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I've heard the phrase "well, a T7 said otherwise, who am I to argue" and similar from people.
It’s up to each individual to make the most of an environment where the utterances of senior engineers are just advice. You don’t need their permission.
Not Google, but another Big Tech company. Visibility is very important to getting a promotion at a large company. Selling your work is important. To move up, you must be playing the "choose a good project or team" game for at least 6 months before you try to get promoted. Preferably for a year or more to hit the right checkboxes for multiple cycles. If you fail to do so, you can do absolutely amazing work but rigid p…
Personally that sounds like barf ... politics, stress, insecurities, backstabbing, stress, burn out. I am much happier working in boring government where working hard for family and with mature/secure with themselves (older) adults is paramount & prevalent. Thankfully not an enticing environment for douchebags.
It is and it's not.
I got mediocre plus results without too much politics, and I guess that for the long run I could advance without back stabbing anyone (the site was closed before I had a chance to test my assumption) but I agree that most of the moving up had to include politics, stress, insecurities, backstabbing and stress.
On the other hand you can relatively easy get to positions where you influence tens or more engineers while in smaller places those positions are rare and super senior
- GAE was missing basic functionality that we (as their biggest customer) couldn't get them to work on. The engineer in charge of GAE had other tasks and didn't care for this role. We ended up doing this work ourselves and I'm relatively sure this is now inside the App Engine SDK.
- Delivery was incredibly badly managed, I have to shut one one eye when I sneeze due to sinus damage caused by working when ill on a project with global visibility and no cover.
- 'Decisions based on data' isn't a thing: if you want an outcome, you research to that outcome or don't depending on how you feel.
As others have said having Google on your resume is great.
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Ok sure I’ll give you an honest and candid answer. It’s basically analogous to top schools. Yes the average engineer at Google is going to be better than the average engineer at some random company because google generally has a higher hiring bar. Similarly your average student at Harvard is going to be a better student than your average student at Random State University. As a result you will on average learn more t…
Thanks for being candid, is this inline with your experience? Have you worked at a smaller company and google as well? Your logic is really sound but I'm also asking this question for the purposes of gathering anecdotal experiences as well. Your answer is great, btw, I just noted that you used the word "average" over a personal example so I wanted to get an idea of where you're coming from.
All big tech companies are approximately the same, since people job hop a lot and these places have tens of thousands of engineers, it’s basically the same people at all of them anyway. I am not sure why people have these starry eyes views of them
No it's not. Microsoft is way different from Google.
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I’m not sure why many people seem to think this, there are like tens of thousands of engineers at google, and there are other good companies out there that also have tons of engineers, you don’t need to be that special to get a job at google. As long as you can get your first interview all you need to do is be able to solve data structures and algorithms problems and talk about software design. Let’s not put google o…
The biggest obstacle, at least in my experience, is actually getting that interview. In ten years of writing software, I've had a handful of emails/messages from FAANG recruiters, and they've never ended up in an actual interview. I won't name names, but I was offered an interview and we agreed a three week timeframe to prepare for the phone screen, but that screen never came. In another 6-12 months I might be lucky…
I guess it depends on how well you do on leetcode already. I think most people could probably just do 1-2 leetcode problems a week for a few months to get good at it. I’ve only been asked a few interview questions ever that I thought would be leetcode hard, most are mediums with some easies thrown in. I don’t think you would ever be asked to reimplement a heap but definitely could be asked a question where you need to use one. And usually if you are asked >3 questions you can not entirely solve one and still advance
Perhaps nice to mention here: "Talks at Google" https://talksat.withgoogle.com/ Not restricted to just software engineering, though.
For the engineering side: https://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleDevelopers
Not Google, but another Big Tech company. Visibility is very important to getting a promotion at a large company. Selling your work is important. To move up, you must be playing the "choose a good project or team" game for at least 6 months before you try to get promoted. Preferably for a year or more to hit the right checkboxes for multiple cycles. If you fail to do so, you can do absolutely amazing work but rigid p…
If I ever find myself working at a FAANG, I do hope that instead of pursuing promotion, I'll stick to stuff that matters to me as an engineer.
While having a FAANG on my resume matters too, I'd much rather use that time to develop my technical skills than to improve my PR skills. In my experience (at a medium sized company with 200+ engineers) these two goals often conflict.
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No it's not. Microsoft is way different from Google.
Having worked at both I can say it’s not that different. But I had a great team at Microsoft
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Having worked at both I can say it’s not that different. But I had a great team at Microsoft
I had great teams at both but the bar was consistent across Google unlike Microsoft. And 9/10 engineers will accept offers at Google over Microsoft given both.