They decide that you are an elite engineer primarily
based on whether you went to an elite school. Elite code.
Elite engineers. Elite schools. Elite company. How very
elitist.
This whole "Google is elitist" meme is silly. They hired me as an SRE, and yet I didn't attend high school, went to a state college, and had something like a 3.2 GPA.
Stop being so afraid of failure that you never try to succeed.
"This whole "Google is elitist" meme is silly. They hired me as an SRE, and yet I didn't attend high school, went to a state college, and had something like a 3.2 GPA."
Would changing the OP's sentence to "Google is mostly elitist" help? (Genuine Question). You might (please note the emphasis on 'might') be the exception that proves the rule. Here in Bangalore, for example, it is known that Google has a strong bias towards IIT grads and academic performance.
Whether such a strong preference for such schools/academic scores etc should be labelled "elitist" is a different debate. Fwiw, my gut feel is that if you are a strong enough engineer, you can get Google to override this bias.
Like I mentioned in an earlier post on Yahoo's selection process, most companies in India are very biased towards your certificates. The other thing that seems to really push their swing is their insistence on company loyalty. They come at you with questions like why did you quit after 2 years? Simple answer:no growth inside, better growth outside.
In fact entire teams of HR thrive on being able to say "We havent found anyone yet." Despite HR, I 've managed to look outside the box and instantly gotten the kind of people I wanted to work with. They havent been blue-chip grads or people with 10 years of PPT pushing experience in a large firm. They have been people who have been enthused by a good problem. There is a ton of talent out there on the streets of Bangalore, they dont all have certificates, but many seem to have demos of products they have built. In my rule book, thats good enough. If you look for designers ask for an online portfolio, if you are looking for devs, ask for side projects, if you are looking for sales guys figure out if they understand tech well enough to sell. In short I need to see demonstrated value.
If you are big company, hire all the certificate holders and thank you for cleaning up the streets.
Company loyalty is one thing, but ultra fast jumping is an another thing. I know some in my team who have jumped something like 6 companies in 5 years. That's like an average of 9 months of stay in a company. Given the joining formalities, getting a project, knowledge transfer and a good start. The person hardly spends 5 months working in a company. That's plainly insufficient by any measure.
Recently we hired a girl, who has all brands next to her name. Hopped like 6 companies in 5 years. Endless projects to her resume and everything looks fine and dandy. After hiring her we figured she was fit for nothing. Every day she reads interview questions for about 1-2 hours. Makes calls to her friends. When asked to work, she just slacks around, force her too much and she throws in the 'harassing the girl' card. Now she wants all foreign travel opportunities to herself.
We know for sure she will quit in another 4 months, and she will get a good job too. Remember she is an expert reading those interview questions for an hour daily.
This is the regular crowd here in India that hops jobs too often. So its perfectly acceptable for the HR to ask for solid experience on a persons resume.
>Company loyalty is one thing, but ultra fast jumping is an another thing.
Your job hopper story is sad, but company "loyalty" is a nonsensical concept to me. You should only ever be as loyal to the company as the company would be to you. For me that means I don't consider company loyalty for one second. That being said, leaving a place too quick (or staying too long) makes you look bad so you have to way that in. Never some stupid one-way loyalty.
Also wanted to add, any company that asks the same questions to all the people being interviewed has bigger problems than just the people it's hiring. I don't think such companies have a right to complain. If they hired her, I hold them responsible. She is just gaming the system, good for her. In short, she has learnt the skill of extracting value for herself from an inefficiency in the interview process. Plug those gaps ASAP.
Of course, the other extreme are interviews where they feel it's okay to ask you questions that make it look like they only hire "geniuses" who can tell you why the mirror reflects left to right etc ...
Ahhh, these are the types that will never have a side project. Ask for side projects at the next interview and you shall find those that love solving problems. What your interview process is selecting for currently is the traditional salary hopper.
I don't consider side projects a good metric either. I hardly have side project for a simple reasons because, I get pretty much burnt out by the daily work itself.
Unfortunately salary hoppers are so common among the job hopping crowd, that its sufficient enough to say the most and nearly all job hoppers are salary hoppers.
If you won't change your filters, you will continue to get your usual stuff and hope against hope that you get someone who will be "loyal." Ain't gonna happen and you need to maintain a team of "HR loyalty maintainers" who fill your inboxes with peppy mails about morale ...
I just told you about what works for some of us. Sure it might cost us a couple of good people who don't have a side project, but all of the people we end up getting are the problem solving type.
Perhaps the hiring field in Bangalore is different? It would make sense to prioritize school more if there is a large amount of mediocre tech talent applying in that talent pool. Google doesn't have completely unlimited resources to donate to hiring. FWIW I have also felt that it's been my achievements in school (and largely out of school, in open source work), that put me on Google's radar, not simply the fact that I go to a good school.
That is probably why,though I am somewhat dubious of IIT grads being better programmers than the average tech talent even in Bangalore. Saying that often brings a violent reaction from IIT grads, but I've found it to be largely true.
Iow, I am not sure school has anything to do with programming ability (it might be interesting to draw up a matrix of dev superstars and schools. hmm). Unlike Stanford or MIT, IITs don't do world class research. They have a good bachelors degree program. And Google Bangalore doesn't do "cars that drive themselves" style work anyway. From what friends who work at Google tell me, Google Bangalore doesn't have a(n internal) reputation (to put it mildly) of pulling off feats of superior engineering skill.
That said, I have zero issues with Google using any criteria they want to hire devs (just in case it wasn't clear earlier). I don't consider them "elitist" just because they do what works for them. In fact I don't even believe in the "elitism" concept. I think it is a largely empty word used to mean "they do things in a way that I find unsatisfactory".
Even if Google has a hiring bias towards IIT grads, the best way for a non-iit grad to get a job offer from Google (if that is what he wants) is to be a better engineer than the favored folks.
"Be so good they can't ignore you" as a wise man said. Good Advice.
Elite institutions do little to produce great people, they just act as a place where great people can assemble, learn and move forward.
The same with IIT, IIT itself will do little to make the person better. Even my experiences with IIT'ians has not been uniform, a lot of them are good ... but not everybody.
Now the main stuff,
Academics is one thing, industry totally another thing. Academics assumes that you can memorize, recollect from the memory and invent. The industry assumes your can discover and deliver. In our times to be able to discover is far more important thing than ability to invent. Coupled with productivity is what makes this software so interesting.
If you are productive, hardworking, and discover and experiment quickly you can achiever far more than any guy from IIT or whatever.
In short, Education only takes you so far. After that its all upto your work.
> though I am somewhat dubious of IIT grads being better programmers than the average tech talent even in Bangalore.
I believe it's more like given a choice between someone `who is most probably a good athlete and may or may not be a good footballer`, and another `who may or may not be a good athlete and may or may not be a good footballer`, you would go with someone who is most probably a good athlete.
The ideal way would be to test them on the soccer abilities, but the volume of applications a company like Google does, and the percentage of people who claim to be programmers, but aren't really good, forces the use of heuristics. It will be simply impractical to test candidates for the actual programming the job entails.
Also, IIT grads do well in traditional interviews. You are more likely to get a dynamic programming solution from an IIT grad for a subset sum problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subset_sum_problem than from a normal college grad - not that it has a high correlation with programming abilities, but traditional interviews focus on these kind of questions.
I did my bachelors from a simpleton college, and I was considered a good programmer, because hell, I could code up a vanilla binary tree in C++(no string attached - a binary tree with inorder traversal - that's it) from scratch in a lab test in under 45 minutes - that was as hard a problem you could get to solve in a lab test.
I would have to be admit I will be negatively biased towards people graduating from that cadre of colleges. Not that they aren't good programmers there - it's just that you will have to dig through a lot of not-so-good to find someone good, and it's not a worthy investment of time.
The kind of questions that are asked on tests will make you puke. We had a AI course, and we were following AIMA(I believe you were maintaining the Java code at that time) - the questions that were asked on the first test were essay questions viz. "How do you design a better computer"(from introduction chapter which wasn't much about designing about a better computer), implementing A* search was considered outside the scope of the course(implementing anything from the book was considered out of scope)...I could go on an on, but you get the idea.
That is probably why,though I am somewhat dubious of IIT grads being better programmers than the average tech talent even in Bangalore.
You're probably right (and I say that as an IIT grad). Most of the people I knew there were significantly smarter than me but couldn't program their way out of a paper bag.
There is a reason for that bias - and that is credibility of the candidates. Imagine, in a pool of potential hires, having to shuffle through 90% chaffe to get to the 10% grain in a humanly impossible timeframe. Elite institutions solve this filtering or shuffling problem to a large extent - which is why people who are after credible talent go to elite institutions, pay whatever they heck the institution demands and get the required candidates.
With the changing times, many startups are getting into the recruiting space and helping such companies as google choose credible candidates without the elite institution tag.
Agreed. I went to a state college not at all respected for software engineering graduates and Google got ahold of me this summer asking if I had interest working for them (I declined). Google could (largely) care less what school you went to. Your work, what you do after school, should speak to your talents and if they only want the elite based on your post-college work, well then good for them. Why would they hire you when your history yells "I'M MEDIOCRE!" You have to prove yourself beforehand. Oh, and if the job posting has the statement "if you plan to become [an expert in distributed computing]", I'd say that's far from saying only the elite will be considered.
Anyway, the post is largely silly. The OP goes into a rant on "I don't care about any of what Google does", then mentions Google+ and MapReduce. Yes, that's all Google has going on these days. Saying Google can't keep up with the world when Amazon can is beyond ridiculous. Hell, Google has defined a large part of the modern world and continues to expand on that. Honestly, I'm a larger fan of Amazon than Google, but Amazon IS TRYING to catch up to Google and only dabbles in a small percentage of what Google does. The OP only points out a few features that Amazon has that Google doesn't (or at least doesn't offer openly and freely to all). Going past that, Google's offerings extend so much farther than Amazon's that it's hard to even begin listing them. Want a 3D representation of the entire world? Google has you covered. You could make those statements for pages.
It takes lots of different kinds of people to make a success. If the company you start can't hire people because everybody thinks like you do you too will fail.
The attitude that you can't be 'successful' in life unless you start a company is really out of touch with reality, I'd argue that it takes all kinds for everybody to even have a chance at achieving their definition of success, and people that do not achieve your definition of success are not automatically failures.
What is up with Google's silly caste system? Being pigeon holed into an SA role and looked down upon by freshly minted developers with little experience "oh, you're just an SA..." is exactly why a senior systems architect like myself will probably never work at Google.
Google seems to want to give their employees the popularity contest atmosphere of an undergrad school so that the elite can feel smug and superior as they slave away in an effort to get the rest of us to click on more ads.
Caste system? I'm an SRE-SWE myself, but I couldn't tell you what side of the fence each of my team members are. (I might have an educated guess, though, based on the projects they choose to work on...)
Yes, caste system. If you don't resemble the right sort of person at hiring time, you don't get the SWE flavored job. Managers will tell you there's no difference, but they are clearly missing the point.
If you ever want to transfer out of SRE, most of the jobs there are SWE positions. As a SWE-SRE, you're set. As a SA-SRE, you're screwed. See the problem now?
My own move from Sr. SA-SRE to Sr. SWE changed nothing in terms of salary. Those are both "level 5" jobs, albeit from different "ladders": O5 to T5.
Incidentally, I later found out they were underpaying me by as much as 20% compared to other folks in my area at the same level. That might mean that my no-op ladder change was an anomaly.
Okay, well, that means you won the caste system at hiring time at least. SA-SREs are pretty much stuck in sysadmin roles (unless they go through the interview process again -- no joke).
Seems fair; if I wanted to transition to a different job role (or even a very different SWE team, like kernel development) I would expect to be re-interviewed.
A developer might a good fit somewhere in the company, but that doesn't mean they'll do well everywhere.
Funny you should mention kernel development. You'd really want to do it for people going the other way, since most of the folks who wrangle the kernel there are not familiar with the Secret Sauce systems. You know, like the one called "MapReduce", cough cough.
I speak from experience: my SA-SRE limbo involved leaving SRE and landing in a role expected to bridge the kernel team to prod, by making their tests work on the things which involve Lots Of Machines (tm). That was a SWE job through and through but it did not give me the ability to transfer out of it until I went through the process last year.
During the interview process, it is not clear which bucket you're being dropped in. Or indeed even that there are two buckets. This may have an impact on whether someone would accept an offer or not.
I'm curious why you think this is a bad thing. Doesn't SA stand for sysadmin? If you were hired for a sysadmin role, doesn't it make sense to reinterview you for a software development role? More specifically, if the situation were turned around and you where asked a bunch of software development questions when interviewing for a sysadmin role, wouldn't you criticize Google for asking questions irrelevant to the job?
I think it's a bad thing because I lived it. I was stuck in their little SA mold, unable to transfer onto various interesting-looking projects because of it. I wound up being stuck in this limbo for over a year until I finally got the internal transfer to go through.
Note that nobody was willing to pull rank and Just Fix Things. That was a sign to me that things had turned pretty bad -- forcing people to jump through hoops like that? Come on.
BTW, for SRE, the interviews are supposed to hit a range of things: sysadmin stuff, coding stuff, debugging/troubleshooting, and so on. At least, the ~100 or so I gave over the years I was there certainly did.
Note that none of the things I asked were "round manhole" type questions. I hate that stuff.
Sure. I'm a SWE intern right now but I'm going through the conversion process right now so I've done the SWE interviews. All I'm saying is that I would have been pretty pissed if I got a dynamic programming question when applying for an sysadmin position. I'm not saying that Google's hiring process makes complete sense (I work for you writing prod code for 3 months and that gets me out of one out of five interviews? Really? One?) but this isn't exactly the biggest problem I see. It would probably be better if they gave higher priority to transfer requests so you could get it done quickly, but I see no reason why I wouldn't have to reinterview if I wanted a different job position.
P.S. This is one reason why I'm glad they don't ask sysadmin questions to SWEs. I'm a really shitty sysadmin.
Stop being so afraid of failure that you never try to succeed.