18 months. Some will, but the pay is stagnant and there are no promotions. You must job hop. As one anecdata point, employers all seem to know that diagonal promotions are the standard now and they don't fault you at all. If they did, well then they gave me a red flag, if anything.

18 months is a lot different than 6 months. You can’t even ramp up fully on a codebase in 6 months, arguably.

Having worked at over a dozen places in my career, I've never encountered a code base that takes longer than three months to master let alone ramp up on. This includes shitty code, overly complex code, and well written code. I'd say the challenge is staying interested and challenged after three months.
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