Most of this advice is (unfortunately) true in large companies. It's sad that the idealism of our youth is corrupted by the reality of survival/prosperity in the workplace.
Tips for Noogler Engineers (Noogler = New at Google)
81–86 of 86 posts
Re: Tips for Noogler Engineers (Noogler = New at Google)
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the kind of thing I had to deal with at Stanford. Same "rainbows and unicorns" outward appearance, but...
Erm, what do you mean? As a student? grad student? faculty? I don't understand how you would need to deal with issues like performance reviews and management as a student. (I can see the distractions part, though.)
From a dean I spoke to: "We felt that, under the circumstances, we couldn't afford the luxury of a fair trial."
Re: Tips for Noogler Engineers (Noogler = New at Google)
#83Had to look up "SRE": SRE: Site reliability engineer SWE: Software engineer
This confirms my suspicions - SRE are looked at as inferior or "second class citizens" compared to SWE. It also confirms some of the interviewer bias I experienced (I interviewed for an SRE position).
It's a measurement issue rather than a value judgement. Reliability is "sales we didn't lose due to downtime" while software is "new sales we couldn't have made without THIS GUY RIGHT HERE!".
Re: Tips for Noogler Engineers (Noogler = New at Google)
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's a war room? Google, ironically, was of no help.
Google's results are fairly decent if you give it a little disambiguation help, though there's still a lot of room for improvement: http://www.google.com/search?q=war+room+software+development From the Joel-on-Software thread: http://www.ns.umich.edu/Releases/2000/Dec00/r120600a.html
Thanks!
Re: Tips for Noogler Engineers (Noogler = New at Google)
#85Former Googler here.
I left a few months ago after four years. I have nothing but great things to say about Google. I loved my job, the environment, the people, the perks, the feeling of being privy to the most closely held secrets in Silicon Valley. Most of all, Larry and Sergey, who have always - always - kept their employees at the top of their priority list, even after the company went public. These guys really mean "Don't be evil", but you need to work at Google to really understand what this means.
Why I left? Career, mostly. I had reached a point where it was hard for me to get promoted. I could have settled for an easy job that is very well paid but without much hope of going much higher. A lot of people are okay with this and I was for a while, but then I realized I wanted more.
If things don't work out at my new gig, I'll try another gig. And if this doesn't work out either, I'll go back to Google in a heartbeat.
Keep an open mind, if you get a chance to interview, take it. If you get a job offer, take it, even if it's just for a few months. At the end of the day, the only person who knows what's best for you is yourself, not a blogger, nor an anonymous Hacker News commenter.
Re: Tips for Noogler Engineers (Noogler = New at Google)
#86Sounds like any other big corporate organ grind -- self promotion and working on high profile, corp important tasks gets you up the ladder, keeping the engine running just keeps you on the ladder. The sexy just wore off for me. Meh.