If you're really, really serious about getting them to stop bothering you, accept an offer from them but then don't show up for work.
No, I still don't want to work for Google
291–300 of 410 posts
Re: No, I still don't want to work for Google
#292Re: No, I still don't want to work for Google
#293I was with this post until I got to: "Over time, I’ve come to consider that this situation is irremediable, given our current capitalist system and all its inequalities. To fix it, we’re going to need to work on social justice and rethinking how we live and work and relate to each other." Give me a break. Socialism isn't going to fix anything. Have you seen Europe recently? Capitalism and Democracy are the worst solu…
The US actually lags behind most of western Europe and Canada in social mobility. Especially among the poorest.
"European Socialism" is not that different from the US. In Europe you may get free child care, health care, etc. and industries that the government likes get subsidies. In the US, this assistance comes in the form of tax cuts. Tax exemptions for employers who pay for health care, the child tax credit, tax deductions for favored industries, etc. Including tax expenditures, the US spends more on social welfare than most of western Europe while doing a poorer job of ensuring it reaches the right people.
Re: No, I still don't want to work for Google
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
To be fair, Google has a lot of very good engineers, so of course there are a lot of great engineers who are getting promoted. I'm pretty sure you could find an equal number of good engineers who don't get promoted. The rank-and-file programmers are just very good, with almost no deadweight.
Google's promotion process isn't, as far as I can tell, that broken. What's broken is the policy of making political-success (or, "perf") scores part of the transfer process. It's mean-spirited and creates an autocorrelation in project quality that many people never overcome.
Google would be a real company with a culture actually worth caring about if the executives manned up and did the following:
1. Go to open allocation. When you have that much fucking cash, you can invest in employee autonomy. No excuses. Do it. Learn from Valve, because you're not a cultural leader anymore, Google. http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/09/03/tech-companie...
2. Get rid of the "calibration" nonsense. It's stupid, and it goes against the idea of a peer-review driven company because that bus is driven by managers only. Fire the B-student management consultants who came up with it. Get rid of the 5% firing rate, too. (I know that Google rarely actually fires people, instead humiliating them with those insipid PIPs and transfer blocks. No real difference. Firing people with a real severance package is a lot more decent than wasting their time with kangaroo-court PIPs and tearing up their careers slowly.) Firing should be saved for real problem employees, rather than a threat that turns no-fault lack of fit into a problem employee. This tactic of-- without a business need (such as in a cash-crisis layoff)-- firing some set percentage (who tend to just be unlucky) to keep people "on their toes" is mean-spirited thuggery that doesn't belong in this century.
Re: No, I still don't want to work for Google
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
"being more familiar with Scala than Java" is a few miles east from "cannot/will not write pseudocode comprehensible to people who don't grok functional languages".
As with most communications distances, that depends entirely on where the other person is sitting. I never use monads, for instance, and only use type-classes when they look really applicable. Still, if the person I'm talking to has never heard of a map() primitive outside of MapReduce, that causes issues. And then the #1 thing that really causes friction is recursion. Most people interviewing on behalf of BigCo's se…
Funny, a lot of the technical questions I had to do in pre-screens and in the interview itself were naturally solved via recursion and were what the interviewer was looking for. This is both with Google and large financial companies.
Re: No, I still don't want to work for Google
#296I 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…
> 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.
Interesting. That's something you don't often hear... but it makes a ton of sense to me. I've only worked in academia and one mid-size corp, so startups are kind of a different world for me. :)
Re: No, I still don't want to work for Google
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
If Googles interviews had seemed to be remotely reasonable, I'm sure the people complaining would have been fewer. As it is, they seems very much to have the attitude that it doesn't matter if they weed out tons of great candidates as long as they weed out the bozos too. I once went through technical phone screening with them for a management position, and was bizarrely asked lots of probing questions about unix file…
>the attitude that it doesn't matter if they weed out tons of great candidates as long as they weed out the bozos too. What would you do if you got over 2 million applications a year for a few thousand positions?
I guess I'd do just like Google and hire an army of non-technical recruiters to interview my top prospects.
Re: No, I still don't want to work for Google
#298Please don't propagate the myth that Google asks prospective programmers questions like, "How many golf balls could you fit on a bus?" Google interviewers list the questions they asked when they write up their conclusions, and anyone who asked a question like that for an engineering interview would be immediately contacted by the hiring commitee and told not to do it again.
Google was well known for logic brain teasers like that in years past - there was a time when Google recruitment was defined by such questions. They've since stopped, and sadly it looks like Microsoft has taken up the mantle for stupid irrelevant logic questions.
I've spent some time at MSFT (including a transfer) and know a few recent hires across the lake and NONE of them (including myself) have had any of these sort of questions. A few data structures and algorithms type questions, but never the 'how many pennies fit in this room' type stuff that they're supposedly so famous for.
Re: No, I still don't want to work for Google
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wit…
One mistake (of his):
The point of these programming tasks is not to show off your prowess; most of the time the interviewer is trying understand your thought process and maybe some basic programming abilities. Think of it like a sanity-check.
Showing off turns people off because it can lead to negative team behaviors. Being creative to make life better is good, but there's a line between that and being too clever to work with other people.
Re: No, I still don't want to work for Google
#300Like many people I have issues with Google. But let's not be silly about things I'd still love to work there. Not out of any particular fanboyism, but because I've worked at plenty of places that are not Google, and the normal day-to-day in a place like a large defense contractor are categorically worse than even the worst nightmare scenario I've ever heard about working at Google.
Give me a break. I'd rather be doing something interesting at Boeing or General Atomics than working on f-ing YouTube ads any day of the week!