Ask HN: Is Google still a cool place to work?

So I'm an ex-Google employee and I can tell you that is an earnest, but ultimately unanswerable question. Google, like any organization, changes over time so for some it wasn't cool before but now it is, for other it was cool and now it isn't, and for still others it never was and may never be a cool place to work. (And of course those for whom it will always be a cool place to work, looking at you Larry)

Engineering work is generally referred to as "R&D" which is short for "Research and Development." That is a spectrum where Research results in a peer-reviewed paper, and Development results in a shipping product. For many years Google was pretty hard into the R side of the equation for most people, and hard over into the D side for a smaller group of people. It created a lot of unhealthy tension where the groups were near each other.

It was a little too much R and too little D for me, I prefer working on problems that have an impact on the business as opposed to just pure coolness factor [1]. But a number of people I know are quite happy just working on science projects.

Also note this is no different than Sun Microsystems for the 10 years I was there, it went from Workstation company to Enterprise Server company to Web services company. Very different companies all in the same skin.

So the only thing you can do is interview, accept if they offer a job, and form your own opinion.

[1] In full disclosure I would have liked to have worked on the Self driving car since it combines my interest in robotics with programming/engineering but alas Sebastian turned me down.

I was hired at Google at nearly the same time as a certain famous ex-Googler. Both of us were given difficult intro jobs with legacy systems, the sort of projects that chew up engineers and spit them out. It's a chance to prove your mettle.

One of us attacked the problem head on, taking on tasks that would normally be "below" us. In the end, the bad project taught him what he needed to know about Google engineering. He replaced the legacy system with modern infrastructure, which brought him public recognition from the senior VPs, new opportunities to work on interesting projects, and nomination for promotion.

The other one of us decided that he was too good for his job. He very publicly whined about how it was below him and how the only way to get ahead at Google is to start out in one of the interesting jobs. Rather than work his way up through a meritocracy, he expected to be instantly recognized for his natural genius. He got poor performance ratings from his peers and manager, and eventually rage-quit after about six months.

It was the classic Goofus and Gallant story.

I second this, helped me a lot, too. In particular, it covers a wide range of topics, each with some introductory exposition, and gives a variety of example questions with answers.

Additionally, glassdoor.com has a lot of user-contributed interview questions and lets you search for/filter by specific companies.

Sigh. How do I answer this with new content?

Let's try this: throw out anything you may have heard about the company prior to 2012. Don't believe any of the marketing. It's all changed, and I'll let you figure out whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. You need current assessments of what it's really like. Then you have to determine whether to believe them.

Finding those assessments should not be particularly difficult, since something obvious has changed. It used to be that if you worked there and weren't one of the "blessed PR people", then you didn't talk about it. In fact, a lot of people wouldn't even mention they worked there. Now it seems like any post about the company brings out the Astroturfers. They all seem to be recent hires and so are probably still in the "honeymoon" phase where everything is sparkly and shiny and nothing could possibly be wrong.

You might also consider that others are quite simply stuck there, and are not going to jeopardize that relationship. Maybe they have one of the Valley's infamous sky-high mortgages, or perhaps they have one of those work visas which amount to legalized slavery keeping them bound to their current master.

Finally, ask yourself this: what are they actually doing as a company, and do you want to be a party to it? That is, assuming you care about such things.

I've already shared my existing compensation, and I'm not drastically underpaid. If their offer is not 15% better than what I'm making now, it will make me think they aren't that interested in hiring me.