No, I still don't want to work for Google • Hacker News Board

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

#371

Post by chii » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 1:05 PM UTC

kamaal wrote: post #329

michaelochurch wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the things I disliked about Google was the tyranny of At Google. If you didn't do it At Google, it doesn't count. You don't really know the first thing about anything unless you did it At Google. It's an extreme case of institutional arrogance. This explains the blind allocation policy. If knowledge that is not At Google doesn't count, then there's no point in matching people with their expertise or interests,…

Again, None of what you are saying seems to be a problem only at Google. These are really MegaCorp problems, and they apply to Google as well. I knew even from the beginning even 5-6 years earlier, when there was immense desperateness among geeks to work there. It was only a matter of time when all MegaCorp problems will eventually plague Google.

> It was only a matter of time when all MegaCorp problems will eventually plague Google.

this is really interesting - what is the cause of all these problems?

Is it inherent in a hierarchical organization? Is it because you have people who are responsible for the output of others (a manager), but isn't able to actually control that output directly, but is only able to indirectly affect it (and not very well at that)?

I think this issue of "control" is central. Facebook and valve seems to have their structure right (at least, the engineering department). But both is still young and small.

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

#372

Post by michaelochurch » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 1:09 PM UTC

kabdib wrote: post #360

michaelochurch wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At Google, "Perv" history is part of the transfer packet, which means that people with average political-success (sorry, I mean "performance") histories become immobile, creating a low-morale underclass that is good for mailing-list drama but bad for the company. It turns average employees and no-fault lack-of-fit cases into problem employees who have to be pushed out. It's disgusting, and people who believe this is…

This happens at Microsoft, too. Have a bad year, get "underperformed". (I dare anyone to have a long career without having a bad year at some point). Ding! Now it's really hard to move until you've scorched that badness from your record. Your mission is to get a bunch of good reviews, or get promoted, or find a sympathetic ex-manager who's willing to hire you anyway (this is why you need a network, and one reason why…

I believe you. Bad reviews have a lot more to do with politics than anything "performance" related.

Making the review part of the transfer packet is one of the worst corporate "innovations" designed. It's not just mean-spirited and immoral (because it gives managers a way to keep people captive). It also makes the review process totally pointless. An honest review needs to be between the manager and employee. Here's what you did right, here's what you did wrong. If it starts having long-term effects on the employee's career, then you can no longer have an honest review process because the stakes are too high. There are two options. (1) Give everyone high ratings they don't deserve, so your employees still like you, making the "review" pointless. (2) Give a few bad ratings, and turn no-fault lack-of-fit cases that would usually be resolved with transfer into outright wars that burn up a lot of time and energy and generally hurt the company.

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

#373

Post by chii » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 1:12 PM UTC

enraged_camel wrote: post #64

ajross wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't follow why being an "expert" in D would make you "bored" of Q. If Q is simply a boring field to you, that's one thing (and the appropriate response is to quit and find something better). But it's not your employer's job to give you your dream assignment. If they need Q geeks and you're available, then that's what you're stuck with. That's what being an employee is all about.

Wrong. Any company that wants to be successful has to allocate their employees to positions they will excel at. Not doing so is a gross waste of resources.

Its more nuanced than that.

A company might want to hire an expert in Q because having expertise in Q means they are of a high skill level, and thus is able to also do D very well. D might be very mundane, boring or inconsequential from the point of view of the employee (and whether it is in reality as well is quite moot at this point).

THe employee might _want_ to do Q, but D is what makes the company money. Hiring someone who does D (but may not come up with novel solutions for D), or hiring someone who does Q very well, and assigning him/her to D in the hopes that they do a great job - which is better for the company?

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

#374

Post by chii » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 1:18 PM UTC

nessus42 wrote: post #194

rachelbythebay wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's actually in the post: "If you are a Google recruiter, and you want me to interview for SWE or SRE or any role that has an algorithm pop quiz as part of the interview, [...]" I was asked about algorithms for my internal reinterview to transfer from SRE (O ladder) to SWE (T ladder) in 2010. It was the usual sorting algorithm complexity stuff. That's never been my strong suit, and I'm sure I disappointed the inte…

Personally, I think that this whole "oral exam" style of interview is completely wack. If you have a lot of experience with it, then you are likely to do great, and if you don't, then you are likely to suck at it. When I was in high school, for instance, I was on the math team, and the first year, I got four questions right the entire year ! By the time I was a senior, I got four answers right every meet, on average…

The assumption is that, if you were a genius, you'd be able to come up with that eureka spark in the time allotted in the interview.

I won't discuss whether this assumption is correct or not. But i will discuss that even if you hired such a genius, it would not ultimately make the company any more money, unless you could put such genius to great use rather than grunt work (which a genius would do no better than the grunt - thats why its called grunt work).

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

#375

Post by chii » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 1:33 PM UTC

droithomme wrote: post #307

bmelton wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that is indeed what he meant, then I should clarify my position. Free speech may well be 'whatever you want to say', but I might often say things that I don't mean. I also might say inflammatory things that I regret. I also might say things that are insensitive to others, or are completely horrible to all people, depending on my mood. I believe that with the freedom to say 'anything' I want, I also have the respon…

> Had Martin Luther King, Jr been 'anonymous' and preached with a V mask... ... he would not have been assassinated at age 39 by someone who didn't like him speaking truth to power.

this is exactly why anonymity is absolutely required on the internet. Its the last bastion where anyone could promote their ideas on the idea's merits and not on appeals to social norms such as authority or ethical/moral norms.

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

#376

Post by michaelochurch » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 1:38 PM UTC

chii wrote: post #368

btilly wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stag…

> I should note that you probably made that decision before you had a negative perf in your record. where would such a negative perf come from? And what is that sort of record's nature? Is there any managers here who could clarify how this whole shebang works?

Google has quarterly "calibration scores" that are assigned by management, but require a lot of political in-fighting because there's a forced curve across the company. You don't see your score but only get a range. "Meets expectations" is what most people get and it's a huge range: from 3.0 (can't transfer, borderline for a PIP) to 3.4 (above average). What this means is that you're managers can smear you and you have no idea that it's happening. Evil much?

Then there's a semi-annual Perfolympics in March and September, which is peer-review driven (engineers drop everything for about 2 weeks to write reviews) but has all sorts of boondoggles that are easy to abuse. For example, there's unsolicited feedback and even manager-only feedback that you don't see. Google routinely has to pay out settlements because of aftermath of this system. If you work in technology, chances are that you know a couple people who've collected six-figure settlements because of things said about them in the Perf system. Needless to say, this only gives Google further incentive toward secrecy.

Also, Perv really is a "permanent record". A bad Perf will block you from getting promotions and transfers 5 years later.

Google is nothing if not abusive with data, although in this case, I'm hesitant to call that deeply subjective garbage "data".

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

#377

Post by papsosouid » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 1:46 PM UTC

subsystem wrote: post #218

papsosouid wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>When there's faults with it, that's relevant to my interests, as I might want to avoid their mistakes at my own company. Same here, except that is why I found the article to be a crappy, linkbait, waste of time. It wasn't about mistakes in google's hiring process, it was a personal rant about what the author dislikes about google.

You're not providing much value with your comment yourself. I thought it was an interesting personal story of what can happen the company you work for gets acquired by a large company. Just because it's not "top 10 hiring mistakes" doesn't make it uninteresting. The comments also include far more insight than usual into things that aren't necessarily found elsewhere.

I didn't say nobody could find it interesting. I said the title is misleading, thus wasting the time of people who were expecting content appropriate to the title. The content would still be interesting to you if the title reflected the content.

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

#378

Post by papsosouid » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 1:48 PM UTC

coliveira wrote: post #222

papsosouid wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard the same thing, always from unreliable "I heard" sources. I've never heard anyone who actually did interviews or was interviewed say that.

I was interviewed by Google and had to answer this "brain teaser" kind of questions. So, no, it is not just folklore.

Can you be specific with some examples? As demonstrated elsewhere in the thread, some people perceive the same questions as appropriate and others perceive them as "brain teasers".

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

#379

Post by michaelochurch » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 1:52 PM UTC

chii wrote: post #369

michaelochurch wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is essentially correct. 3.4 is fine, but 3.0-3.1 means you are dead and may not even know it. It's utterly immoral, because a lot of employees at 3.0-3.1 think they're doing fine. Their managers are just giving them low scores to keep them captive. What's amazing to me is that employees don't know their rights. If your manager deliberately interferes with your work performance, that's illegal (harassment law). I…

> Their managers are just giving them low scores to keep them captive. From reading these comments in this thread, it seems that this score is used to evaluate whether to allow the said employee to transfer. Now, a manager has incentive to keep the best people in his/her team. Is this 3.0-3.1 score something they do so that a good programmer but is somehow "bored" with the crappy work (and face it, there is always cr…

From reading these comments in this thread, it seems that this score is used to evaluate whether to allow the said employee to transfer.

HR won't stop transfer with a 3.0-3.1, especially if those are more than a year in the past, but no one will want you. It's the standard ill of closed-allocation shops. When projects compete for people, the result is better projects. When people compete for projects, the result is worse people.

Captivity is the most common reason for bad perf. Second place is plain old punishment for things that are political in nature. In third place is "storying", which is when a manager gives bad reviews (and often projects with low visibility and no hope of success) to a good employee to bring him within an inch of his life, puts him through a PIP, and then starts giving him more reasonable scores. The manager gets a story about "rescuing" an "underperformer" and looks like a good boss, but the employee is lucky to transition into the company's lower-middle class, because no one wants a guy who was put on a PIP 5 years ago (having stayed with the company, while under the PIP, reflects on him worse than the PIP itself). The fourth-place cause of bad performance reviews is when the manager takes out someone he fears might be better than him.

Somewhere about #13 on that list is actual low performance, because 95+% of real underperformers are so good at underperforming as to be political wizards (they have a lifetime's worth of experience playing politics, since they can't rely on ability) and never end up on the Perf list.

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

#380

Post by michaelochurch » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 1:59 PM UTC

chii wrote: post #371

kamaal wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, None of what you are saying seems to be a problem only at Google. These are really MegaCorp problems, and they apply to Google as well. I knew even from the beginning even 5-6 years earlier, when there was immense desperateness among geeks to work there. It was only a matter of time when all MegaCorp problems will eventually plague Google.

> It was only a matter of time when all MegaCorp problems will eventually plague Google. this is really interesting - what is the cause of all these problems? Is it inherent in a hierarchical organization? Is it because you have people who are responsible for the output of others (a manager), but isn't able to actually control that output directly, but is only able to indirectly affect it (and not very well at that)?…

Open allocation seems to have one drawback. You still do need (a few) managers and executives (not to order people around, but to keep track of the bigger picture) but it's hard to hire managers from outside into an open-allocation shop because typically they want promises of authority, and OA is directed through leadership rather than intimidation.

Most companies move toward the closed-allocation end of the spectrum because they perceive a need to do so in executive recruiting. Most executives don't want to take a position where they won't have the power to unilaterally fire people.