How to get a job at Google, interview questions & process • Hacker News Board

Re: How to get a job at Google, interview questions & process

#111

Post by birken » Wed, Sep 15, 2010, 7:23 AM UTC

rjurney wrote: post #99

brown9-2 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can't hold onto their people, have very high churn and dissatisfaction rates, etc. Do you have citations for this?

What better way than to link you to google? :) http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&#3... And specifically http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/01/google-making-extraordinary... More generally, this is common knowledge around the valley.

I think Google has about 10,000 engineers, so this article is saying that over the past 5 years, approx 1% of Google engineers have moved to Facebook. I think this article is light on facts and high on sensationalism.

And it is "common knowledge" that Google has "very high churn and dissatisfaction rates"? Is that because Techcrunch or Valleywag says so? I think there is a large vocal minority of (in most cases) non-Google employees who are so quick to talk about how Google is a terrible place to work and everybody hates it. And internally at Google, there are a bunch of happy employees who just laugh at all the made up stories about how they are supposed to feel.

Look, people are going to leave Google. That is what is going to happen when you have a bunch of really young and talented engineers working in a big company, but don't think this is because Google is some terrible place to work. I'll bet the satisfaction rates of Google employees is among the highest of any large company.

Re: How to get a job at Google, interview questions & process

#112

Post by jrockway » Wed, Sep 15, 2010, 7:30 AM UTC

guelo wrote: post #109

jrockway wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are something like 70,000 developers and 300,000 total employees, so it's hard to say anything other than "all of the above". I mostly use Haskell and Perl. The rest of the department is mostly Perl. Sometimes I do C. Other groups are Python-heavy. There is a big Java and C# presence, and of course a lot of people that think C++ is the only real programming language. There is some initiative to standardize on C…

You forgot to mention that you would be working for a giant corporate behemoth that is evil to its customers.

How exactly are they evil? They borrow your money at a certain rate, and loan it to other people at a higher rate?

Re: How to get a job at Google, interview questions & process

#113

Post by rjurney » Wed, Sep 15, 2010, 8:42 AM UTC

birken wrote: post #111

rjurney wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What better way than to link you to google? :) http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&#3... And specifically http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/01/google-making-extraordinary... More generally, this is common knowledge around the valley.

I think Google has about 10,000 engineers, so this article is saying that over the past 5 years, approx 1% of Google engineers have moved to Facebook. I think this article is light on facts and high on sensationalism. And it is "common knowledge" that Google has "very high churn and dissatisfaction rates"? Is that because Techcrunch or Valleywag says so? I think there is a large vocal minority of (in most cases) non-…

That article, yes. Check out any of the many in the google search. This one stands out: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124269038041932531.html This is well covered.

As to 'common knowledge,' it is common knowledge outside of google that tons of people are leaving because every week someone new shows up from google at these companies. Enough that people notice, kinda like Yahoo. Google is melting.

The other oft cited metric is the headcount freeze, while there is still aggressive hiring. Put that together... turnover.

If you like it, I don't think Google is a terrible place to work. The opposite is true I'm sure. You're getting a disk golf course that we're not allowed to use ( bastards ;) ). But for whatever reason, dissatisfaction and turnover are high. This could simply be attributed to being all growds up.

Re: How to get a job at Google, interview questions & process

#114

Post by sgift » Wed, Sep 15, 2010, 8:58 AM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #112

guelo wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot to mention that you would be working for a giant corporate behemoth that is evil to its customers.

How exactly are they evil? They borrow your money at a certain rate, and loan it to other people at a higher rate?

Without getting into the evil/not evil argument: This is not quite correct. A bank can lend more money than they have/borrow. The bank must only maintain a specific ratio of equity and loans. For more details see Basel I, Basel II and the upcoming Basel III, which (should) regulate the loans of banks.

Re: How to get a job at Google, interview questions & process

#115

Post by rjurney » Wed, Sep 15, 2010, 9:00 AM UTC

guelo wrote: post #110

rjurney wrote: post #35

Why would anyone want to work at Google at this point? They can't hold onto their people, have very high churn and dissatisfaction rates, etc. I could see maybe wanting to put in a year to learn the google stack, or if you have a particular area you've been researching and they will pay you to do exactly what you want, but beyond that... there are lots of companies offering better salaries and options with serious va…

Google is one of the top 5 software companies in the world, it is chok-a-ful of world class talent including many of the luminaries in computer science, they are changing the world with massive innovation every year, and to top it off they are famous for their employee perks and flexibility ... but you'd rather go work for zynga making dumb games? To each his own I guess.

I wouldn't work at Zynga, but your dismissal of them is pretty on par for Google's social media strategy, so it does make sense :)

Re: How to get a job at Google, interview questions & process

#116

Post by michaelbuckbee » Wed, Sep 15, 2010, 9:17 AM UTC

btilly wrote: post #69

BrandonM wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see lots of assertions to this effect. Is it really true? One point that no one seems to consider is that frustrating interview processes are a big contributor to smaller applicant pools; that is, a would-be good employee has applied a couple places, been filtered out by false negatives, and is thus disincentivized from even continuing to look for a better programming job. Personally, I don't like my current job bu…

It is really true. As you would know if you'd been on a team that needed to fire the wrong hire. As for why not to try people before you hire them, a lot of experienced people already have jobs. They aren't going to want to accept a "maybe yes, maybe no" position without a really strong incentive. That said, a number of companies do have policies of liking to hire contractors, then make some of them permanent. This k…

To me, this is one of the big unspoken about benefits of working in a startup. There is no room for slack and if someone isn't doing their job it's immediately apparent. Nothing kills my motivation more than working with someone who is technically incompetent and/or generally unpleasant to be around.

Re: How to get a job at Google, interview questions & process

#117

Post by nostrademons » Wed, Sep 15, 2010, 9:28 AM UTC

rjurney wrote: post #113

birken wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Google has about 10,000 engineers, so this article is saying that over the past 5 years, approx 1% of Google engineers have moved to Facebook. I think this article is light on facts and high on sensationalism. And it is "common knowledge" that Google has "very high churn and dissatisfaction rates"? Is that because Techcrunch or Valleywag says so? I think there is a large vocal minority of (in most cases) non-…

That article, yes. Check out any of the many in the google search. This one stands out: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124269038041932531.html This is well covered. As to 'common knowledge,' it is common knowledge outside of google that tons of people are leaving because every week someone new shows up from google at these companies. Enough that people notice, kinda like Yahoo. Google is melting. The other oft cited…

(Disclaimer: happy Google employee here.)

I do know the numbers, though I can't share them, and Google's turnover is ridiculously low. Much lower than I would expect from any company in Silicon Valley, which has a notoriously fluid job market.

It's also false that there's a headcount freeze: the total number of employees at Google has increased significantly over the past year.

Re: How to get a job at Google, interview questions & process

#118

Post by dlo » Wed, Sep 15, 2010, 10:18 AM UTC

greg_holsclaw wrote: post #57

BrandonM wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see lots of assertions to this effect. Is it really true? One point that no one seems to consider is that frustrating interview processes are a big contributor to smaller applicant pools; that is, a would-be good employee has applied a couple places, been filtered out by false negatives, and is thus disincentivized from even continuing to look for a better programming job. Personally, I don't like my current job bu…

Maybe programmers nudged out of the process is a feature not a bug. People who self select out of a hard hiring process may meet not Google's criteria for certain attributes they want to see in their candidate.

Reminds me of property management: When screening possible tenants, merely saying that you will conduct background and credit checks will deter some people from even applying, most of them being people you wouldn't want to rent out to anyway.

Re: How to get a job at Google, interview questions & process

#119

Post by brown9-2 » Wed, Sep 15, 2010, 1:08 PM UTC

rjurney wrote: post #99

brown9-2 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can't hold onto their people, have very high churn and dissatisfaction rates, etc. Do you have citations for this?

What better way than to link you to google? :) http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&#3... And specifically http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/01/google-making-extraordinary... More generally, this is common knowledge around the valley.

These are anecdotes, not real data.

Re: How to get a job at Google, interview questions & process

#120

Post by arethuza » Wed, Sep 15, 2010, 2:13 PM UTC

studer wrote: post #72

paracomerpan wrote: post #44

In norvig page, norvig.com it is said that a good method to increase the power of the team is to choose someone that is better that someone at google. The author did a statistical simulation to show the positive effect of this strategy compared to another one. There is someone working at google that was working at apple and is good at social blogging (I don't remember now his name) but he didn't pass the test and he…

The post you're referring to is here: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/03/hiring-lake-wobeg... and the argument is that you should try to "only hire candidates who are above the mean of your current employees", rather than just hire people better than the worst you have. I find the part where he talks about hiring for project vs. hiring for the company a bit more interesting.

This comment is interesting:

"This model seems to assume that people don't change, or that they perform in an interview and hiring process in the exact same way that they will perform on an actual team with a variety of personalities and any kind of manager."