

Why I loved working at Google - asdfprou
https://jng.squarespace.com/blog/2013/9/25/working-at-google

======
greenyoda
Note 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.

~~~
dewitt
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.)

~~~
varelse
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.

~~~
dewitt
I'm sincerely sorry things didn't work out in your case, varelse. I don't know
your backstory, and it wouldn't be my story to tell even if I did.

But I do know it makes me sad whenever I hear that we have any attrition,
regretted or otherwise. And I know as an eng manager I try to put myself out
there for /any/ engineer who wants a hand, or even just a sympathetic ear.
Some cases are just unfixable, but I like to believe we still can repair a
good number of them.

I hope things worked out better for you wherever you landed next.

~~~
varelse
I had an offer for something more suited to my skills before I left Google,
skills that I knew Google would ultimately need, but didn't yet need when I
was there. In fact I had previously turned said offer down to join Google in
the first place. These employers were happy to have me. All is good there.

What isn't so good is that since I left Google, several positions have arisen
that would very much make use of my existing skill set. Several people within
have tried to get me considered for those positions only to get shut down by
HR without so much as a phone screen. So I would appear to be on some sort of
black list. There are worse things in life, but it does seem silly to me.

~~~
asdfprou
It certainly comes to no surprise to anybody that a company as large as Google
will have mixups in their hiring/recruiting process.

Often one arm of the organization does not know what the other is doing,
although I am sure Google is constantly trying to improve their internal
communications in order to prevent exactly this.

As for your point about the black list... I would say it would likely be
closer to a note that has been placed in your recruiting profile instead.

~~~
Helianthus
Hahaha come on, just what do you think a blacklist _is_?

------
Cookingboy
Holy mother of generalization! There are literally tens of thousands of
Googlers and the author made it seem like they are all the same.

Disclaimer: I currently work for Google and I like a lot of the things here.
The company culture that you see every day really is refreshing and
encouraging, but deep down, we are individual human beings with different
motivations and drives and want different things. There are many people who
join and leave Google every day, an considering the size of the company, I can
guarantee that not everyone works on those "moonshot" problems every day
either.

Google is a fantastic company, but using a 3 months experience to generalize
the entire workforce and culture of a company this size is a bit ambitious.

------
cromwellian
Even though he's an intern, it's a fairly accurate impression, although there
are gray areas.

The two biggest points I think are fairly true:

1) Google engineers are very passionate about transparency, and collaboration.

There are way way less engineering prima-donna hot-heads at Google than other
companies. The kind of Linus Torvald-style rants and flame wars are extremely
rare internally, and many people are happy to help and mentor. I've worked at
IBM and Oracle and there were plenty of shouting matches between alpha-male
hackers battling egos.

Secondly, secrecy pisses people off. To give you an example, there was a high-
profile flop that started life as a secret project until it was almost ready
for release, and it drove a lot of internal disharmony. In fact, one of the
reasons listed in the post-mortem for the product flopping was the fact that
it was developed in secret. Googlers don't like secrecy.

2) The engineers are world class, period. Jeff Dean. Rob Pike. Etc. 'Nuff
Said. It's possible in a smaller company to be a big fish in a small pond.
It's part of what drives the big, hot-headed egos of engineering prima donnas.
They're the shit, because they might have 10 other junior engineers around
them who are far less knowledgeable. You can't really get away with those
kinds of attitudes at Google, and that may be part of the reason for the more
relaxed, cooperative humility ('googliness'), because many of your peers are
just as good, if not better, than you.

The grey areas are this. As Google becomes larger, the probability of a shitty
employee being immature and leaking to the press goes up. As a result, Google
is not as wide-open internally as it used to be. Some of the bad employees
have spoiled it for the majority. Moreover, to my dismay, many of Google's
attempts at federated, open protocols have failed in the marketplace. Open
doesn't always win, or, takes a long time, and the success of closed silos of
competitors I think has taught some Google product teams the wrong lesson, and
forced it to compete on the same grounds of its competitors. Hopefully,
eventually when things reach saturation and commodification, they'll be a
return to setting standards, but I'm cynical. Apple has the whole industry
thinking open specifications are bad because you can't make arbitrary changes
to them to vertically integrate and suit your needs. And Google's years of
supporting XMPP federation did nothing to get AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, et
al on board. You can't say Google didn't try, they ran GTalk for years, but
none of the big players with 10s or 100s of millions of users played along.

------
pocketstar
"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.

~~~
asdfprou
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.

------
cpprototypes
Most of the articles and blog posts about Google are about Mountain View. Does
anyone know if the satellite offices are good? I think I've read some good
things about New York, but haven't heard much about any others.

~~~
dumitrue
The Los Angeles office is right by Venice Beach, in a beautiful setting. It's
a mid-sized office (~500 employees according to
[http://venice.patch.com/groups/business-news/p/silicon-
beach...](http://venice.patch.com/groups/business-news/p/silicon-beach-google-
venice-los-angeles-opening-reception)) in the same time-zone as Mountain View
and a less than 1h flight to the mothership should you need to go there.

Unlike the main office, most people don't have to choose between commuting
from SF or living in Mountain View, because Venice/Santa Monica is actually a
nice area to live in :). Naturally, the breadth of projects is not as big as
in Mountain View, but there's a number of exciting things happening here
(computer vision, quantum AI etc).

~~~
epsylon
> Venice/Santa Monica

I bet you have a few surfers there! I'd kill to work next to the beach.
Nothing beats a good early morning surf session. (Figuratively, of course)

------
scrabble
I know people who work for Google in Kitchener, Ontario and I've been through
their offices here myself. I don't have work experience there though.

What struck me the most going through the office is that the office setup and
benefits seem to excel at getting out of your way. If you need something, it's
there. You have privacy, you have food, you have people around, you have
quiet. Whatever you need is already there.

It seems like in an environment like that it would be easy to get work done
because distraction would be at a minimum and context switching would not
occur as often.

I'd love to work in an office like that one day.

------
dcre
So... now I've heard of someone who actually watched _The Internship_.

~~~
asdfprou
For the record I thought it was a terrible movie and ripe with inconsistency
compared to the real thing, but I can only assume the director and writers
took to creative license in an attempt to appeal to a larger audience.

