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No, I still don't want to work for Google

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Re: No, I still don't want to work for Google

#281

Post by nsp »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #251
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ;-).

You have a lot of choices, basically look for anyone with big iron requirements (big data systems/infrastructure). Microsoft, Google, Facebook love PL people. Many startups would be happy to have you also.

Sorry for the novice question, but what does PL stand for/refer to? My best guess is programming languages [creating them] but I have zero confidence in it.

EDIT: Sorry, did some research and assuming its this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_language_theory

Re: No, I still don't want to work for Google

#282

Post by btilly »

sxp wrote: post #172
Jabbles wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you say more about how you arranged to transfer? Others have suggested it is impossible or very difficult, but perhaps they are outliers or victims of older policies. Was it 4 months of trying to be moved, or did you move quickly after trying your assigned role for a while? (I think I would move the other way, into servers :))

It was Others who have run into problems and left might be outliers, but it's difficult to come to a solid conclusion based on anecdotes. People who have bad experiences will have stronger feelings and bring up their experiences whenever possible (E.g. michaelochurch who complains about Google every chance he gets) while those who have good experiences like myself don't mention it as much. I only mentioned my case be…

I should note that you probably made that decision before you had a negative perf in your record. If you had waited you'd have been less likely to have had a good experience.

(I'm another who got dropped into a "poor for me" role. I waited too long to think about transferring. The site director said that I shouldn't have made that mistake. A co-worker on the same team who was in a similar situation at an earlier stage, on my advice, proceeded to begin his transfer immediately. He had a much better experience.)

Re: No, I still don't want to work for Google

#283

Post by nostrademons »

xenen wrote: post #204
michaelochurch wrote: post #187

Earlier 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…

Wow, I never would have expected Google's perf management to be as bad as what I've read here - Glassdoor reviews all sound so peachy.

The negative comments here haven't really been my experience either. I once heard a VP say that perf is an "eventually consistent system", meaning that mistakes are often made over the short term (1 review cycle), but over the long term high performers get promoted. That's basically what I observed: it can be maddeningly slow for people to notice you've been working your ass off, but if you keep at it, they do notice and the rewards do come. If you stick around long enough for them.

The real world isn't all that different - if you found a startup, you're likely to go through 3-4 years of nobody giving a shit before everybody suddenly discovers your a genius.

Re: No, I still don't want to work for Google

#284

Post by nostrademons »

jjwiseman wrote: post #103
varelse wrote: post #28

I worked at Google for a short stint. I found the tech interview easy and I wasn't asked anything particularly ridiculous. I received a job offer shortly thereafter and accepted. As someone who regularly interviews prospective engineers at my current gig, I see no problem with expecting candidates to arrive prepared to answer algorithm questions or questions about their strongest programming language. Ditto for someo…

Blind allocation got me too. They told me how allocation worked before I joined, but I was hopeful that they would put me on a project that had some overlap with what I was interested in and what I had worked on for the past 15 years (computer vision, robotics, natural language processing). No. I found out on the last day of orientation I would be doing YouTube ads. I knew there was no way I could do that for 18 mont…

I've heard of the 18 month rule, but it wasn't how it worked in my experience. My first project lasted 4 months and ended with a successful launch. My second lasted two months and ended when I was pulled off (actually, I volunteered) to work on a project more suited to my abilities.

YMMV. Google is a giant corp, I'm sure there are bad managers somewhere (and I've heard of Nooglers getting stuck on a bad project and then leaving for Facebook), but if you keep your eyes open for opportunities and work to build relationships with your new team, you can usually transfer regardless of what the rules say.

Re: No, I still don't want to work for Google

#285

Post by kenko »

nostrademons wrote: post #283
xenen wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, I never would have expected Google's perf management to be as bad as what I've read here - Glassdoor reviews all sound so peachy.

The negative comments here haven't really been my experience either. I once heard a VP say that perf is an "eventually consistent system", meaning that mistakes are often made over the short term (1 review cycle), but over the long term high performers get promoted. That's basically what I observed: it can be maddeningly slow for people to notice you've been working your ass off, but if you keep at it, they do notice…

If you identify high performance by the performance review system, and people who perform highly according to that system are more likely to be promoted than those who don't, then of course over the long term high performers are the ones who get promoted. And it might well be merely "eventually" consistent if a few dings early on (or later on!) don't destroy your chances to, over time, be considered a high performer by that system. It would be very hard for such a system to be anything but consistent, since the consistency is just self-consistency.

The relevant question isn't "do promotion decisions get made consistently with the tools used to rank performance" but "do the tools used to rank performance adequately track potential, and does the environment generally adequately make potential actual?". A system in which lots of people are dissatisfied and bored but some luck into positions for which they're suited, excel, and are promoted is, indeed, consistent, but it's also pretty wasteful.

Re: No, I still don't want to work for Google

#286

Post by nostrademons »

mattdeboard wrote: post #51

I was interviewing at a startup in the Bay Area and the CEO insisted that since "being surrounded by people smarter than me and getting better at what I do" was a huge driver for my professional life, I'd be better served by working at Google. I did not understand that then, and I don't understand it now. I don't blame the guy for saying that I guess, and maybe he's right. That said I don't want to work at a megacorp…

I worked at two startups and founded one before joining Google, and I have a friend that's been bouncing between working for and founding startups since he's left Google. I understand what the CEO was saying.

In a startup, there's a lot of grunt work that has to be done and there's nobody to do it, and so you frequently end up taking on a lot of tasks that really don't teach you anything. In a big company like Google, a lot of that work is automated, or there's a dedicated team of people who like doing that work, and you can just forget about it. Think about carrying pagers, repairing hardware, corporate IT, installing software, setting up your workstation, doing logs analysis, cooking for you, etc.

It's less of a problem early on in your career when everything's new for you, particularly if you eventually want to found a startup where you have to do all that stuff anyway. A lot of engineers really want to be top of their field, though: they want to be the world expert in machine-learning, or in extraction of data from news articles, or in distributed parallel processing, and so on. You typically don't have the opportunity to do that in a startup, because you have to focus on the immediate business needs and on staying alive rather than on pushing the state of the art forwards. "Good enough" has to be good enough in a startup.

Re: No, I still don't want to work for Google

#287

Post by nostrademons »

kenko wrote: post #285
nostrademons wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The negative comments here haven't really been my experience either. I once heard a VP say that perf is an "eventually consistent system", meaning that mistakes are often made over the short term (1 review cycle), but over the long term high performers get promoted. That's basically what I observed: it can be maddeningly slow for people to notice you've been working your ass off, but if you keep at it, they do notice…

If you identify high performance by the performance review system, and people who perform highly according to that system are more likely to be promoted than those who don't, then of course over the long term high performers are the ones who get promoted. And it might well be merely "eventually" consistent if a few dings early on (or later on!) don't destroy your chances to, over time, be considered a high performer…

I don't identify high performance by the performance review system. I identify high performance by "Who would I like to have on my team if I were to found a startup?" I've found a fairly high correlation between these people and the people who get promoted.

Re: No, I still don't want to work for Google

#288

Post by GuiA »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #274
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who regularly interviews prospective engineers at my current gig, I see no problem with expecting candidates to arrive prepared to answer algorithm questions or questions about their strongest programming language. And as someone growing to be an expert in programming languages, I'd appreciate if Google didn't immediately peg me as "useless academic" for using something other than C++, Java, and Python. Di…

Actually, for reference of why I mentioned those languages in specific, it's because the following scene happened in these interviews: Interviewer: Could you figure out how to solve a blah blah blah for me in whatever language you prefer? Myself: By "whatever" language, do you mean whatever language? Is Scala ok? Interviewer: We'd prefer C++, Java, or maybe Python. Try with one of those. It's one of those things like…

A (very naive) friend of mine started programming in Haskell for a job interview because he thought it'd show the interviewer that he was creative, liked to learn things out of the beaten path, etc (after all they said 'your favorite language').

Needless to say the interviewer was very confused and irritated, and asked him to switch to Python/C++/Java after 15 minutes. He didn't get a followup interview (this was with a big major tech company too)

Re: No, I still don't want to work for Google

#289

Post by bjourne »

varelse wrote: post #225
xenen wrote: post #207

Earlier 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…

I'm curious to know if you would reciprocate in kind? That is to send me code samples of the work your dev team has done on your company. Your goal is to ensure I'm not a bozo and my goal is to not have to work with bozo colleagues. Hence the exchange of code samples. Fair?

Re: No, I still don't want to work for Google

#290

Post by michaelochurch »

kenko wrote: post #276
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But at-will employment is actually a separate issue from unionization. At-will employment goes against what most countries and cultures regard as a cornerstone of capitalism itself: clarity and enforcement of contracts. At-will employment: anyone can terminate the employment relationship at any time, unilaterally, for any reason or no reason. The party in the stronger bargaining position can unilaterally demand chang…

Yes, that's so, at-willness of employment and unions are separate. I nevertheless believe it comes from the same impulse, because, in general, the employer is in the stronger position than the employee. (Not always, of course, and it's certainly possible that some employers regret not having contracts with certain of their employees.)

Union rights and at-will employment are intimately connected.

What do people get fired for? It's rarely a true "performance" issue. Mostly, it's anything that the company judges to be against its interests. (In contemporary companies where managers can unilaterally fire people, it's anything that is judged to be against the manager's interest.) Anything that is perceived as disloyal, no matter how small, will usually lead to termination. That's how human societies tend to work, so it's not reasonable to expect that (absent legal incentives to operate differently) corporations would behave differently.

At-will employment, philosophically, trusts the company to pursue its own rational interests and gives it the right to terminate an employee if it believes retaining him to be outside of its interest. I don't fully agree with it, but that's what it is.

Collective bargaining is something that governments have decided that workers have the right to do, even though unionization is decidedly against management's interest.

The fundamental question here is: is it reasonable to expect companies to continue to employ people who, lawfully and ethically, act against the company's interest? There's no simple answer to that one. Greg Smith didn't do anything wrong, but I can't say Goldman would have been wrong to fire him (had he not resigned). On the other hand, the social benefit to unions (in theory, at least) and whistleblowing provides a good reason for the law to protect some categories of employees acting against employer interests.

Over time, the laissez-faire policy regarding employment relationships has been scaled back-- in the U.S., not enough; in many European countries, too much. It's now technically illegal to fire someone for attempting to organize a union, filing a discrimination or harassment claim, escalating a disagreement to HR, or even publicly disclosing one's salary (try that one in most white-collar contexts and see how long you last!) The problem with at-will employment is that companies have become very good at making illegal firings look "performance"-related.

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