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.
I'm interested to hear Tim's take on it because I remember when he wrote the employee blogging guidelines for Sun Microsystems[1][2]. He was a pretty big force in convincing Sun to talk more candidly in public - up to the CEO himself - so I'm curious to see how his views evolve in the very different environment at Google.
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
I say it is pretty fair. There hasn't been another blog that successfully catches me with its titles then after reading I sit back and say, "what did I learn there?" as much as this one.
Thanks for the reply. Perhaps it boils down to confusion over what TL;DR actually means in different contexts.
My take from that thread was that it's discouraged to post a comment saying you didn't read an article because it was too long. This only makes sense: such a comment is necessarily devoid of informed content, as the person writing it chose not to read the source material before commenting.
In this case, I was indicating that I read the piece and was posting a brief summary that captured what I believe to be the salient message - i.e. that Tim Bray knows a lot of secrets about Google but isn't allowed to talk about them publicly.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Next week Tim discusses why Google lunches are so great.