Why I loved working at Google
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Why I loved working at Google
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Re: Why I loved working at Google
#2Note that this was written by someone who spent three months at Google as an intern, so it's probably not very representative of what it's really like to work there. After three months you can't really understand much about a complex corporate culture or become familiar with more than a tiny corner of a huge company. And interns aren't involved in corporate politics, performance reviews, etc.
Re: Why I loved working at Google
#3Note that this was written by someone who spent three months at Google as an intern, so it's probably not very representative of what it's really like to work there. After three months you can't really understand much about a complex corporate culture or become familiar with more than a tiny corner of a huge company. And interns aren't involved in corporate politics, performance reviews, etc.
I found it fairly accurate, and I've worked there seven years.
For most engineers most of the time, the job isn't politics or performance reviews. It's writing interesting software with talented teammates.
(Counterexamples of course exist, and a handful of vocal ones certainly like to chime in on threads like this. But if it weren't still mostly good for engineers at Google, Google wouldn't still employ the great engineers it does. But it does have great engineers to this day, so something is still going mostly right.)
Re: Why I loved working at Google
#4Note that this was written by someone who spent three months at Google as an intern, so it's probably not very representative of what it's really like to work there. After three months you can't really understand much about a complex corporate culture or become familiar with more than a tiny corner of a huge company. And interns aren't involved in corporate politics, performance reviews, etc.
Hey Greenyoda,
Certainly correct, although I have worked at a number of other companies (an investment bank, Microsoft, a startup, and in management consulting) so I was using those as benchmarks.
Thanks for reading!
Re: Why I loved working at Google
#5"Google is the home to world-class engineers working on the world’s hardest problems". World-class engineers: true. World's hardest problems: false. Unless google has a secret space program, cold-fusion reactor, cure for cancer, desalination, etc... Perhaps I am naive but monetizing searches, email and other things doesn't count as any of the world's hardest problems.
Re: Why I loved working at Google
#6Note that this was written by someone who spent three months at Google as an intern, so it's probably not very representative of what it's really like to work there. After three months you can't really understand much about a complex corporate culture or become familiar with more than a tiny corner of a huge company. And interns aren't involved in corporate politics, performance reviews, etc.
I found it fairly accurate, and I've worked there seven years. For most engineers most of the time, the job isn't politics or performance reviews. It's writing interesting software with talented teammates. (Counterexamples of course exist, and a handful of vocal ones certainly like to chime in on threads like this. But if it weren't still mostly good for engineers at Google, Google wouldn't still employ the great eng…
Thanks Dewitt! I had a feeling that my lack of tenure was going to be a point of contention, so having someone with as much experience as you backing the story certainly helps!
Re: Why I loved working at Google
#7Note that this was written by someone who spent three months at Google as an intern, so it's probably not very representative of what it's really like to work there. After three months you can't really understand much about a complex corporate culture or become familiar with more than a tiny corner of a huge company. And interns aren't involved in corporate politics, performance reviews, etc.
I found it fairly accurate, and I've worked there seven years. For most engineers most of the time, the job isn't politics or performance reviews. It's writing interesting software with talented teammates. (Counterexamples of course exist, and a handful of vocal ones certainly like to chime in on threads like this. But if it weren't still mostly good for engineers at Google, Google wouldn't still employ the great eng…
As one of the vocal ones(tm), even I would say Google is fantastic if you get allocated onto the right team. This obviously occurs most of the time or the place would be out of business.
What led to me becoming one of the vocal ones is what happens when allocation fails and there's really no resort other than trying to fit in doing something completely uninteresting or leaving. Google seemingly does not acknowledge that the allocation process is in any way flawed.
My mistake was I should have insisted on an allocation upfront as a condition of accepting the offer made to me. After acing the interview, all the power was in my hands and I failed to make use of it.
Re: Why I loved working at Google
#8"Google is the home to world-class engineers working on the world’s hardest problems". World-class engineers: true. World's hardest problems: false. Unless google has a secret space program, cold-fusion reactor, cure for cancer, desalination, etc... Perhaps I am naive but monetizing searches, email and other things doesn't count as any of the world's hardest problems.
At this point I consider Calico to be a part of Google (although separately incorporated). Not sure about you but I definitely see "extending the average life expectancy of the human population" as a difficult problem.
But even discounting this (naysayers will cry foul at the fact that it technically is a separate company), I think organizing the world's information is certainly an extremely difficult problem. And certainly one that Google is attempting to solve in more ways than search.
Also - self driving cars? Certainly you will agree that is not trivial.
Re: Why I loved working at Google
#9"Google is the home to world-class engineers working on the world’s hardest problems". World-class engineers: true. World's hardest problems: false. Unless google has a secret space program, cold-fusion reactor, cure for cancer, desalination, etc... Perhaps I am naive but monetizing searches, email and other things doesn't count as any of the world's hardest problems.
their search is pretty amazing though. i think we forget that at times.
Re: Why I loved working at Google
#10"Google is the home to world-class engineers working on the world’s hardest problems". World-class engineers: true. World's hardest problems: false. Unless google has a secret space program, cold-fusion reactor, cure for cancer, desalination, etc... Perhaps I am naive but monetizing searches, email and other things doesn't count as any of the world's hardest problems.
> Perhaps I am naive but monetizing searches, email and other things doesn't count as any of the world's hardest problems.
Working on monetization isn't, AFAIK, what Google engineers do, that's what Google business folks do.
Google engineers work on things like natural language processing for conversational search, or predictive algorithms for identifying information needs in advance and providing them at the right time without requiring an active search -- and that's just for Google's fairly prosaic mainstream products, not the GoogleX/Calico/etc. moonshot kind of work.