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Poll: Given the opportunity would you work at Google?

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Re: Poll: Given the opportunity would you work at Google?

#61

Post by nostrademons »

neilk wrote: post #45
nostrademons wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious why there's this perception that the vast majority of Google engineers work on mundane stuff. 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 inter…

> even simple things become an interesting technical challenge. It depends on your perspective. This also means that you can spin for a year or more just getting one feature out the door. I think I had about 10 meetings over six months on whether addresses for Google Checkout would contain two or three address lines, and whether we needed a separate field for France's CEDEX postal codes. Some of this was justified as…

Yeah, some of the bikeshedding that goes on around UI gets ridiculous. I remember running into a quote board from very early (~2000) in Google's history. Marissa (who ended up in charge of the search UI anyways) said, "Maybe we should have a mailing list where anyone who's interested in UI can contribute" and then Amit (who came up with "Don't be evil", alongside Paul Buchheit) said "Bad idea. That's every engineer in the company."

On the plus side, you learn from many, many different perspectives this way. It's like Peter Norvig's advice in "Teach yourself to be a programmer in 10 years":

1.) Get involved in a language standardization effort.

2.) Have the good sense to get yourself off the language standardization effort as quickly as possible.

Great way to learn, perhaps not such a great way to get things done.

Re: Poll: Given the opportunity would you work at Google?

#62

Post by GrooveStomp »

As always, this is a complicated question - more complicated than probably intended.

Google certainly isn't seen as the "hip", "cool" place to be anymore. Google+ seems shiny and new, but as a whole, Google has this aura of being a place where creative, active developers get sucked into a black hole, and you never hear or see anything from them again.

I would love the chance to work with great people and to make a killer income there, but to work at Google I'd have to move to a different country, or move completely across the country I already live in. Both of those options are simply unacceptable right now - even if I was willing to jump willy-nilly, I have a significant other who has real ties to where we are right now.

I also seriously doubt that I'd get to work on something that interesting at a company so large.

That said, if Google offered me a large salary and the opportunity to work on my side projects full time - Hell yeah. You'd have to make a really good argument why anyone shouldn't take advantage of that! :)

Re: Poll: Given the opportunity would you work at Google?

#63

Post by pfedor »

nostrademons wrote: post #35
rxin wrote: post #11

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.

It's probably a bit more true than that. You got the process right, but the problem is that Google is in so many lines of business that almost anything you do could be considered "along the lines of business of your employer". 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 n…

My personal experience: I submitted two personal projects http://kartofel.jfedor.org/ and https://market.android.com/details?id=org.jfedor.frozenbubbl... last year (in July I believe) and both were rejected (i.e., the committee said that Google would not release copyright). However, recently (a month or two ago) I was told that the rules changed and now they were happy to release the copyright for both. In the meantime I tried to get my employment agreement altered to state that my personal projects belong to me, not to Google, but I found there was absolutely no room for negotiation there (despite the fact that my manager, an eng director, supported this). I was told by the legal department that the only person in the company who could approve such thing was Larry Page.

It is true that Google has a very easy process to open-source your projects. One practical pain is that if you want to accept patches you have to get every contributor to sign Google's CLA.

Re: Poll: Given the opportunity would you work at Google?

#65

Post by nostrademons »

ra66it wrote: post #49

I am a senior in college from Cupertino. My biggest problem with working for Google is that if I sign to work for them I won't know what I'll be doing. That means I can get stuck in any job in any field, and that is a big turnoff. Doesn't stop me from applying though :)

The transfer process isn't that hard, as long as you're transferring into one of the areas that is a top priority for the company (eg. Search, Infrastructure, Chrome, or Google+). If you do get stuck in a role you dislike, I'd highly recommend making friends with the people that are doing what you actually want to be doing, start contributing 20% stuff to them, and if you that it should be trivially easy to get a transfer as long as they have headcount.

One of my Noogler classmates was assigned to doing backend indexing work when he really wanted to be doing frontend UI stuff. He left for Facebook after 5 months, which was a total manager fail, because we had headcount in Search UI and would gladly have taken him had we known he was dissatisfied with his current job.

Re: Poll: Given the opportunity would you work at Google?

#66

Post by gregholmberg »

neilk wrote: post #45
nostrademons wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious why there's this perception that the vast majority of Google engineers work on mundane stuff. 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 inter…

> even simple things become an interesting technical challenge. It depends on your perspective. This also means that you can spin for a year or more just getting one feature out the door. I think I had about 10 meetings over six months on whether addresses for Google Checkout would contain two or three address lines, and whether we needed a separate field for France's CEDEX postal codes. Some of this was justified as…

> If I remember correctly we simply came around to the exact same hacks I proposed on the very first day.

Your story could be read in a positive way by an MBA class: "After much careful company-wide introspection, the smart guy's instinctive solutions were allowed to prevail."

Me? I would have given up on the process long before a year had passed.

Re: Poll: Given the opportunity would you work at Google?

#67

Post by spicyj »

spicyj wrote: post #58
cagenut wrote: post #19

90% no, in that its a very large company and therefore you will deal with very large company issues no matter what. But if I could get in on the RE < C or electric-vehicle stuff, hell yeah, I'd take a pay cut.

Sorry, what is RE < C?

Never mind, found it: http://www.google.org/rec.html

Re: Poll: Given the opportunity would you work at Google?

#68

Post by jarin »

jedc wrote: post #43
jarin wrote: post #9

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…

re your 2), I was in the Navy for six years, and now work at Google. There's virtually no comparison at all. Sure there's a bit of what you might call "bureaucracy" at Google, but only enough to keep things from going off the rails, and people actively work to keep that to a minimum. It's nothing, nothing, nothing like the Navy. (I worked at COMUSNAVEUR for ~18 months, so am even familiar with 4-star Admiral staff le…

Oh totally, I had some really fun times and met some great friends in the Navy, and I'm glad I did it. I also gained a ton of technical knowledge in a very short amount of time, which was fantastic.

It wasn't the rank structure or chain of command that left a bad taste in my mouth, it was the layers and layers of approvals and paperwork needed to do something as simple as run a security audit on my servers, or set up an intrusion detection system on a spare PC, or even keep an extra set of backup tapes in a separate location on the ship.

I wouldn't expect it to be crazy like that at Google or any other progressive tech company, of course.

Re: Poll: Given the opportunity would you work at Google?

#69

Post by jarin »

nostrademons wrote: post #33
jarin wrote: post #9

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…

1.) Basically everyone who gets hired at Google feels that way at the beginning, right on up to Larry Page. He tells this story occasionally about how when he got into Stanford, he kept walking around for a month or so terrified that he was about to be "found out" and that Stanford would ship him home and rescind his acceptance. And then when Google started becoming popular, he was afraid that it was taking too much…

Putting it that way, it actually does sound like a good fit. Guess I'll have to reconsider my vote :)

Re: Poll: Given the opportunity would you work at Google?

#70

Post by kragen »

msort wrote: post #53
jasonkester wrote: post #46

I go back and forth on this one. It'd certainly be a fun place to work, and you'd get to play with some cool tech. If I was just starting out, I'd jump at the opportunity. Nowadays, I see a lot of downsides. First, it's a full-time on site job, which is something I left behind almost 10 years ago, so it'd be tough to go back. Probably more importantly, I doubt they could offer me the kind of salary that would tempt m…

After last year's 10% rise and bonus-structure change, Google's salary is very high now. Counting salary and bonus, not counting equity-grant, Google perhaps pays the highest in the software industry now. If counting cash + equity, adjusting for risk, only a few companies (FB etc.) now can beat Google in terms of expected income. So if your only concern is money, you can still try to see how Google could offer.

> If counting cash + equity, adjusting for risk, only a few companies (FB etc.) now can beat Google in terms of expected income.

Are you including e.g. Morgan Stanley and Knight Capital in your pool? Because Google's salaries would have had to rise a lot more than 10% to catch up to those guys, last I heard.

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