The last recruiter I talked to was hilarious. Like the author here, I pulled my Linkedin profile and I feel like I am fairly hard to find. However, I have a food blog and I guess I might have mentioned some tech stuff there. So this recruiter calls me and starts talking to me about food, I guess as a way to get me interested, but he totally and hilariously botches it because it's pretty clear he knows nothing about it. I told him "You live in one of the best food cities in the world, so even if you aren't looking to recruit you should to to these restaurants/food purveyors." I sent him a list of them and told him I wasn't interested in a job.
No, I still don't want to work for Google
231–240 of 410 posts
Re: No, I still don't want to work for Google
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you hire lots of [...] compiler specialists but you allocate them to write web apps we're all possibly worse off. Speaking from direct experience, faced with the job of developing a framework for web data entry apps, what I ended up doing was writing a dataflow language for data binding. Another ex-Delphi compiler developer, Danny Thorpe, ended up co-creating Google Gears. IMO compiler development is a great basis…
Speaking as another compiler guy (ok, more into PL), there is a reason many of the top engineers at Google are PL/compiler guys (e.g., Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat)...think of MapReduce. However, we are also sort of dangerous as we see many problems as PL problems, and if the problems require specialized domain expertise beyond grunt programming, we really aren't that effective (e.g., machine learning) without being pa…
PL man to PL man, what would you say the prospects are for taking a brain soaked in PL, compilers and software-engineering research expertise outside academia? You know, for when they boot me out of grad-school with a so-called "degree" in a bunch of years ;-).
Re: No, I still don't want to work for Google
#233[deleted]
Re: No, I still don't want to work for Google
#234I agree with you on the unnecessary puzzle solving. I don't even solve Sudoku. How can I even come up with a reasonable solution in 45 minute? The only puzzle I ever solved with C++ and Java was minesweeper and it took me a month in each language. I do think algorithm design problems like fitting 1 million 8 digits into 1 M ram is an OKAY question. Google's scale is big, and they want to test you how quickly you can…
Dude if you can really solve minesweeper, publish the paper and become famous and rich, because that shit is NP-complete. http://www.cs.montana.edu/courses/spring2004/spring2004/curr...
NP-complete problems aren't impossible, they just get very computationally expensive the bigger they get.
OP would only be rich & famous if they had developed an algorithm that solved minesweeper in polynomial or better time. (i.e., a time complexity on the order of O(n^k), where k is some constant)
Many NP-Complete problems are trivially solvable, just not trivially solvable in an efficient manner. - like the Travelling Salesman Problem. You can just try every possible combination. It's not fast, but it works.
Re: No, I still don't want to work for Google
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
Get any offer in writing, and if it's rescinded, the words you want are: promissory estoppel .
At-will employment, unfortunately, makes that doctrine legally useless for workers in America. A friend of mine came to this country (Israel) to work as a chemical engineer. His salary isn't large by American standards ($27,000 USD/year take-home pay), but for here it's pretty good and the benefits package is superb . The thing that really hit me, though, was that his job offer was a literal, written contract specify…
At-will employment is complicated. Very complicated.
The truth is that you should usually take the severance as offered, because a lawsuit usually isn't worth the time and reputation risk. That said, there are reasons companies write severance contracts. They're afraid of lawsuits, and secondarily about what you might say about them.
At-will protects the right to end employment for business reasons (layoffs) and to fire people for objective, published performance standards. The first of these, I think, is completely reasonable. The second would be reasonable if the standards were published before people accepted the offer.
Performance improvement plans (PIPs) attempt to make subjective firings look "performance" based, but if you know how to play that endgame, you can draw it out and make your manager's life hell without giving him anything objectively fireable. (You shouldn't make his life hell. In fact, if you can strike a deal with him where he improves your review so you can transfer, and you get the hell out of his way, that's better. You should get a new job and resort to endgame tactics only if you need more time at the old job.)
With a rescinded offer, there's no performance case, so it's only legally acceptable if the company can establish a business-related reason (such as a plant closing or a hiring freeze).
It's very unlikely that one will actually end up in a lawsuit over this. You use the words "promissory estoppel" to get a severance package, and you take it.
Re: No, I still don't want to work for Google
#236Yes, it's probably somewhat frustrating to be laid off by Google and then later receive recruiting emails. But Google is a big company. The right hand doesn't always know what the left is doing. Or maybe the recruiter thinks you really do want to come back to the fold. Who knows.
It's pretty unfair to blast Google for "eroding" the public domain, fair use, and consumer rights. Google has been a champion of all three of those things, unlike some other companies I could name.
Does it really matter if Google+ doesn't support anonymous comments? It's not like there's a shortage of places online to make anonymous remarks.
Re: No, I still don't want to work for Google
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the problem is the fact that we have two types of engineers: the academic geeks, and the creative geeks. I wouldn't give anyone a pass if they show no personality, creativity and out-of-the-box thinking with good product intuition during my interview. Vice versa, I don't think any academic geeks would give me a pass if I couldn't solve their math puzzles with a proof. I could be just talking out of my ass her…
In an interview, I have 30-60 minutes to figure out whether I want to hire you or not. My team writes a lot of code. Therefore, I'm going to ask you what your favorite language is and then test your ability to write 10-20 lines of code in that language to solve a relatively simple problem. If you can't do that, it seems to me that a) you don't like to write code and therefore I shouldn't hire you or b) you're out of…
Keep in mind that if we only have 30-60 minutes together, I'm going to be putting forth a lot of energy in determining if you are even worth working for or are just another bozo boss/company. It is just as risky on my part as it is yours. That doesn't leave a lot of time to think about any challenges you send my way, no matter how easy they may be.
It feels to me like such a process tries to shift the power towards the employer, to make it seem like you would be lucky to even have a chance to work there and focus the time wholly on the business needs, when it really should be a mutual discussion to see if both parties feel it is a good fit. Passing your test with flying colours only to find we are a terrible match is just as damaging as hiring a bozo to begin with, no?
Re: No, I still don't want to work for Google
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
20% time can easily destroy your career. Most managers view it either as a waste of time or a flight risk. If the manager has to put someone on the 5% shit-list (which has more to do with his performance than yours) and you're 20%ing, then you're probably screwed. Blind allocation is imbecilic, but I think even the idea that people need to be "allocated" to projects is moronic. It doesn't belong in this fucking centu…
> 20% time can easily destroy your career. Most managers view it either as a waste of time or a flight risk. So at Google, you're job isn't to make Google more successful, but to make your manager look good.
Yes, which doesn't make Google any worse than most companies, but does mean it has regressed into the meaningless, incoherent, parochial grey glop that is standard corporate working life.
Re: No, I still don't want to work for Google
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're probably right, and it occurs to me that I'm thinking of the civilizations in the cities I've visited recently (SFO, DC, etc.) and are perhaps not reflective of what it's like to be a transgender in other parts of the world / nation.
And even then, there's the problem of "what do you want your family to see?" I know a number of people who're completely open about stuff to their friends, but very carefully maintain a cis+hetero front to their family in order to avoid a complete disaster. (psueodynoms aren't a fully sufficient solution there of course, but they definitely help quite a lot)
I think it's worth noting that in that regard, Google Plus, with its 'circles' grouping mechanism, is very good at respecting one's privacy to whatever degree that they wish and are willing to put forth the effort to implement.
Re: No, I still don't want to work for Google
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
At-will employment, unfortunately, makes that doctrine legally useless for workers in America. A friend of mine came to this country (Israel) to work as a chemical engineer. His salary isn't large by American standards ($27,000 USD/year take-home pay), but for here it's pretty good and the benefits package is superb . The thing that really hit me, though, was that his job offer was a literal, written contract specify…
At-will employment is complicated. Very complicated. The truth is that you should usually take the severance as offered, because a lawsuit usually isn't worth the time and reputation risk. That said, there are reasons companies write severance contracts. They're afraid of lawsuits, and secondarily about what you might say about them. At-will protects the right to end employment for business reasons (layoffs) and to f…
Personally I think these anti-discrimination laws are likely fundamentally flawed.