
Google Is Now a 'Tier Two' Employer, Says Recent Comp-Sci Grad - Flopsy
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/google-now-tier-two-employer-says-recent-comp-sci-grad-carlson?trk=hp-feed-article-title
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eloisant
<i>"For full time specifically, you get equity at a startup. If it IPOs, you
make millions if you're one of the first 100-1000 employees."</i>

Not really. You can make millions if you're a founder... As a regular employee
you have more chances to make millions by going to Vegas than with stock
options.

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plorkyeran
Are there _any_ tech IPOs that made employee #1000 millions? IIRC Facebook
only came close even if you ignore the "s", and Google "only" made hundreds of
people millionaires.

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mikeyouse
Allegedly, there were over 1,600 Twitter employees with options valued over
$1M at IPO:

[http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-ipo-
created-1600-mill...](http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-ipo-
created-1600-millionaires-2013-11)

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LittleDan
When I got out of school 4 years ago, people were already making the same
arguments. While Google isn't perfect, I can't imagine a place I'd rather
work, where I can really dig into technical details of things while having
freedom to set my agenda in many ways, very smart coworkers and predictably
high compensation. I don't think any of those things have changed in 4 years.

Talking about top CS schools/going to Stanford is really irrelevant. I went to
Carleton College, which has a nice little CS department but not really well-
known, and got a liberal arts education. Because I did some open-source work
and maybe because of some academic projects, I was able to get lots of
interviews and offers, all in the same range as people are discussing today.
All Stanford does at a company like Google is get your foot in the door--
small, poorly run startups may hire on that basis, but that's it.

My one piece of advice for people who want to get into the tech industry:
Choose one open-source project and contribute to it over a long period of time
(ideally starting in high school, but never too late). The short time span of
college courses and lack of large projects (a semester is not long) means that
you can't really develop the skills that you need to be effective by that
alone. Large, open-source projects give you real experience in structuring
code to be maintainable, working with others and receiving feedback, and
understanding and changing existing code that other people wrote. It might
also get you some nice internal references.

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aesthetics1
The student mentions that Google's pay is "average" and the housing stipend is
taxed more than wages, bringing the overall compensation down to on par with
other employers in the valley. Fair enough.

He then says that other more prestigious startups are paying more and allow
employees to be on the ground floor and have a bigger impact - I'm curious to
see a list of _these_ companies.

I also wonder if "fresh out of grad school" versus "worked at Google for 2
years + grad school" gets you into these startups. I still believe seeing
Google on your resume gets you a second look.

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dlu
According to one recent grad. Why is this even an article?

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exelius
I can say from my interactions with CS students at top schools that this
attitude is common. Google is no longer seen as innovative; everyone wants to
work for Facebook or Apple now. Google isn't seen as a bad company to work
for, just not sexy like it used to be. It's like going to work for Microsoft:
you'll make good money and get some interesting projects, but major
engineering decisions happen in an ivory tower and you just have to roll with
the punches.

~~~
getpost
Should recent grads be making major engineering decisions for any established
company? This article smacks of entitlement.

A very few recent grads may be able to make major contributions. How do you
know if you're one of them?

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exelius
Some are, yes. We're talking about the top CS students at schools like
Stanford, Berkeley, CMU and MIT - these kids are in the top 10% of the top 1%
of students. They may not be making major decisions on day 1, but they expect
to be able to grow into a role where they are at least a voice at the table
within a year or two.

~~~
aries1980
> these kids are in the top 10% of the top 1%

And the unit is... ?

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robbrit
The writer of this article has a pretty faulty premise: it's all about the
money. After close to a decade of working as an employee in startups, some
that failed and some that succeeded, my view is that the last thing you want
to do is join a startup for the money. You join (and more importantly, stay)
because of the other benefits: the independence, the impact, and the
camaraderie. Unless you're working on the next unicorn - and realistically,
you're not - you're not going to come out with much cash. Google and Facebook
are exceptions, not the rule.

I eventually left the startup space to see what the rest of the world is like,
and I can tell you that the money is much better out here.

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mojoe
This is a pretty bizarre single data point. However, if this sentiment is
actually popular amoung "top CS students" these days I wonder what companies
they consider to be tier one.

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smm2000
TIL that even students from top CS program have no idea about taxes if they
think that housing stipend is taxed higher than ordinary income.

He is not alone though - compensation director at Box tried to convince me
that higher salary is significantly better than lower salary + bonus because
of higher taxes on bonus.

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exelius
There is some truth to this actually. Companies often charge both sides of
payroll tax on bonuses, which adds another ~6%. IIRC some states have a bonus
tax as well.

That said, higher base salary is usually better than lower salary + bonus
because your annual raises are larger on a higher base. Variable comp also
just kind of sucks period - you get a big windfall at some point in the year,
but you can't plan for it because you don't know how big it will be.

~~~
smm2000
I have never heard about companies charging both sides of payroll tax on
bonuses - is it even legal? Anyway, Google does not do it and California does
not have any extra tax for bonuses so it does not matter in this case.

With that, I agree that having higher guaranteed salary is better than having
the same expected variable comp but the comment was about taxes.

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tempaccountbees
"Recent Comp-Sci Grads say all sorts of things that vary in cleverness," says
recent TA.

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whitecat
I would rate big companies i.e. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and
startups all at tier two places of work, when you take social and pressures of
work into consideration. Good companies to work for are any that 1) do
something you are interested in. 2) Don't require you to work longer than 40
hours a week.

The problem I see is big companies, and startups is the amount time they
require their employees to work, which is normally over 40 hours and can be
upwards of 60 hours average per week.

Paying 100k at 40 hours a week is $48 an hour.

Paying 100k at 60 hours a week is $32 an hour.

I work with undergrads always tell my best students to avoid Facebook, Amazon,
Microsoft, Google companies. Longer hours means more stress. Big companies get
employees to work longer by offering food and games at work. I tell them find
a company that does cool stuff and only asks for 40 hours a week. I tell them
I know working for interesting research companies getting paid $80k and
working ~30 hours a week. Which is getting paid more per hour than the person
working at a company earning 100k and doing 60 hours per week.

I checked up and Google isn't too bad from what I can see online. Some say
40[1] Others say 50-60 [2] Places like Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft are worse
places to work.

[1] [http://mashable.com/2012/05/10/reddit-users-
google/](http://mashable.com/2012/05/10/reddit-users-google/)

[2] [http://www.quora.com/How-many-hours-a-day-do-Google-
employee...](http://www.quora.com/How-many-hours-a-day-do-Google-employees-
work-on-average)

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foobarqux
If not Google, who _are_ the tier-1 employers?

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suyash
The article fails to answer then who is in Tier 1?

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sidcool
Not a convincing article. Google is a great employer. May be people's
expectations have risen.

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newuser88273
Lower prestige? I think this is true. People may not be consciously aware of
it, but due to the company's core business model, i.e. basically adware and
spyware, non-billionaire employees will almost certainly incur a hit to their
social prestige account.

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jbob2000
That's a common criticism of google; that everyone there is so educated and
qualified, you have PHD comp sci people writing unit tests.

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jhugg
Would that be so bad?

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mattst88
Not in itself, no. I'd be happy to have a PhD writing unit tests for me, but
if they're overqualified for that (which I think is the assumption we're
making) I'd probably rather have them working on a harder problem.

I think the point is that it's not an efficient use of their skills.

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ElDiablo666
Which is why it wouldn't happen. Interns and entry level grads are doing
testing; they hire PhDs specifically for doing the kind of research they were
doing at university. But the original comment wasn't serious anyway, just
making a point.

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sjg007
Most PhDs write terrible unit tests or don't test at all.

