
No, I still don't want to work for Google - chris_wot
http://infotrope.net/2012/10/29/no-i-still-dont-want-to-work-for-google/
======
varelse
I worked at Google for a short stint. I found the tech interview easy and I
wasn't asked anything particularly ridiculous. I received a job offer shortly
thereafter and accepted.

As someone who regularly interviews prospective engineers at my current gig, I
see no problem with expecting candidates to arrive prepared to answer
algorithm questions or questions about their strongest programming language.
Ditto for someone who wishes to change assignment within their organization,
however they arrived there. If you're unwilling to provide proof you're not a
bozo, you're probably going to be just awful to work with as well.

However, the blind allocation policy at Google sucks, and it continues to
suck. I came in as an expert in field D and therefore according to Google's
magic sorting hat I ended up a natural for assignment in field Q. I tried my
hand at it for several months, but as someone else has already said, bored
employees quit:
[http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2011/07/12/bored_peopl...](http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2011/07/12/bored_people_quit.html)

In order to avoid that fate, I futilely attempted to get reassigned to
something close to field D (really, B, C, E, or F would have been just peachy)
and that seemingly got me flagged as trouble internally. Shortly thereafter, I
got a higher offer to go somewhere else and left.

However, unlike the author of this post, while Google recruiters regularly
stalk my linkedin profile, none of them ever contact me, which is good.

~~~
ajross
I don't follow why being an "expert" in D would make you "bored" of Q. If Q is
simply a boring field to you, that's one thing (and the appropriate response
is to quit and find something better). But it's not your employer's job to
give you your dream assignment. If they need Q geeks and you're available,
then that's what you're stuck with. That's what being an employee is all
about.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
As if geeks are so interchangeable like sprockets! I'm an expert in my field,
I have a PhD in it, if someone asked me to do machine learning or data mining
or image processing, it would be a huge ramp up time for me, say about 2 or 3
years to get to the point of expertise I have in my current field. It would be
a boring 2-3 years, and something that I'm probably not very interested in. If
there are other jobs out there that make use of my expertise and interest, why
bother with something else?

~~~
quomopete
why would you be bored learning something new?

~~~
michaelochurch
One of the things I disliked about Google was the tyranny of At Google. If you
didn't do it At Google, it doesn't count. You don't really know the first
thing about anything unless you did it At Google. It's an extreme case of
institutional arrogance.

This explains the blind allocation policy. If knowledge that is not At Google
doesn't count, then there's no point in matching people with their expertise
or interests, because a Noogler by definition doesn't know _anything_.

In July 2011, I did some research on the strategy of the Google+ Games team
and saw that the going plan was doomed to failure and seriously risked such
embarrassment as to kill the entire product. (Lots of Zyngarbage, preferential
treatment to mainstream publishers.) I had some domain expertise from
designing a game and spending a lot of time hanging around game designers. So
it was pretty easy for me to come up with a strategy that had a damn good
chance of actually succeeding. I posted it internally and got a huge amount of
engineer support. The strategy was to establish a quality-centered community
first by providing a platform for independent developers, integrate it with
Hangouts, and become a center for the "German-style" board game sphere. The
high quality starting community would establish G+ Games as cognitively
upscale, creating a comparative brand advantage that would persist in
perpetuity.

By the way, the Google+ Games engineers also got wind of what I'd been
proposing and they supported me. It was as obvious as it can be to humans
(obviously, no one can predict the future) that this strategy would work. I
got a ridiculous number of emails from engineers telling me that I was right
on and that they wished they were implementing "Real Games" instead of giving
ridiculous preferential treatment to mainstream publishers (who were throwing
us mediocre product because they didn't expect us to succeed). What got me in
trouble was that a lot of high-level people didn't like that an FNG had so
much engineer support.

I was a recognized domain expert, but not an At Google domain expert. There
were no At Google games experts, because Google had never gone into the Games
space before (and that's smart, because Google did extremely well on web
search by being ideologically non-editorial, but for the games space _quality_
is so damn important that you _must_ be editorial.) So it came down to
politics, because Google's At-Google bias rendered it incapable of recognizing
domain expertise and discovering a correct decision.

Finally I got an email to the effect of, "domain expertise isn't relevant
here, deal with it. Besides, you're only a SWE 3." Well, fuck you very much. I
don't see why job titles matter when you're about to lose millions of dollars
and would have been _making_ as much had you listened to me.

A year later, I was proven right, but it doesn't matter in the least. Google+
Games is a non-concern, and I'm not a part of Google.

The lesson I learned from that ordeal is not to try to "save" a company from
itself because you can't. You'll be seen as right, and possibly even lionized,
long after you leave... but it won't matter in the least. Keep your head down,
stay employed, and enjoy the middle-row seat to the show-- that "show" being
the people in charge making fools of themselves.

~~~
kamaal
Again, None of what you are saying seems to be a problem only at Google. These
are really MegaCorp problems, and they apply to Google as well.

I knew even from the beginning even 5-6 years earlier, when there was immense
desperateness among geeks to work there. It was only a matter of time when all
MegaCorp problems will eventually plague Google.

~~~
chii
> It was only a matter of time when all MegaCorp problems will eventually
> plague Google.

this is really interesting - what is the cause of all these problems?

Is it inherent in a hierarchical organization? Is it because you have people
who are responsible for the output of others (a manager), but isn't able to
actually control that output directly, but is only able to indirectly affect
it (and not very well at that)?

I think this issue of "control" is central. Facebook and valve seems to have
their structure right (at least, the engineering department). But both is
still young and small.

~~~
michaelochurch
Open allocation seems to have one drawback. You still _do_ need (a few)
managers and executives (not to order people around, but to keep track of the
bigger picture) but it's hard to hire managers from outside into an open-
allocation shop because typically they want promises of authority, and OA is
directed through leadership rather than intimidation.

Most companies move toward the closed-allocation end of the spectrum because
they perceive a need to do so in executive recruiting. Most executives don't
want to take a position where they won't have the power to unilaterally fire
people.

~~~
hga
Regrettably rhetorical question: And this is not a useful filtering function
for most of the executives you'd want to hire?

A company _must_ be able to fire people (I've been in ones that went down the
drain because the founders were too nice to do this, or at least do it soon
enough), but this sure sounds like Lord Acton's " _Power corrupts, absolute
power corrupts absolutely._ "

------
c0nsumer
Back in 2007 I got quite far through the Google hiring process, up to an on-
site interview and being told to expect an offer the Thursday after I returned
home. I was ready to move half-way across the country and get started living
in the bay area, moving my life to there.

That Thursday came and went, and I found out that due to some internal bar-
raising I would not be receiving an offer. I stayed here in the Detroit area,
moved up with my current company, married my wife, and settled into being
quite happy here.

Five years on I regularly have Google recruiters contacting me both via phone
and email, asking if I'm interested in a position, and exclaiming how good the
interview feedback was. When I decline to revisit any opportunity which would
require me to move across the country, the recruiters are universally
flabbergasted.

Sorry Google, the time when I was excited to move across the country has
passed. I still want to do interesting things, I'll just do them on my terms
now.

~~~
simonsarris
I always thought that strange too. I get a fair number of recruiter emails,
and almost all of them seem to assume out of hand that relocation is the least
of my concerns, when it probably _easily_ the #1 thing. Every reply I give[1]
ends up being a cheeky way of mentioning that I have a _life and a home_ in a
place and I do not intend to abandon it for a mere job.

Perhaps my current job isn't the most interesting thing in the world, but I
love my coworkers, my family, my friends, my little town. That's a lot for a
job offer to compete with.

[1] <http://simonsarris.com/blog/626-why-i-love-recruiters>

~~~
_pferreir_
Let's hope you can afford to do that for many years to come. When the choice
is between relocating or unemployment, an average job offer suddenly gets much
more interesting.

Unfortunately, here in Europe things are starting to change for the worse.

~~~
vidarh
> Unfortunately, here in Europe things are starting to change for the worse.

For very geographically specific values of "Europe". Lots of places are on the
contrary seeing things improving. Europe isn't a single entity.

~~~
_pferreir_
If a growth rate of 0.5% for the EU is not a good indicator of an economic
slowdown, then you must be talking about Europa, Jupiter's moon. I know that
EU < Europe, but we're talking about almost all of Europe's greatest economies
here.

Yes, I know some countries are doing better than others and that in some
places unemployment is even decreasing, but taking into account the fact that
Spain is on the verge of bankruptcy and countries such as France and Italy are
being hit by austerity, I see no reason for optimism.

~~~
vidarh
Averages across hundreds of millions of people easily mask that substantial
areas and sectors are thriving. Yes, it sucks if you're in low level jobs in
the weaker markets. If you're in other sectors and markets you will instead be
hounded by recruiters. The place I currently work, we have to be lightning
quick when hiring these days, because the candidates we want get snapped up
within a couple of days.

~~~
_pferreir_
And does that make the european crisis a localized thing? If any, such
anecdotal evidence shows us that it is possible for a company to thrive even
in the worst of scenarios (which is a positive thing, I agree), but
extrapolating any macroeconomic data from that makes no sense.

Even considering that there are sectors that don't suffer as much (or even get
some benefit) from this crisis and that you're working in one of those,
everyone will be worse off in the long run. Or is your job the only thing in
the economy that influences your well-being?

------
stroboskop
Key quote.

 _Since I’ve been out of the Silicon-Valley-centred tech industry, I’ve become
increasingly convinced that it’s morally bankrupt and essentially toxic to our
society. Companies like Google and Facebook — in common with most public
companies — have interests that are frequently in conflict with the wellbeing
of — I was going to say their customers or their users, but I’ll say “people”
in general, since it’s wider than that. People who use their systems directly,
people who don’t — we’re all affected by it, and although some of the outcomes
are positive a disturbingly high number of them are negative: the erosion of
privacy, of consumer rights, of the public domain and fair use, of meaningful
connections between people and a sense of true community, of beauty and care
taken in craftsmanship, of our very physical wellbeing. No amount of employee
benefits or underfunded Google.org projects can counteract that._

~~~
timwiseman
Google has historically both been reliant on fair use and the public domain
and has defended such in court. I'm not saying they did it out of altruism,
but substantial precedents that help solidify fair use come out of Google's
activities in court.

------
raldi
Please don't propagate the myth that Google asks prospective programmers
questions like, "How many golf balls could you fit on a bus?" Google
interviewers list the questions they asked when they write up their
conclusions, and anyone who asked a question like that for an engineering
interview would be immediately contacted by the hiring commitee and told not
to do it again.

~~~
potatolicious
Google was well known for logic brain teasers like that in years past - there
was a time when Google recruitment was _defined_ by such questions.

They've since stopped, and sadly it looks like Microsoft has taken up the
mantle for stupid irrelevant logic questions.

~~~
papsosouid
Were they well known for it because they did it, or because people assumed
they did it? An awful lot of people immediately jump to "stupid brain teasers"
when hearing "they ask technical questions". I have people write code and
solve actual problems during interviews, and have gotten several "these kinds
of riddles are a waste of time" responses from people who are offended by the
notion that I want them to be competent.

~~~
potatolicious
From my limited anecdotes of the time, I believe Google actually did it. We're
not talking about programming-related brain teasers here, we're talking about
non-programming ones.

e.g., "3 light bulbs in a room" and "family crossing the bridge" being the
classic examples.

~~~
debacle
Never heard the family crossing the bridge one. Which one is that?

~~~
potatolicious
You have a bridge that can only take a certain amount of weight at once
without collapsing. It's dark at night and you have only one flashlight. A
flashlight is required to cross the bridge, which is traversable in both
directions.

You have a family of people of varying weights (the exact numbers you'd have
to look up) - determine the optimal way for the family to make it across the
bridge.

~~~
debacle
Thanks. I don't think that's a bad one. In fact, like the Towers of Hanoi, I
think it has enough parallels with computer science and engineering to be a
good interview question.

~~~
usea
Indeed, it is a specific instance of
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knapsack_problem>

------
spindritf
I may be making the problem worse but both this post and the comments section
are some of the worst I've seen on HN -- from linkbaity title to incorrect
possessive pronouns (I barely speak English and caught it while skimming), and
then the deep analysis of anonymity on G+ completely based on one or two
anecdotes with no relation to G+, anonymity, or even the Internet.

Why is this submission at 80 upvotes? What value am I missing that others are
seeing?

~~~
michaelt
Some of what Google does is tech industry gospel - for example things like
technical interviews. When there's faults with it, that's relevant to my
interests, as I might want to avoid their mistakes at my own company.

That's why I found the article interesting, at any rate.

~~~
papsosouid
>When there's faults with it, that's relevant to my interests, as I might want
to avoid their mistakes at my own company.

Same here, except that is why I found the article to be a crappy, linkbait,
waste of time. It wasn't about mistakes in google's hiring process, it was a
personal rant about what the author dislikes about google.

~~~
subsystem
You're not providing much value with your comment yourself. I thought it was
an interesting personal story of what can happen the company you work for gets
acquired by a large company. Just because it's not "top 10 hiring mistakes"
doesn't make it uninteresting. The comments also include far more insight than
usual into things that aren't necessarily found elsewhere.

~~~
fourstar
How would he provide value on top of something that he perceives of not having
any itself?

------
bmelton
I tried, but I found that I can't really identify with the plights of some.
Thankfully (for reasons I'd rather not be challenged to justify, except to say
that it's apparently good as measured by others) I'm a fairly normal white guy
with no marginal traits that might cause me to have different viewpoints than
I currently do.

This means that I support the notion real names on Google Plus, and I also
believe that all speech should be free, but that you should also have the
courage to attach your name to it. Yes, I understand that there are reasonable
circumstances in which that would not be ideal, but perhaps due to my
aforementioned luxury of being a 'normal' white male, I am ignorant to how
much they would matter in real life. I am neither queer nor gender-queer, so
while I am empathetic to their struggles, I just can't identify with what are
possibly very real concerns about losses of anonymity, and as I've met people
who are public with their genderqueer status who haven't been assailed or
assaulted, I can't help but wonder if the fear isn't simply perceived fear or
not.

Regardless, aside from that (which again, I empathy with, but cannot relate
to) the only other thing I took issue with in the article was the
categorization of the autonomous vehicle as a 'geek toy'. It isn't, and that
marginalizes an entire category of technology that has a very real possibility
of changing the world in a very positive way to 'something SV types are
wasting money on', which I take issue with.

~~~
paganel
> I am ignorant to how much they would matter in real life. I am neither queer
> nor gender-queer, so while I am empathetic to their struggles, I just can't
> identify with what are possibly very real concerns about losses of
> anonymity, and as I've met people who are public with their genderqueer
> status who haven't been assailed or assaulted, I can't help but wonder if
> the fear isn't simply perceived fear or not.

I live in an Eastern-European country, which also happens to be an EU-member.
One of my (female) colleagues told me how two or tree years ago she happened
to see a trans-gendered person (I don't know what's the politically correct
term) who had just been beaten up during that year's GayFest. "Blood was
pouring out of his/her wounds", was what my colleague told us.

That's why I down-votted you, btw, which I only do once every 2-3 months on
HN. Not because I don't agree with you, which should not be reasons for down-
votting people anyway, but because you kind of choose to view things through
very narrow lenses, which is what the article was writing about all the way.

~~~
dpark
I think you chose an exceptionally poor reason to downvote him. You downvoted
him because you disagree with his views ("view things through very narrow
lenses"), which is different from downvoting him because you disagree with him
only in phrasing.

Downvotes should be for comments that do not add to the discussion.
Considering that most of the comments here are in response to him, his comment
clearly added to the discussion.

~~~
Apocryphon
Downvotes are for disagreements, too.

~~~
randomdata
That just sounds like an easy way to rationalize your counterargument while
avoiding being shown the error in your thinking. If a comment is worth
disagreeing over, it is worth explaining why you disagree, otherwise nobody
learns anything. Save your voting for the quality of the writing, not the
arguments being made.

~~~
Apocryphon
No, actually it has been discussed elsewhere in other comment threads that
downvotes are used for showing disagreement, as well. I didn't come up with
this myself; rather, it seems to be convention on the HN community.

If you disagree with this, please feel free to downvote this comment. This
isn't reddit, or YouTube comments, where karma is some sort of aspect of
prestige. It should be freely given and taken away as part of the natural
discourse.

~~~
prodigal_erik
I once thought downvoting as disagreement was disapproved-of (as I would
prefer), but in fact it is not: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2164087>

------
rmrfrmrf
One thing I can't stand is "recruiters" who invite you to come interview with
them. Oh, great, you "invite" me to come torture myself for months on end just
so I can have a snowball's chance in hell at getting a job? This is 2012. If
you want to learn about me, go on my website and read my blog posts, look at
my current projects, and download my resumé.

If you think I'm so great, make me an offer. Don't spam my inbox with "We're
Hiring!" e-mails.

~~~
timfrietas
As someone who does a fair amount of hiring, I would never hire someone off
the strength of their (supposed) work alone. The ability to problem solve
under pressure and their ability to communicate effectively with others are
really important factors I won't get from looking at their Github account.

~~~
rmrfrmrf
I agree in situations where the candidates are the ones doing the outreach.
However, what I'm saying is that I don't want to be recruited by a company
unless they've actually heard of me before and think my work is on par with
what they want. It's bullshit to me to be spammed by a company that claims
you'd be great with their team, only to be dumped into the same candidate pool
as 800 other applicants.

------
mattdeboard
I was interviewing at a startup in the Bay Area and the CEO insisted that
since "being surrounded by people smarter than me and getting better at what I
do" was a huge driver for my professional life, I'd be better served by
working at Google.

I did not understand that then, and I don't understand it now. I don't blame
the guy for saying that I guess, and maybe he's right. That said I don't want
to work at a megacorp doing software engineering, even if that megacorp is
Google. It's just not for me.

~~~
nostrademons
I worked at two startups and founded one before joining Google, and I have a
friend that's been bouncing between working for and founding startups since
he's left Google. I understand what the CEO was saying.

In a startup, there's a lot of grunt work that has to be done and there's
nobody to do it, and so you frequently end up taking on a lot of tasks that
really don't teach you anything. In a big company like Google, a lot of that
work is automated, or there's a dedicated team of people who _like_ doing that
work, and you can just forget about it. Think about carrying pagers, repairing
hardware, corporate IT, installing software, setting up your workstation,
doing logs analysis, cooking for you, etc.

It's less of a problem early on in your career when everything's new for you,
particularly if you eventually want to found a startup where you have to do
all that stuff anyway. A lot of engineers really want to be top of their
field, though: they want to be the world expert in machine-learning, or in
extraction of data from news articles, or in distributed parallel processing,
and so on. You typically don't have the opportunity to do that in a startup,
because you have to focus on the immediate business needs and on staying alive
rather than on pushing the state of the art forwards. "Good enough" has to be
good enough in a startup.

~~~
mattdeboard
Interesting perspective. But like you said, at this point in my career I
_want_ to know how to do all this stuff. Thankfully I'm in a position where I
get/have to do basically everything, so I'm getting very broad experience.

There are specific areas where I want to focus -- search, data analysis,
infrastructure -- and my next job I'll probably be looking for a focus in one
or more of those areas (each of which Google would be a good option but
without a degree and at my age I doubt I'd get hired). Be that as it may, I
really, really don't want to work in a huge organization. I hate bureaucracy,
central authority, people I never see in the organization making policy for
me, etc. I spent my entire adult life in the military up til a couple years
ago. I think that has something to do with it.

edit: This comment really crystallizes the type of thing I want to avoid,
which means eschewing employment at Google, IBM, Microsoft,etc:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4713802>

>Those were (are?) the designations for certain types of jobs over there. You
might think that if you're hired into the company, your possibilities are wide
open, but they aren't. System administrator flavored SREs (site reliability
engineers) could only get other SA-flavored jobs, of which there are
relatively few. Meanwhile, software engineer (SWE) type SREs could go into any
other SWE job, of which there are many. If you were hired on as a SA-SRE as I
was, then you have to do an internal interview to get to be a SWE-SRE. If you
can't make it through that, you're stuck. I made it, and a friend did too, but
I know people who didn't. I'm sure that makes them feel great, especially if
they're already doing SWE type work in their daily jobs. I was told repeatedly
there was no difference between the types, but found out the hard way when it
was time to transfer from a toxic situation and there were few alternatives.
It took over a year to finally get it all sorted out.

~~~
nostrademons
Again, YMMV. I was hired as a UI SWE, told my manager (repeatedly) that I
wanted to do more backend algorithmic work, eventually refused to do any more
UI work, then taught myself enough about Google Search's backend systems that
I became known as a full-stack engineer that knows everything. It probably
delayed my promotion by about a year, but it was worth it, and it's not like
anyone stopped me.

I'm now doing basically product-manager type work, despite officially being a
SWE. Again, nobody stops me. I've found that if you're producing stuff of
value, you can basically move into another role simply by doing the work
entailed by that role. I know two other SWEs that are de-facto PMs, and one
SRE who became a SWE (and core LLVM contributor in the process).

~~~
ilf10
At google, you are thrust into a new environment, you are but a naked noogler,
and your past a distant memory. Old, young, female, male, fat, skinny, likes
sports, hates sports, prefers sushi, blah de dah, shut the hell up, no one
gives a shit. It doesn't matter until you have proven yourself.

A lot of problems come from when nooglers expect the world to do their
bidding, but have nothing to show for it. At the end of the day, profit
matters, lines of code matter, cleaning up and maintaining code matter, how
much you help your coworkers matter, these things lead to you creating new
features, these things matter and increase profitability, but you wouldn't
know which new shit to add if you didn't earn your licks. Do your job, then
improve things around you while doing your job, then we talk.

Before I came to google, I was very successful, making kick ass fast, scalable
systems, doing the job of many people, bringing glory to my managers but not
to me.. Didn't matter though because for years I studied coding from what I
would call masters, taking my licks, being humble and learning from anyone and
anything. I didn't mention my past to my new team members at google.. Some of
them ridiculed me at the first site of any minor bug I introduced, but inside
I laughed like an insane hobo. The years of shit code I have refactored, bugs
that drove me insane because they had to be fixed and no one else wanted or
could tackle them.. I endured, so with a silent knowing I set out to rip apart
the hearts of my naysayers with a blood curdling smile.

Now I'm being promoted while those who ridiculed me are not, they in fact
respect me and head my advice, usually because when they don't, they get
ridiculed when their code is the source of design problems.

What you did before google matters, not in how much you boast about it, but in
that it gives you the skills to rise above the rest. Otherwise, you're just a
blowhard talking about the olden' days that no one gives a shit about.

In that way, I have found that google is a meritocracy, with people
challenging each other, making everyone better, and it's something I never got
at a previous employer. Before google, employers just took advantage of me.
So, yeah, I would defend google to the death and recommend it to anyone who
isn't a whining wimp.

~~~
mattdeboard
Is this a joke? I don't get it.

------
tehwebguy
The one thing I took away that really is a pain in the ass is recruiters
hitting people up and asking them to apply. If a recruiter reaches out, in my
opinion, they should already consider the person in question a genuinely
attractive candidate and should be asking for a little more info, not asking
them to start at step 0, they can do that on their own if they decide to.

------
bane
Like many people I have issues with Google. But let's not be silly about
things I'd still love to work there.

Not out of any particular fanboyism, but because I've worked at plenty of
places that are _not_ Google, and the normal day-to-day in a place like a
large defense contractor are categorically worse than even the worst nightmare
scenario I've ever heard about working at Google.

~~~
neilk
I think almost anything is better than a giant defense contractor. I had a
friend who worked at the place she called "the bomb factory" (in a completely
innocuous IT role) and her stories were universally depressing.

~~~
nostrademons
I have a friend who worked at General Dynamics for about 5 years and really
enjoyed it. At least up until all the people he respected and liked working
with quit.

------
halayli
Interviews should go both ways. If the interviewer asks you for a "pop quiz"
algorithm question you studied in college and forgot about it ever since, you
should throw a "pop quiz" question back at them. Not for spite, but if they
expect you to know the answer to their question you should expect that they
know the answers to your question.

~~~
danielweber
Depending on tone, I would treat a candidate who does this as either "really
awesome" or "really an asshole." YMMV.

~~~
halayli
The tone is a major player here. :) But every candidate has the right to know
who'll they be working with on a daily basis.

------
clarky07
I was with this post until I got to:

"Over time, I’ve come to consider that this situation is irremediable, given
our current capitalist system and all its inequalities. To fix it, we’re going
to need to work on social justice and rethinking how we live and work and
relate to each other."

Give me a break. Socialism isn't going to fix anything. Have you seen Europe
recently? Capitalism and Democracy are the worst solutions for economies and
governments, except for all of the others that have been tried. America and
capitalism have given more opportunities to help people grow out of poverty
into success than anything else in the world. If you think you are entitled to
something, you're wrong. Get off your ass and do something productive and go
take that thing you think you're entitled to. If you are sitting on your couch
watching tv, the only thing you are entitled to is being overweight.

~~~
uriah
The US actually lags behind most of western Europe and Canada in social
mobility. Especially among the poorest.

"European Socialism" is not that different from the US. In Europe you may get
free child care, health care, etc. and industries that the government likes
get subsidies. In the US, this assistance comes in the form of tax cuts. Tax
exemptions for employers who pay for health care, the child tax credit, tax
deductions for favored industries, etc. Including tax expenditures, the US
spends more on social welfare than most of western Europe while doing a poorer
job of ensuring it reaches the right people.

~~~
clarky07
I find much of that to be a huge waste of money. Why are we encouraging people
to have kids with a tax credit? There were a lot of people in my hometown on
welfare who would have more kids because you get more food stamps and welfare
than what the kid would cost them. Brilliant. We are subsidizing terrible
parents bringing kids into poverty because these idiots want more food stamps.

Just because things are done a certain way doesn't mean it's a good idea. It
certainly isn't a capitalist idea to have favored industries with subsidies or
tax credits. America is far from being a pure capitalist society. It's a
bastardization of capitalism and socialism, and while I may not be in the
majority, I'd prefer pure capitalism over what we've become.

I'm all for helping people who can't help themselves, but I'd prefer it be
done in the private sector. I give more to charity than I pay in taxes, and
the money I give does far more good than food stamps and welfare ever will. If
I didn't have that money wasted on taxes (note I don't think it all is, just a
lot of it. i.e. roads are a good thing, military, etc.), I could give a lot
more to the places I think are more worthy.

------
brown9-2
I think it's fairly obvious from all of these stories about the Google
recruiting process - being pestered fairly regular by different people who
appear unaware or indifferent to your past experiences with Google, either as
an employee/contractor/failed candidate - that the recruiters have some sort
of quota system and need to keep feeding potential candidates into the
interview process to meet their own metrics. Hence why a lot of times it seems
like someone is being contacted out of the blue based upon an "online profile"
that someone stumbled upon through desperate-seeming research.

~~~
SilvaR
Correct! This is the main source of external Google HR issues. When there is a
certain stretched goal to hire X number of people, this sort of situation
tends to happen.

------
sxp
>The very day after I blogged about that, my Google+ account was suspended,
for using the name I was almost universally known by. Over the next couple of
months, I campaigned tirelessly for Google+ to change its policies, working
with the EFF and other advocates. My work was covered in Wired, The Atlantic,
and a number of other mainstream press outlets. Obviously this was to no
avail...

FYI, this policy has changed:
[https://plus.google.com/u/0/+BradleyHorowitz/posts/SM5RjubbM...](https://plus.google.com/u/0/+BradleyHorowitz/posts/SM5RjubbMmV)

~~~
greenyoda
Note that they still want to have your "real" name in addition to the name
that you're known by. The article says:

"Over the next week, we’ll be adding support for alternate names – be they
nicknames, birth names, or names in another script – _alongside your common
name_."

So someone who is afraid of revealing their true identity still can't use
Google+.

------
pnathan
I am curious about responses to skud's call for seeking social justice, it
doesn't seem to be addressed here. Personally, I don't have a formed opinion
on it...

------
tlow
I'm totally with the author here, I just wish we could also include some of
the other large companies like Facebook.

------
griftah
She is building a social network for hobbyist gardeners. Apparently this is
what humanity needs more than geek toys like self-driving cars and augmented
reality sunglasses.

~~~
kevinh
That's a bizarre critique. It's just more likely she would be working on
youtube ad code than self-driving cars or augmented reality sunglasses, which
most people would consider less constructive than a social network.

Additionally, I think many people would consider Facebook more valuable than
augmented reality sunglasses. If we're going to only build things that
humanity "needs", we're going to needlessly limit our scope and put many
people out of jobs. After all, our needs are considerably less than our wants.

~~~
rohern
The original article specifically mentions self-driving cars and augmented
reality sunglasses as "geek toys", FYI.

------
anonymous717
So here's my experience with Google's recruiting process.

I exchanged a few mails with the recruiter, who offered a SWE position. Then
two telephone interviews followed (with the recruiter and extensive interview
with some developer), then they arranged an on-site interview. Apparently the
2nd tech phone interview wasn't needed.

For the on-site interview I got some paper-mail, where the position had been
changed to SRE.. So I'm thinking to myself.. right, this is going to be
interesting.

So I show up on-site, and 5 interviews follow, with a ~1hr lunch break in the
middle. The 1st guy who interviewed me was a bit pompous [hey, he had a PhD!],
but OK; the 2nd and 3rd guys were extremely arrogant; the 4th guy (my supposed
team-leader) seemed to have had a bad day but was otherwise OK; the 5th guy
was the ONLY with whom I felt I could build accord and have an engaging
conversation. With him, it didn't feel like an "interview"; we were more like
two equals talking about an interesting technical topic.

The guy who I had lunch with was... interesting. Suffice it to say that I had
the impression that he was on the verge of explicitly telling me NOT to take
the position I was interviewed for. (As in, crappy job and crappy place to
live in.)

They tried to impress me with how every employee gets two big screens, a
laptop of their own choice, how big systems they're working with, how good the
food in cantina was, the fancy office space, etc.. Their attitude was in
general as if they were interviewing a teenager whose "wet dream" was to work
for google.

I never found out what kind of project I would be working on. Everybody's
attitude during the interview was "you ask, and we'll tell you if it's not
confidential". The SRE position was briefly described as "root on google.com".

It turned out that I'd also be required to be periodically on-call (since the
position went from SWE to SRE underway), and that the people I'd be working
with would be the same people who interviewed me.

So I got an offer, a contract came in paper-post and I found out that I'd only
be having ~15 workdays of paid vacation per year. Incidentally, in the country
I was supposed to move to, it was allowed by the law to work NNN hours
_unpaid_ overtime per year... Guess whether NNN matched (or maybe was even
greater!) than the number of paid vacation days.

I didn't take the offer, and it turned out to be a damn good choice.

I'm rather sure that somebody without other hobbies or desires to have some
free time to spend on things other than computers would have had a different
subjective experience.

[This post is deliberately vague about some details in order not to reveal too
much about the persons involved.]

------
mamoswined
The last recruiter I talked to was hilarious. Like the author here, I pulled
my Linkedin profile and I feel like I am fairly hard to find. However, I have
a food blog and I guess I might have mentioned some tech stuff there. So this
recruiter calls me and starts talking to me about food, I guess as a way to
get me interested, but he totally and hilariously botches it because it's
pretty clear he knows nothing about it. I told him "You live in one of the
best food cities in the world, so even if you aren't looking to recruit you
should to to these restaurants/food purveyors." I sent him a list of them and
told him I wasn't interested in a job.

------
zoidb
at least you aren't bitter about it :)

~~~
NegativeK
I'd call that more justifiable anger than bitterness.

~~~
eumenides1
I agree. Google should have done their homework before contacting a past
employee (including contractors). Google as a large organization should know
why people left their company and the context of situations around it. Some
employees aren't vocal about it, but I don't think this is the case.

~~~
Kylekramer
At risk of being callous, why should they? If an employee already dislikes a
company to the point that a recruitment letter angers them, why should the
company go out the way to accommodate them? The amount of effort it would take
to throughly research every recruitment letter recipent seems like it would be
a largely pointless endeavor with minimal returns. Most people aren't going
react negatively to an email feeler and the ones that do are already a lost
cause.

~~~
bathat
>At risk of being callous, why should they? If an employee already dislikes a
company to the point that a recruitment letter angers them, why should the
company go out the way to accommodate them?

So that they don't write blog posts like the one we are commenting on? So they
don't actively try to convince other (possibly talented) potential employees
to ignore your recruiting efforts?

The entire comments section here seems to be "is Google a horrible company to
work for and does Google+ suck, or are they merely ok?" If you're looking for
new talent, wouldn't you rather have prospective employees asking "is Google a
fantastic company to work for or an outstanding company to work for?"

------
xanderhud
If you're really, really serious about getting them to stop bothering you,
accept an offer from them but then don't show up for work.

------
interg12
TL;DR: Worked at Metaweb which was acquired by Google to develop for Google+.
Left within a year because of a disagreement over policy against pseudonymity
and the affect it has on victims of harassment. Received email from Google
years later offering job.

------
rrbrambley
I've been turned off by Google's recruiting style as well. I don't understand
why the current state of tech recruiting is to blast out (almost) generic
recruiting emails to everyone. It feels like this style of recruiting should
have gone away by now.

P.S. I just wrote a blurb about this last week:
[http://robdotrob.com/post/33737357324/recruiting-for-
bigco-p...](http://robdotrob.com/post/33737357324/recruiting-for-bigco-please-
try-harder)

------
redler
As a side question, is it common practice for Google to hire people using
employment contracts with fixed terms? Is there an underclass of employees who
join as a result of an acquisition, but who have expiration dates?

------
welebrity
Fascinating article. A truly unique voice and perspective, although after
reading all the comments and reviews, maybe their is a groundswell here!?
Nonetheless, thanks for opening one brain, and keep on keepin' on!

------
pvdm
Megacorps self-destruct eventually.

------
voltagex_
Strangely, the link is blocked by BlueCoat at my workplace. Can someone
pastebin the text?

------
Morphling
Man, I just wish a big company like Google was interested in me, but since I
just mostly suck at everything that will never happen.

------
chris123
Ah, the Hacker News brag. Nice.

------
bborud
Oh wow, I have not seen such a self-important wall of text in ages. Pull
yourself together.

------
sidcool
Hi, can anyone pls post a mirror? I am unable to access this from work. Thanks
in advance.

------
mememememememe
I agree with you on the unnecessary puzzle solving. I don't even solve Sudoku.
How can I even come up with a reasonable solution in 45 minute? The only
puzzle I ever solved with C++ and Java was minesweeper and it took me a month
in each language. I do think algorithm design problems like fitting 1 million
8 digits into 1 M ram is an OKAY question. Google's scale is big, and they
want to test you how quickly you can arrive an OKAY solution in 45 minutes,
even if it's wrong.

~~~
Shorel
Dude if you can really solve minesweeper, publish the paper and become famous
and rich, because that shit is NP-complete.

[http://www.cs.montana.edu/courses/spring2004/spring2004/curr...](http://www.cs.montana.edu/courses/spring2004/spring2004/current/513/resources/minesweeper.pdf)

~~~
Yen
NP-complete problems aren't impossible, they just get very computationally
expensive the bigger they get.

OP would only be rich & famous if they had developed an algorithm that solved
minesweeper in polynomial or better time. (i.e., a time complexity on the
order of O(n^k), where k is some constant)

Many NP-Complete problems are trivially solvable, just not trivially solvable
in an efficient manner. - like the Travelling Salesman Problem. You can just
try every possible combination. It's not fast, but it works.

------
cmccabe
Yes, it's probably somewhat frustrating to be laid off by Google and then
later receive recruiting emails. But Google is a big company. The right hand
doesn't always know what the left is doing. Or maybe the recruiter thinks you
really do want to come back to the fold. Who knows.

It's pretty unfair to blast Google for "eroding" the public domain, fair use,
and consumer rights. Google has been a champion of all three of those things,
unlike some other companies I could name.

Does it really matter if Google+ doesn't support anonymous comments? It's not
like there's a shortage of places online to make anonymous remarks.

------
wei2012
Just another dreamer.

~~~
y4m4
affirmative!!

