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you heard of a land grab...well Google is in the process of doing a talent grab, hiring engineers left and right, so chances are unless you made a name for yourself, you'll be stuck doing something stupid
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is not true. Google is actually fairly open about this. For projects that fall into the grey area, there is a committee of engineers and lawyers that you can submit your (personal) projects to, and they can give you a clear answer that the IP is owned by you. From anecdotes I've heard, the committee is very friendly to employees.
I find the idea of bringing a personal project into the office and having a committee decide whether I own it or not, to be rather distasteful. The obvious course of action is for developers to universally stop signing over their rights willingly like this. Nobody should ever have to sign these invention clauses to be employed.
If you're not working on something similar to what the employer is working on, it's not a problem. If you're working on something that will compete with what your employer is doing, there's a problem.
If you were running a sports team, you wouldn't let your employees run a betting parlor - they'd have too much incentive to throw a game and profit off it. In the same way, employers don't want their employees having situations where the company's goals and the employee's goals are at odds.
Even though it seems like it would be pretty cool, I said no for a couple of reasons: 1) I'm not sure I could hack it there. While I consider myself to be a good coder (and people tell me so), I don't consider myself to be a top-notch guru ninja coder. I also don't have a CS degree, and I tend to get a little lost when people start getting into CS theory. 2) I have a (probably irrational) aversion to working at reall…
Incidentally, this is the same criteria YCombinator uses, except that instead of "do you really want to work at Google?" they ask "do you really want to found a startup?" It's a pretty handy mindset to develop in general.
2.) I felt the same way, and then discovered it was nowhere near as bad as I expected. There're a bunch of pretty autonomous small groups working at Google, often on pretty cool things. One trade-off is that the more important your work is to the company, the less autonomy you have, yet the more important your work is to the company, the greater the resources you have at your disposal and the greater the financial and career rewards.
Not sure if this is true, but I heard that Google takes ownership of any IT projects that you work on your spare time. If this is true, then I certainly wouldn't want to work for them. Is this true?
It is not true. Google is actually fairly open about this. For projects that fall into the grey area, there is a committee of engineers and lawyers that you can submit your (personal) projects to, and they can give you a clear answer that the IP is owned by you. From anecdotes I've heard, the committee is very friendly to employees.
The success of getting IP rights assigned to you personally is heavily dependent upon what you're doing. If it's just a Chrome extension for your favorite website or a webapp that caters to a niche interest you have, no problem. If it's a casual game (now that Google+ has launched) or a mobile app, it can be very, very difficult, as those are industries of pretty heavy strategic importance to Google.
Interesting all the "no" responses, in lieu of the (as of when I write this) the 2:1 "yes" vote.
no because chances are all your skills will go towards doing some mundane task. you heard of a land grab...well Google is in the process of doing a talent grab, hiring engineers left and right, so chances are unless you made a name for yourself, you'll be stuck doing something stupid
Yes, there's mundane work in any job. There is less of it in Google than in other places, even including the startups I've worked at, because when you operate at Google-scale, even simple things become an interesting technical challenge.
It's sorta hard for me to point out specifics because most of Google's internal infrastructure is quite secret, but if you can point out some things that you think would be mundane and boring, I can try to illustrate some of the challenges involved, up to the limits of my confidentiality agreement.
After more than 5 years as an engineer, I left Google on April first. I was surrounded by intelligent, friendly, and honest coworkers. Across the company, good, reusable, well-documented, well-designed code was normal. People also go out of their way to help, answer questions, and put an end to BS. I'd consider returning.
Out of curiosity, why did you leave?
a) Google has good infrastructure, but there's a high barrier to adding a new technology in production. If I put 5 engineers in a room with a rough design for a product, they'd probably suggest the same components. I wanted to step outside and use new technologies. (I wouldn't do this off work hours because I don't have the brain bandwidth to work on side projects)
b) Avoiding my own complacency. Google was my first gig out of university and I didn't want to stay there just by default.
c) I wanted to work somewhere where success and failure rested on my work (and of everyone on the team's) - I wanted to put my heart into something, and that, for me right now, requires something that can fail and then I'd be out of a job as opposed to just switching teams. Later, I might be happy making 1 billion people's search results 0.1% better, but now isn't that time. Certain teams at Google are more at-risk like this, but mine wasn't.
There are a few other minor reasons, but none of them were other people, an uncaring company, or incompetence.
Google's certainly not perfect, but I'm pretty sure no other company even a quarter of its size is as good a place to work.
Not sure if this is true, but I heard that Google takes ownership of any IT projects that you work on your spare time. If this is true, then I certainly wouldn't want to work for them. Is this true?
Also, it's not a simple open-and-shut "yep, we own it" response. It takes ages, while you lose whatever enthusiasm you might have had going in to the idea.