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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

#401

Post by dsymonds »

michaelochurch wrote: post #376
chii wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ha…

You are spouting nonsense sprinkled with vague half-truths. You have a distorted view of what one part of Google might have been like for the short time you were there.

There is no forced curve. One of your "Perfolympics" is actually optional. Perf is technically a permanent record, but promotion committees will rarely look back beyond one or two cycles (e.g. up to a year). Five years is nonsense.

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

#402

Post by hn_is_vile »

exSoftyGoogler wrote: post #394
michaelochurch wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 is wrong with a manager who is considering bringing you onto their team wanting to know about your past performance at the company? I bet that happens at EVERY company. It certainly did at Microsoft.

Because software development is not the 100 metres. You could spend weeks on a particularly elusive and obscure bug and change one line of code. While you were doing that, your colleague built 2 new 'oh wow' features, banging out hundreds of lines. There is no standardised measurement for 'performance' that can rank those two achievements objectively, so to assess performance, it comes down to the subjective opinion, motivations and political goals of the 'assessor'.

More to the point, if the subjective performance metric rewards the latter and punishes the former, the net result is more features AND more bugs.

In other words, it's crap wherever it occurs.

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

#403

Post by ermida »

ori_b wrote: post #241
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.

Take what Michael Church says with a grain of salt. I was around to observe his threads on the eng-misc mailing list while he was still at Google. Without his consent, I'd rather not say what went on, but I would advise you to get your information elsewhere.

Yet you leak the name of an internal mailing list. Well done!

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

#404

Post by krichman »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #364
krichman wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I write tail-recursive functions in C using gotos sometimes. I figure why bother with recursion when the function call would be two jmps, register spills, and stack growth? I'd say you are doing it right, it's just too bad the companies you had these experiences with don't understand you are a solid candidate.

It's really not that bad. I ended up back in academia getting a funded MSc, and at this level I'll be interviewing in summers or at the end of my degree for industrial positions that are more in line with what I want anyway. Why not walk to the door that says, "Research and Development Engineer" rather than "Generic Software Engineer N+1"?

Definitely; I'd much rather do R&D as well. Good luck!

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

#405

Post by hga »

vidarh wrote: post #353
endtime wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 realize the problem. But their current approach has the outcome of alienating a lot of their target audience from even wanting to work there, or at the very least wanting to subject themselves to the hiring process. The result is that a lot of people who are good enough to find it easy to find competitive jobs elsewhere self-selects out of the process, leaving the people who either really badly want to work specifi…

Sounds a bit like the Death by Lethal Reputation example Nick "Ask the Headhuner" Corcodilos wrote up: http://www.asktheheadhunter.com/halethalrep.htm

Google could eventually reach that point....

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

#406

Post by hga »

randomdata wrote: post #237
varelse wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Both are important; match is obvious, but what about the prospect of working at a place with a fair amount of deadwood? Even if they're on the way out, that's going to be ugly.

Failure to do the most basic of technical screening will result in the latter; as I've said in more detail before, in the '90s it was reverse a linked list in C/C++, look at this dozen or so lines of code and find some of the errors in them, and do some design (quiet, no one in the same room time allowed for that, with a discussion to follow). I didn't think it was too much to ask back then, but it sure weeded out a lot of people who couldn't program their way out of a paper bag.

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

#407

Post by hga »

bjourne wrote: post #289
varelse wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Heh, I'd go father than that, I'd set them in front of a console and let them look through the code base. Of course, this test works both ways ^_^.

Never had anyone ask for that, though. They would have gotten major bonus points for asking....

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

#408

Post by hga »

michaelochurch wrote: post #380
chii wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Regrettably rhetorical question: And this is not a useful filtering function for most of the executives you'd want to hire?

A company must be able to fire people (I've been in ones that went down the drain because the founders were too nice to do this, or at least do it soon enough), but this sure sounds like Lord Acton's "Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely."

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

#409

Post by yuhong »

michaelochurch wrote: post #314
quomopete wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why would you be bored learning something new?

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,…

"The lesson I learned from that ordeal is not to try to "save" a company from itself because you can't..."

Agreed in most cases, but you once said that before:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4337057

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

#410

Post by eli_gottlieb »

mech4bg wrote: post #295
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Like I said, the interviewer who asked me to convert recursion to iteration, who knew something about it beyond "Dirty!", was a great guy with whom I had a great time. The fact that my quite-sufficient-in-his-opinion algorithmic skills ended up not being what his company actually needed doesn't change that it was a wonderful interview.
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