It doesn't seem that the post paints Google as being disrespectful to engineers. If it is unfriendly to engineers, then it is unfriendly to everyone.
Some points here:
The key point that starts off #1 is more or less a side effect of any company where you hire folks who have a need for stability in their life. The unpredictability that he refers to is little different than how startups need to pivot. The only difference is that at a big company, it's management's job to hide that from the masses, and there's a limit to how well that can be handled.
Now as startup folks, you may find this abhorrent, or as big-company peons, you may still find this abhorrent, but all the organizations I've seen, from 200-man high school volunteer clubs all the way up to multi-billion dollar corporations, all of them have to deal with this. It's just that a tiny startup where people feel like they're on the same boat and have the emotional fortitude to handle it, then it may be better to be direct and honest.
The no-interviews bit is mildly troubling, but every engineer who's thought about company culture has probably come to this question eventually: if it's not to one's own benefit to interview engineers, then doesn't it seem likely that interviews would devolve into intellectual hazing sessions?
Points #3 and #4 are typical at any company larger than about one or two hundred. My hypothesis is that once you have more than 3 layers of management, the folks at the top who've been there and know what they're doing can't help your direct manager when he needs it. And again, as I see it, this is little different from how startup folks have to go through the process of finding the right company, the right founding team, and so on. People want to go to a big company and think that it will suddenly all be magical but of course there is no shortcut for the biggest challenges in life.
Good points. I don't think interiews ever became hazing rituals. What happened instead was that a lot of folks got burned out on interviewing, and because interviewing was never taken seriously as a priority, interview training was outsourced to an outsider. That led to a number of travesties.
Like the one I had for my Google phone interview earlier this year... when he asked me to code up a simple sorting implementation (an array with an empty slot, and you can't use extra memory) the FIRST thing I described was a swap method that took the two indexes to swap, as well as the index for the blank. (I also at that point mentioned saving the location of the index in order to avoid having to scan for it for every swap). Two minutes later when I said we would simply swap two items, he asked me how, and I ended up describing the swap function AGAIN. And he also didn't understand the part about remembering the location of the blank, he brought it up in the performance analysis -- even though I'd mentioned saving it in a class variable already, I had to explain it yet again.
I didn't get a call back and I didn't expect one, but I was sorely disappointed with the quality of the interviewer, so I can't say that not getting a call back was much of a disappointment after that.
Some points here:
The key point that starts off #1 is more or less a side effect of any company where you hire folks who have a need for stability in their life. The unpredictability that he refers to is little different than how startups need to pivot. The only difference is that at a big company, it's management's job to hide that from the masses, and there's a limit to how well that can be handled.
Now as startup folks, you may find this abhorrent, or as big-company peons, you may still find this abhorrent, but all the organizations I've seen, from 200-man high school volunteer clubs all the way up to multi-billion dollar corporations, all of them have to deal with this. It's just that a tiny startup where people feel like they're on the same boat and have the emotional fortitude to handle it, then it may be better to be direct and honest.
The no-interviews bit is mildly troubling, but every engineer who's thought about company culture has probably come to this question eventually: if it's not to one's own benefit to interview engineers, then doesn't it seem likely that interviews would devolve into intellectual hazing sessions?
Points #3 and #4 are typical at any company larger than about one or two hundred. My hypothesis is that once you have more than 3 layers of management, the folks at the top who've been there and know what they're doing can't help your direct manager when he needs it. And again, as I see it, this is little different from how startup folks have to go through the process of finding the right company, the right founding team, and so on. People want to go to a big company and think that it will suddenly all be magical but of course there is no shortcut for the biggest challenges in life.