
Google Closes Offices in in Austin, Texas; Trondheim, Norway; and Lulea, Sweden. - Anon84
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/changes-to-engineering.html
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okeumeni
I always wonder as an engineer myself what kind of project these guys in
overseas Google offices do; how do Google keep them happy? Is it just the fact
that it is Google? That won’t be enough for me.

In my 12 years career so far I have always worked in startup or small
companies where I have actual work to do. I have been to interview with big
companies, they could not tell me what would the job bring me in terms of real
work; I had always turned down offers from Google like folks.

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lacker
Well there is certainly "actual work" done in overseas Google offices... ;-)

Sometimes many groups from different places work together on a larger project.
E.g. there are teams working on "search engine algorithms" in many different
countries. Or sometimes you have a smaller project that is just handled in one
office. Like the javascript engine for Chrome was done out of Denmark I
believe.

I'm not sure about other big companies but Google at least doesn't interview
on a group-by-group basis. So during the interview itself, they wouldn't know
yet what group you would be working in. That discussion comes later.

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madmanslitany
I've always thought that that was pretty cool--helps keep organization
standards high overall and prevents poor managers from building their own
little kingdoms.

Even if a group ends up with a new hire who lacks some domain knowledge, I'd
bet that as long as they're generally smart, which the hiring process should
guarantee to some extent, they'll adapt quickly.

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jimbokun
"However, after much consideration, we have with great regret decided that we
need to go further and reduce the overall size of our recruiting organization
by approximately 100 positions."

Uh, wow. If they're _cutting_ by 100, how many did they have to start with?

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tienshiao
I think you replied to the wrong link.

I was confused because I was reading about the office closing and couldn't
figure out where the 100 positions came from.

~~~
jimbokun
I think you're right. Not sure how that happened.

