
What is it like to work at Google? - pietro
http://www.scripting.com/stories/2007/11/02/whatIsItLikeToWorkAtGoogle.html
======
tryagain
I'm sure it's fantastic to work at Google, if you're the kind of person who
wants to work in a big company.

As for me, I made a cool mashup with the maps API, and they offered me a job,
subject to approval by HR. You could tell by the way they were talking that
they thought they were offering me a glimpse of a ticket to heaven. When I
asked some clarifying questions, they didn't even bother to answer them.
Silence for the insolent fool!

So arrogant they undoubtedly are. People inside the company find it hard to
understand why anyone would not leap at the chance to work there. I was
actually considering it but they shut down the conversation, and I'm glad
about it now. I turned the mashup into a company and it now brings in a lot
more than even Google would consider paying me.

~~~
tocomment
Can I see the mashup?

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cstejerean
Well, I got a job offer at Google and decided to turn it down. Sure, the food
is great and you have everything you need but I think it's counter productive
to starting a startup. You need to dislike your current job enough to want to
do something else.

I also agree with the author that humility is a scarce resource at Google.

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ecuzzillo
I recently met a very smart guy who has worked at Google for nearly a year,
and he had almost nothing positive to say about it. In his whole large
division, there seemed to be hardly anybody who actually got anything done.
And, worse, there was no method for firing people who didn't do anything.

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mynameishere
Can someone explain why this got upmodded to #1? It reads like it was written
by a 23 year old who just got turned down by google's HR department. And then:

 _Don't get me started about the developers. They hardly do any work, they get
quoted in the press all the time as if they're gods, and make millions of
dollars, and I do all the work_

Huh? Satire? I can't tell...

~~~
alaskamiller
Because it's Dave Winer.

~~~
apathy
His parents must have been clairvoyant when they passed on the family name. If
the shoe fits...

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ajkates
One of my co-founders worked for Google this past summer. He didn't have one
negative word to say about it.

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MuddyMo
Looks like Winer is pretty much in line with many in the YC community:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=75433>

Might this be the milestone we look back on and eval: (not (not (= google
evil)))

~~~
kirubakaran
Is Google guilty of early optimization? :)

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mhb
Wow. His writing style is exceedingly annoying. And, either as a result of
that or not, I feel as though this is the fifth installment of something he
wrote of which I haven't read the preceding parts.

~~~
machine
And what's with the tiny hash symbols at the end of every paragraph. I also
found the article unpleasant.

~~~
henning
Don't tell Dave Winer that to his face. He'll start rambling about OPML,
outliners, and other shit only he and like 3 other people care about (i.e.,
way more people care about Haskell than they do about outliners from what I
can tell).

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apathy
I worked at Google for a while, pre-IPO. There were an awful lot of very
smart, capable people (or so it seemed, out of the 200 or so that were there
when I arrived), and the challenges in operations simply do not exist at any
other company I have seen (you try administering 100K servers, expanding by
about another 1000-2000 per week, using typical methods, and let me know how
it goes, for example (%)). The hardware engineering produced numerous clever
patents, the software engineers produced stuff like MapReduce, and despite the
North Korean Labor Camp work ethos, people were generally pretty happy.

I have no idea if it's like that anymore. A lot of my friends who stuck around
after the IPO report that it changed, that there arose much friction between
the perceived old guard and the newer post-IPO employees. Maybe now that there
are a zillion Googlers in a dozen or so countries (Ireland, Switzerland,
India, China, and teh USA were already set up by the time I left), perhaps
there's less camaraderie. Maybe the SarbOx role-based access control (which I
helped implement as part of my job) means that you can't poke around MOMA and
the Perforce tree after work hours and gawk at the new patents.

It was a great place to work, but in the end I moved on because I didn't get
the position I really wanted to be promoted to, and I noticed that all of the
guys doing really, really cool stuff had completed some advanced study, more
often than not in CS or comp bio.

Given that machine learning doesn't seem to be going out of style, I have to
try and remember that $80K or so is really not a very good salary for the
amount of work that an SRE drone is responsible for, and figure out 'what
next' instead.

I didn't have a wife or a kid when I left Google. Now I do. It's harder now to
embrace the risks of starting up a company, although I made a sizable chunk of
change in the meantime simply by developing and selling a hobby website. If
the idea is solid and the execution solid, there's at least some chance that
even the 'just for fun' projects will end up putting a roof over your head
(literally, in my case).

I'm still conflicted, but I like to think that the mathematical and
computational skills I've picked up in the meantime (especially modern
statistical methodology, and applications in comp bio and machine learning)
will continue to provide me with fun stuff to work on, regardless of what
happens at Google. If it weren't on the opposite side of town, though, I'd be
tempted to apply for a different job at Google once I finish my thesis.
Hopefully I'll have something better to do with my life than be a cog, though.

(%) ps. If you've ever wondered whether it's better to automate everything up-
front at your Little Start-Up: yes it is. You're not going to have any more
time to deal with it if you succeed, and if your company stagnates, automation
will make it easier to walk away and do something else.

~~~
neilk
What does Sarbanes-Oxley have to do with locking down parts of the source
tree? I worked there a couple of years after you did, and there were a few
parts of the source tree that were not public, but that was usually for crypto
reasons. Config files, not algorithms.

I'm not sure what to tell you about Google today versus then. Yes, you will be
a cog, but in one of the shiniest and most well-maintained machines ever.
There's a non-negligible chance of doing a significant 20% project.

The one thing you'll notice is how much stricter the standards are for testing
and code quality generally, while the codebase has expanded exponentially.
Sometimes this results in code that's so great it practically makes you weep.
Other times, especially for the really old projects, it becomes a morass of
incomprehensibility but whose quality is carefully husbanded. I knew of a guy
who spent weeks getting _one_ change into the basic webserving code, because
running all the tests took an entire day, and by the time he was done, other
people had committed new changes that broke his change. It was Xeno's
Changelist.

Maybe you can answer me one thing: in the early days, did people think they
were a moral force for good in the world? As Dave Winer correctly notes, one
of the amazing/insufferable things about Google is that many engineers there
really think this -- _especially_ the pre-IPO crowd. It's the sort of attitude
that enables them to open for business in totalitarian China, because how
could you deny the Chinese the wonderfulness of Google?

Also note the proliferation of teams which make promotional videos starring
themselves. This started with a team that happens to have a very charismatic
dude working for them, but it seems that everyone's doing it now.

~~~
apathy
> in the early days, did people think they were a moral force for good in the
> world

Yes. I thought it was ridiculous at first, but after a while I decided it was
nice to be part of a group that had a moral compass -- and actually used it.

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augustus
I don't know much about working at Google.

But using Adwords and dealing with some of the folks at Google was really a
pleasant experience. They really went out of their way to accommodate me. I
was really surprised!!

~~~
axod
If they're taking your money, they're going to be helpful ;) But agreed. Far
better customer service than microsoft or yahoo.

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shayan
I just think Mr. Winer is not considering at what level you are at, meaning
what kind of a position you'll be able to hold in these companies...I guess
the experience will be quite different, so will the opportunities that will
open up to you

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tocomment
What kind of salaries do people get working there?

