91–100 of 129 posts
(Eight years at Google here.) It's changed a lot over the years and has certainly disappointed me many times, which any xoogler can also tell you. But every time I've considered leaving I've been unable to imagine some other work that gives me the same combination of high freedom and good compensation. I've also seen the occasional person pull a michaelochurch. I've been lucky in that my random fun hacks have been se…
A little under two years ago I got offers from both Facebook and Google. The Google offer was a lot bigger (including in stock, the break even point was a valuation of 50 bln), but I accepted the Facebook offer instead, because I knew I'd only get to work on the kind of infrastructure projects I wanted to work on at Facebook. Bootcamp beats the hell out of preallocation for things like this.
That is close to FB's valuation (40bn today) now....
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I went to lengths to not give an actual judgement here, and you come back at me personally. Awesome job. Again, do not rely on that which was to judge that which is. Do your homework and don't assume things are the same.
Google's problem is that most of the work is shitty legacy maintenance. If you can get on one of their machine-learning or research projects and have a good manager, you'll have a fantastic experience (and I say this as a notorious Google detractor). Take the offer seriously but negotiate extremely hard on project allocation because it's really hard to transfer to a good project if you start in the wrong place, so yo…
I had seen your earlier comments and asked Googlers how hard they thought it was to change projects. They said they hadn't ever encountered another company that made it easier to change project than Google does, and wanted to know if you had encountered such a company.
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It could be that management hopes for that -- due to publishers' inertia AdSense will delay payments them. I wonder if that delay would improve GOOG Q3 revenue results. Edit: it seems I guessed incorrect (due to GAAP).
You report revenue and expenses during the quarter in which they were earned, not when they're paid. So a delay in payment wouldn't change their Q3 filings at all. Beyond this, Google makes a profit from having both sides continue to participate. The more ads they can show, the better. Hampering one side of this equation for temporary gains that only really improve how you look to Wall Street (not how you're actually…
But then what's left?
I know for sure that my own payment information is gone and it coincided with AdSense system upgrade.
Can anyone with AdSense account share if their payment information is still set?
But even if it's just my payment information lost - it's not a good sign about quality of engineering at AdSense.
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Since this comment is currently at the top, I feel I have to add that michaelochurch's overall Google experience was an extreme outlier, as is well known internally at the company.
People who are currently at Google will obviously not be an unbiased sample of all people who have ever joined Google.
Google's a good place to work. Like any, it has its faults and is not the right place for everyone.
Hopefully you'll make these important career decisions by, I don't know, talking to people you know and trust who do or have worked here, and not by taking the Internet ramblings of anonymous dorks at face value.
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> 1. I hope you've taken everybody's boilerplate negotiating advice and not put yourself in a hard position over money. Did you tell them exactly what you're currently making? Or exactly what you want? If so, next time don't do that. Even if somebody tries to button you down, just finesse it a bit. "Dollar amount isn't the most important thing, yadda yadda" and ask them to give you the range they're considering to en…
How does sharing their previous salary benefit the prospective employee?
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18 months? That's a problem if you have the bad fortune of being put on a project you don't enjoy. I've heard you have little to no say in the project you get assigned when you first join, is this true?
No, while this was once true, this is no longer true at all. You should know exactly what team you will be working on before you ever get an offer.
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This is good advice, but be advised that you won't be able to transfer for 18 months.
I transferred after ~3 months because my original team wasn't a good fit for me. One of the topics that is mentioned during orientation is that Google is designed to be fault tolerant at multiple levels. If a server goes down, the workload needs to be able to move to a different server. If a Noogler is placed a team that isn't a good fit for their skillset, they need to be able to move to a different team. This happe…
3 weeks of conversations later, I was told that the 18 month rule was "fair" in everyone's opinion, and that if I'm really concerned about working on projects that are interesting to me, I should just find one to spend my 20% time on (easier said than done).
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This is good advice, but be advised that you won't be able to transfer for 18 months.
In my experience the 18 months 'rule' is much more a guideline than a hard rule. I've personally seen a number of cases where someone transferred much sooner than that for a variety of reasons. If you approach situations like this in a constructive and professional manner, the company will go to great lengths to find a solution. At least that's been my experience.
i had potential teams lined up (one of which I would've been allocated to initially, had they not hit their new grad hire cap), so it was certainly a very frustrating experience. perhaps they care more about established engineers than recent graduates?