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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?

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Picking up algorithm skills on the job is not that easy. You really have to spend some time, think problems though, play with them and internalize the learnings. Your job in any company doesn't deal with algorithms that much but it's very useful to know them for the rare opportunities that do occur so that you make better choices. As for YCombinator, in startups when you hit scaling issues if means your product is go…

Start picking up algorithm knowledge now online. This guy is excellent and entertaining:

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpRRUQFbePU&feature=relmfu
I too have had interviews with Google and had questions about big O notation. And questions about sorting during interviews with several other companies.

Not knowing fundamentals like this never helps. Many interviewers will spoon feed it to you, but you're not going to respond to questions with all your mental resources if you're spending all your energy trying to understand the context.

But its not necessary. And it costs nothing other than time to fix it. And it may even be fun.

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

#72
I had the opportunity about two years ago. I was on the Google campus for an event for the open source CMS that work on. The HR folks were very friendly and I enjoyed the time that I spent with them. At Google I'd have had some of the brightest coworkers anywhere, and that was pretty tempting. In my time at the GooglePlex I also got to experience the ample perks of working there. I realized that these were probably the best benefits I could get if I chose to work for another company.

Still, it took me less than a split second to decide. As a founder and a location-independent entrepreneur the loss of freedom and self-determination were unthinkable. With my current setup, I can jump a flight to anywhere I want, for as long as I want without having to ask permission from anyone. Likewise, my income and share of the profits I produce are determined by me alone. I wouldn't trade that for anything.

I'm actually tremendously thankful for the opportunity that I had at Google because, as potentially the world's best place to be an employee, they helped crystalize for me the realization that I am in exactly the right place.

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

#73
No.

Google has an orientation that is opposed to my agenda.

I joined the internet in 1992. It was a pretty decentralized place, and any person on it could set up an online service accessible to any other person on it; but you pretty much had to write your service in C (less of a security worry at the time) and it was easy to get in trouble by bogging down the DECStation you shared with fifty other people. So it was such a hassle that there were only a few dozen online services, plus a few thousand FTP sites. As an example, there were no public porn sites, although there was lots of porn.

A few years later, when the internet hit mainstream, it was a decentralizing force; server-centric Novell LANs and mainframe-terminal networks gave way to workstation networks, where anybody at the company, or anybody with an ISP account, could set up a web server on their personal workstation with a little trouble.

I started running my own mail and web server when I moved to Ohio in 1997, and I've been running one ever since, first alone and later with half a dozen friends. Until 2001 it was on dialup, which was fine, although obviously there are limits on how much traffic I could cope with.

But this rosy picture is complicated by centralizing forces. Apple wants to relegate websites to second-class status on their popular computers, and exercises viewpoint censorship on what "apps" they allow in their "app store". Google wants you to keep your mail in Gmail instead of on your home computer (with backups, naturally, on your friends' home computers), and they'll delete your account with no recourse if you admit you're only 10. Microsoft won't let you run unsigned device drivers on your own computer any more. Facebook wants to know every web page you visit and log that information permanently for later analysis.

And email from our little mail server automatically gets dropped into the spam box on Gmail these days. Not sure why. Apparently our domain has a "bad reputation", but even finding that out required an inside connection; no way to find out more.

I imagine a different future, where if Alice wants to talk to Bob and Bob wants to talk to Alice, there's no unaccountable intermediary that can interfere with their communication, whether they're speaking text, or video, or 3-D models, or simulation. If Alice's email gets marked as spam, Bob ought to be able to find out why — and fix it!

We're a lot closer to that world today than we were in 1992, and the evidence suggests that it is to that that we owe the collapse of oppressive regimes throughout the Middle East and Northern Africa; the revelation and destruction of the nascent government-funded slander campaign against Glenn Greenwald and other WikiLeaks supporters; and the public discovery of the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" flights. If we successfully beat back the global menaces of governmental corruption, global warming, overfishing, and terrorism, it will be because we were able to collaborate and organize more effectively around the world by means of this new medium.

Google, of course, wants to solve these problems too. But it has a different, less-democratic approach in mind. While of course the company contains an enormous diversity of opinion internally, their approach publicly has been somewhat paternalistic, and their engineering culture is organized around big centralized solutions; warehouse-scale computing, as the title of Barroso and Hölzle's excellent book puts it.

A rather shocking view of the depth of some Googlers' commitment to centralized computing can be found at http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/web/05/11/google.skype.wire...

I believe that warehouse-scale client-server computing will, in the end, undermine the kind of democratic freedom of communication that we need to deal with today's global menaces. It's more practical than peer-to-peer computing at the moment, but that pendulum has swung back and forth several times over the decades. (Some of my friends were among the first employees of a hot cloud-computing startup, in 1964, called Tymshare.) The proper response to the current impracticality of decentralized computing is not to sigh and build centralized systems. The proper response is to build the systems to make decentralized computing practical again.

Google is not institutionally opposed to this; they've funded substantial and important work on it. Nevertheless, because of their overall orientation toward centralized solutions, I believe working there would be a further distraction from that goal. Worse, with every advance that companies like Google and Apple make, the higher is the bar that decentralized systems must leap to achieve real adoption.

I'm not making much progress on that. My friends Len Sassaman (who committed suicide yesterday), Bram Cohen, Jacob Appelbaum, and Zooko O'Whielacronx have made substantial contributions. But I don't think I'd make more progress at Google, and I might make negative progress.

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

#74
post #70
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Software engineers surely can make more or less in Financial Industries.

Please read my original comment, which was comparing Google with other software companies.

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

#75
post #74
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Software engineers surely can make more or less in Financial Industries. Please read my original comment, which was comparing Google with other software companies.

If Google is a "software company", then so is Knight. (Morgan Stanley is, admittedly, a little more contentious.)

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

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Picking up algorithm skills on the job is not that easy. You really have to spend some time, think problems though, play with them and internalize the learnings. Your job in any company doesn't deal with algorithms that much but it's very useful to know them for the rare opportunities that do occur so that you make better choices. As for YCombinator, in startups when you hit scaling issues if means your product is go…

Start picking up algorithm knowledge now online. This guy is excellent and entertaining: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpRRUQFbePU&feature=relmfu I too have had interviews with Google and had questions about big O notation. And questions about sorting during interviews with several other companies. Not knowing fundamentals like this never helps. Many interviewers will spoon feed it to you, but you're not going to re…

Great link! Buckland is a stellar lecturer. Stumbled across him some time ago.

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

#78
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It comes down to math. Google has 25,000 employees, and let's say 100 different projects. They have a higher percentage of engineers than most companies, so you end up with quite a large # of people on every project. Sure the guys who made a name for themselves are working on something cool and doing big things. But some peon? They are stuck doing the mundane busy work that the big guys don't want to bother with. It'…

It's not organized like that. Rather, there are perhaps 100 public-facing products . And then each product has lots of individual features that have teams working on them. For example, I work on Google Search, but the actual projects that I've worked on include Wonder Wheel, the left-nav, the move of all the properties (books.google.com, video.google.com, etc.) to www.google.com, the May 2010 visual redesign, the occ…

Well, not all infrastructure work is confidential. I work on the Production Linux team at Google, and we're quite open about a lot of the work we do, and we try to push as much as possible of the work we do upstream.

I do have to second this thing about the "celebrity programmer". We have a group of people working on ext4, some of whom have been working on it at Google before I decided to start working there. (In fact, I learned about Google adopting ext4 from their contributions of no-journal mode for ext4 to the upstream.) I may be one of the more visible persons at Google, but I'm certainly not the only one working on ext4, and ext4 wouldn't be where it is today without some really talented folks who have been working on it with me for the last 2-3 years --- and I've only been at Google for 18 months!

One of the reasons why I am at Google is precisely because it is a big company. It is only when have a very, very large number of machines in your data center does it make sense to put a whole team of people working on infrastructure code such as file systems. (I'm pretty confident, by the way, that Sun never recouped all of the money they poured into ZFS --- it's a project which is highly impressive from a business perspective, but from a business person's ROI perspective, not so much.)

One of the things I can definitely say about Google is that while it may be a large company, compared to IBM, it has a minuscule amount of bureaucracy. I used to sit on the team that worked on the annual budget for the Linux Technology Center, and that would be weeks and weeks of conference calls where the ROI of work items at the granularity of 6 to 12 persons months worth of effort for the next fiscal year would be weighed, judged, and decided. Which is something I'm glad IBM does as a shareholder --- but as someone who had to sit on those interminable conference calls, not so much. I get to do far more real, honest coding work at Google than I did at MIT (where I spent the bulk of my time on Lotus Notes, PowerPoint via Crossover Office, and conference calls.) The one good thing about having gone through a very dispassionate review on the ROI of various different bits of technical work is I can say with fairly great authority that there is huge amounts of work which makes sense from an ROI perspective for me (and a whole team besides) to do at Google, but which wouldn't make sense at most other companies, just because of the scale at which it operates.

If you are interested in working on very large scale systems problems, Google is definitely one of the best places in the world for you to do this kind of stuff. I know a tenured faculty member at Harvard who decided that it was far more fun to do systems work at Google, and who left his tenured faculty position for this reason.

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

#79
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[deleted]

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

#80
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

This wasn't UI as much as it was data model.

Also, the guy they had doing the official i18n libraries had a default position of We Only Do The Right Thing. Admirable, but not fun to work with. So even if I proved to him that our downstream vendors, and indeed almost all French companies, handled these special French zip codes with a simple hack... that wasn't good enough for him.

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