
 Blogging at Google - wglb
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/04/28/Android-Dev-Blog
======
weego
In the latest installment of "Things thousands of people have said about
working at Google already" Tim tells us that Google us unlike other businesses
because people who work there know lots of things that they don't make public
straight away.

Next week Tim discusses why Google lunches are so great.

~~~
JoachimSchipper
That's not really fair. He says that Google employees know a lot of "secret"
information about Google, much more than e.g. Sun employees knew about Sun.

It's still light on content (it's an announcement, not an article, so this may
be somewhat expected).

~~~
joubert
I'm struggling to grasp that. If people working at Sun didn't know company
secrets, who did know the confidential information?

~~~
mbrubeck
Dude, was btilly just hellbanned? That sucks, he is one of my favorite
commenters. <http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=btilly>

For those without showdead enabled, he just posted this (which is roughly what
I was going to post):

 _"The point is that pretty much everyone at Google knows a lot of secrets
about a lot of things. At Sun secrets were known by someone, but not widely
disseminated internally. It reflects very different corporate cultures."_

\--

That matches what all my Googler friends have told me: There's a stronger than
usual barrier around the company as a whole so that there can be fewer or
weaker barriers internally.

~~~
inerte
I've never played with showdead enough to understand it, but couldn't btilly
have deleted his comment? For whatever reason. Then I don't think it's cool to
reproduce it.

PS: I agree with btilly and there's nothing wrong in the tone of his comment,
just wondering if you're showing what is normally hidden and btilly wanted to
hid.

~~~
mbrubeck
btilly told my by email he didn't know the comments were deleted. Also,
everything he wrote since this (two comments and one post) has been killed:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1303360>

Anyway, he's emailed pg to ask about it.

------
RyanMcGreal
TL;DR: There are lots of interesting thing to say about Google but I'm not
allowed to talk about them.

 _Edit_ \- can someone explain why I'm being downvoted?

------
whalesalad
Tim, your blog has been great to read. I was just inspired to apply for a
position at Google. 3 actually. _Crosses fingers!_

~~~
timcederman
Applying for more than one position does not generally improve your chances.
It actually usually has the opposite effect. Find someone you know at Google,
even tangentially, and get them to submit your application for you.

~~~
digitallogic
I'm apparently an outlier then. I've applied on three separate ocassions via
their careers website, each time for multiple positions, without knowing
anyone inside. Each time I was contacted for an interview, and the last two
times I was contacted for more than one position I applied for. Never got far
enough to get an offer though.

Though the last round of phone interviews I went through, one of the engineers
I was interviewing with actually commented that he'd never heard of anyone
getting an interview via their website, only through a friend or a college
recruiter.

~~~
timcederman
You sure are. I worked on the HR software previously used by Google, so I know
firsthand a little bit about how the application process. I'm guessing you
previously worked for a well known IT company and/or went to a top 50
university for a CS degree?

------
apphacker
Huh, so there are secrets then? Because just a couple of days ago Andy Rubin
was interviewed by the New York Times and I think he repeatedly said that
Android was open and there were no secrets. I guess he just informed us that
Andy Rubin was full of shit.

Nytimes article:

[http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/googles-andy-
rubin-...](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/googles-andy-rubin-on-
everything-android/)

~~~
pavs
...we can use the same logic and say the blogger is full of shit?

On a serious note, what Rubin was probably referring to is the OS aspect of
Android, while not a beacon of open source project, has no secrets.

While the op was probably referring to what Google does in its end of android
project which is not open source.

A lot of Google products are open source, the business itself is not.

