Instead of Google cherry-picking all of the talent out of the pool, why not let them pay corporate taxes, so we can spend the money on education?
My Google Internship
161–170 of 270 posts
Re: My Google Internship
#162If only institutes like CERN had such good HR/recruitment techniques as Google, this world could be a better place.
Re: My Google Internship
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
It always requires a partial interview loop (the "conversion" interviews) now; they changed it in the last year or two.
Nah, 2 or more time interns (only in the US, at the moment? Wasn't the case in Sydney, but was for a friend in Seattle) can get a FTE role if they have really good feedback from t heir internships.
I can confirm this, 2 time intern in the US then London who a full time SWE offer with no conversion interviews.
Re: My Google Internship
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why cater to 0.6% of the population, at the expense of convenience for the 99.4%? Do all those 99.4% of people consider it an "expense"? A lot of people are happy to make a small sacrifice if it greatly benefits other people.
Very fair point, but what about the fraction of people who not only consider it an expense, but an affront to moral dignity? For example, Politico did a poll which showed that 46% of Americans believe that everyone should use the bathroom of their birth. Should their comforts be sacrificed for the sake of 0.6% of the population?
If people do things that have no material impact on you, and yet you believe are a "moral affront" then you don't understand where your liberty ends and someone else's begins. Those people need to learn that lesson, and then get over themselves.
You don't get to impose your morality on other people. Morality is a personal belief, and nothing more. It's that simple.
Re: My Google Internship
#165If only institutes like CERN had such good HR/recruitment techniques as Google, this world could be a better place.
Not sure how the experience is like as a CERN intern, but you can surely do internships there as a student: https://jobs.web.cern.ch/join-us/students
-- If someone happens to have experience with interning at CERN, I'd love to hear about that :-)
Re: My Google Internship
#166I love reading accounts like this. It's fun and well written and I enjoy the photos too. I work in a cube farm of grey cubes on boring LoB applications. I know I'll never be skilled enough (or, more correctly, I'll never be ambitious enough to become skilled enough) to work at Google et al but it's really fun to sample the experience from the outside. :)
I genuinely believed that I wasn't intelligent or confident enough to pass a Google interview. When a Google recruiter contacted me several years ago, my wife encouraged me to reply even though I liked the startup for which I was working and didn't think I'd make it. I prepped aggressively, got very lucky, and now I've been at Google for over 3 years.
This is a truly wonderful place to work; if you are interested in being here, I'd encourage you to apply in spite of your self doubt. :)
Re: My Google Internship
#167"It’s Googley to stand up for diversity and inclusion, such as protesting against binary gendering on toilets"
This is BS.
99.99% of the world is find with the 'binary signage' on toilets, and it is absolutely not 'anti trans' or 'anti anyone else' frankly, to do so.
BTW - this is not like a 1960's movement - you're not in the 'right side of history' here. 'Binary Gender' is, and will always be normative, simply because almost everyone is binary, and is fine with it. The number of people who actually have issues with 'binary' is very, very small. Even most people who are trans are still 'binary' (!) i.e. they identify as one gender or the other, not anything in between.
I somehow doubt that 'it's Googley' to be this, this may be a little bit of a stretch, or 'mis-articulation' by the author.
Though I don't have a problem at all with someone who is 'anti gender binary' (I don't really care) - I do have a problem with a company that pushes social extremism as part of their culture. It's just more evidence of the culty behaviour at Google.
I make a hobby of studying cults. I used to go into the Scientology clinic to 'take the test' and kind of debate with them, to get an understanding of how they are. I used to read a lot of their stuff - not for the 'knowledge' but to grasp the nature of the organization.
These kinds of 'ideals' are actually far more about creating a coherent group, than projecting any ideals.
Google is a good company, generally, but they do some nefarious things with our data. One of the great things about having a 'we are morally superior' cult, is that any decision made by Google that can feasibly be considered unethical - won't be, using the internal logic of 'We don't do evil, so, what we are doing cannot be evil'.
Anyhow, it takes working at several companies for a while to start to figure this out.
Re: My Google Internship
#168I love reading accounts like this. It's fun and well written and I enjoy the photos too. I work in a cube farm of grey cubes on boring LoB applications. I know I'll never be skilled enough (or, more correctly, I'll never be ambitious enough to become skilled enough) to work at Google et al but it's really fun to sample the experience from the outside. :)
Also to chime in with the other Googlers here: apply. Apply. Apply. Apply. There is a lot of varied work going on internally at Google. As well as the hard-core, intense, "pure" software engineering work that everyone thinks about going on at Google (search, self-driving cars, android, machine learning etc etc), there is also a lot of ... how can I put this nicely? erm ... lets say "less-pure" software engineering go…
Why would you tells someone on HN who is probably a software engineer to apply to google for non software engineer roles?
Re: My Google Internship
#169I love reading accounts like this. As someone who had an internship in high school, I'm always happy to hear what other people's experiences were going into and out of the process. I think my immediate reaction is that Google creates an environment that simply doesn't exist at most other places. I interned at two companies in the defense industry. You could argue that our experiences were different because of securit…
One one side: yes.
And BTW - this has nothing to do with defense industry, it's just 99% of business is like this.
Business could do a lot more to make a more fun environment.
On the other hand ...
Google is a 'de-facto' monopoly, and they print money. They are super, super rich, and literally have billions more than they know what to do with.
So it's easy to justify a lot of extra expenses. And these things can be expensive.
Lastly - let's not be so naive. Much of the reason many of these things are offered is so that you 'never have to leave the office'. 'Free lunch' was a cold, hard, Google style calculation: the time it took to 'drive to resto and back' was wasted time, it was cheaper to give people food than have them waste this time.
Years ago, my friend interviewed at Google, and they lauded all the 'free clothes' that you could take, which were often used 'the next day' as employees 'stayed the night'. Sleeping over at the office was a relatively common practice, and as such, there's going to arguably be some pressure to work insane hours. Which is completely against the law. We lambast conditions in factories in China, and just because Google workers earn a bit more does not mean that the practice is any less problematic, when the vast majority of the surpluses are going to 'the factory owners'.
Re: My Google Internship
#170"It’s Googley to stand up for diversity and inclusion, such as protesting against binary gendering on toilets" This is BS. 99.99% of the world is find with the 'binary signage' on toilets, and it is absolutely not 'anti trans' or 'anti anyone else' frankly, to do so. BTW - this is not like a 1960's movement - you're not in the 'right side of history' here. 'Binary Gender' is, and will always be normative, simply beca…
For someone who doesn't care much about toilet signage, you sure care a lot about toilet signage.