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Part of the magic of working at Google is there are lots of projects that can make you feel that way.

by dpe82 11y ago

fapjacks 11y ago
From what I understand, those kinds of projects are only available to certain engineers, and the vast majority of engineers working at Google don't get to play those games. Six of my seven interviewers essentially said that they did not get to work on problems that challenged them when I asked "If you could change one thing without veto...." This is actually one of the two big reasons I chose not to accept an offer.
- saalweachter 11y ago
  Eh, there's an important thing to realize about working at a company like Google. 1. As a programmer, you will feel most productive working on a project by yourself where you just pound out thousands of lines of code. 2. The secret to how you get 100x more done than any individual programmer can do is that you have 200 programmers working together feeling 50% productive. 3. Google has no interest in projects that can be accomplished by one brilliant engineer working by themselves. It can be really unsatisfying for a programmer, because we all learn to program individually and that's what we base our "am I being productive?" feeling on, but it turns out that you can do some really amazing things if you're willing to put that aside and work together, even if it means spending half your day in meetings and checking email or writing design docs that no one reads. And if you're feeling challenged, it's probably because you're doing something convoluted and even you won't remember how it works in six months and no one will be able to maintain it and you can actually get nearly equivalent performance out of three mapreduces and a drop-in machine learning model, so maybe you should just do that? It's not for everyone, but at the end of the day would you rather feel productive and challenged, or actually change the world a little bit at a time?
- thrownaway2424 11y ago
  "Moving huge amounts of data from hither to yon" is not a specialized role at Google. Anybody with solid C++ skills can find a way to work on that.
  - dpe82 11y ago
    Heck if that's the metric anybody familiar with SQL or even basic unix command line operations can do it if they really want. It's sometimes easy to forget how much data we regularly move around without really thinking about it.

Part of the magic of working at Google is there are lots of projects that can make you feel that way.

by dpe82 11y ago

Part of the magic of working at Google is there are lots of projects that can make you feel that way.

From what I understand, those kinds of projects are only available to certain engineers, and the vast majority of engineers working at Google don't get to play those games. Six of my seven interviewers essentially said that they did not get to work on problems that challenged them when I asked "If you could change one thing without veto...." This is actually one of the two big reasons I chose not to accept an offer.

saalweachter 11y ago
Eh, there's an important thing to realize about working at a company like Google. 1. As a programmer, you will feel most productive working on a project by yourself where you just pound out thousands of lines of code. 2. The secret to how you get 100x more done than any individual programmer can do is that you have 200 programmers working together feeling 50% productive. 3. Google has no interest in projects that can be accomplished by one brilliant engineer working by themselves. It can be really unsatisfying for a programmer, because we all learn to program individually and that's what we base our "am I being productive?" feeling on, but it turns out that you can do some really amazing things if you're willing to put that aside and work together, even if it means spending half your day in meetings and checking email or writing design docs that no one reads. And if you're feeling challenged, it's probably because you're doing something convoluted and even you won't remember how it works in six months and no one will be able to maintain it and you can actually get nearly equivalent performance out of three mapreduces and a drop-in machine learning model, so maybe you should just do that? It's not for everyone, but at the end of the day would you rather feel productive and challenged, or actually change the world a little bit at a time?
thrownaway2424 11y ago
"Moving huge amounts of data from hither to yon" is not a specialized role at Google. Anybody with solid C++ skills can find a way to work on that.
- dpe82 11y ago
  Heck if that's the metric anybody familiar with SQL or even basic unix command line operations can do it if they really want. It's sometimes easy to forget how much data we regularly move around without really thinking about it.