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Ask HN: What do you think of Google (as a company)?

22 points by baccheion 11y ago

That is, how do you perceive the company, its work environment, its employees, and its future prospects?

twunde 11y ago
I worked for Google as a contractor for a small team a few years ago. What's most impressive looking back is that everyone I worked with was genuinely nice and smart including the cooks and janitors. I would be willing to hire literally everyone I worked with, no exceptions. Overall, Google treats its employees really well and receives good work from them. Working at Google exposes you to best practices. Overall, Google will continue to do well for the foreseeable future as they control ~90% of the online advertising market.
gdfbvbvc 11y ago
This article pretty much sums it up: https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e#.8pmgy7nzn https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo... I wouldnt work there even if I was smart enough to do so, for moral reasons.
stephenr 11y ago
They're one of the worlds biggest (my share market value, and mind share) companies, and almost the entirety of their revenue is generated by collecting huge amounts of personal information about people all over the web, and using that data to sell adverts, all over the web. Yes, a percentage of their revenues have been spent on things that help people without inflicting more harm (e.g. some of their software contributions to the world, some services they run "for free" which the industry uses for security purposes). That doesn't mean their other actions should be ignored or accepted as OK. Edit: Based on the other comment maybe this is about considering working for Google? I wouldn't work for Google for all the money in the world. I've had a high paying contract position doing work I didn't really enjoy that much, on projects that made questionable choices (I don't mean tech choices). The saying "you can't buy happiness" is fucking true. If you are doing something you hate, all the money in the world won't make you enjoy it.
- argonaut 11y ago
  Common sense (and my limited sample size of friends I know working at Google) tells me that the vast majority of people working at Google love their jobs.
  - stephenr 11y ago
    > Common sense Why is it common sense that people would "love" to work at Google? A lot of posts/comments/etc in the last few years say "I love my job, <employer> provides free <snacks/food/hookers/whatever> and I have unlimited time off whenever I want it. That isn't a job you love. Thats literally a job that offers ridiculous "perks" because the job itself is not enough to attract the people they want.
    - christopher_ 11y ago
      It consistently tops the chats of "best places to work". Combine that with the fact that there's literally a movie about how great it is to work there and I'd say that's pretty common sense.
      - stephenr 11y ago
        > Common sense is a basic ability to perceive, understand, and judge things, which is shared by nearly all people and can reasonably be expected of nearly all people without any need for debate. You think that Google being a great place to work meets this definition, despite the fact that the vast majority of people have no idea what it's like to work there.? > It consistently tops the chats of "best places to work". Which are answered by who? I've never even seen one of those surveys and I've worked in the industry for 13 years. SV types tend to think the world is all like SV (which seems to be a focusing of the more general American view point) > Combine that with the fact that there's literally a movie about how great it is to work there There's a biographical movie about the life of Steve Jobs that has actual evidence about factual events, and they fucked it up massively. Why would you assume any movie is a true representation of something, especially a fucking comedy??
alexnewman 11y ago
Great company. Too arrogant. It may require a kick in the pants to become what it wants to become. Something more human altering than websearch. As far as one trick ponies go. It's not too bad. I wish they hadn't given up on space.
argonaut 11y ago
I know many people at the company and have visited several times. My perception: massive, massive company, with a stellar engineering-talent brand, and raw technology that is across the board superior to all competitors. They are mostly likely the technological leader in databases, search technology, operating systems, distributed computing, cloud computing, machine learning, and self-driving cars. I say technological leader, because while they are still pretty decent at it, product design and marketing is not their strength - which explains why IMO Apple beats them in mobile (yeah, yeah, please don't argue with me on this, this is just an opinion) and Amazon beats them with cloud computing. Great perks, high pay (especially since the stock is doing so well). Contrary to the HN popular opinion, I have never heard anything negative about work life balance at Google, although I'm sure lots of companies are better at this than Google - I think the stereotype comes from Google's earlier days and the fact that workaholic types tend to be attracted to companies like Google. The major negatives relate to the fact that Google is massive and somewhat elitist about credentials. Because it is so huge, it is unlikely you will get to work on any of these cool technologies (or any exact team you want to work on, for that matter) when you're just starting out at Google, unless you have some sort of "in" into Google, are from a top school, did an internship at Google already, or otherwise have some sort of significant leg up over everyone else. But regardless you'll be exposed to lots of engineering best practices. A related problem is that because many of the infrastructure/tools are internal (not to mention light years ahead of the competition), a lot of skills you learn won't be transferable to the startup world, for example.
TurboHaskal 11y ago
Most of what I know from the company comes from watching the movie The Internship. It seems to be packed full of eunuchs. They seem to pay and treat their employees well though.
mrmondo 11y ago
They know too much about everyone, I don't trust them, they are quick to drop software / platforms they develop. Their products are generally appear to be ugly to me. Their search result quality is good.
plinkplonk 11y ago
I have a dozen+ friends who work at Google(Engineering). Most of them are very happy with their jobs. As with any large company,the key to happiness is getting to work with the right team on the right problem. . The other factor here is that the specific projects you want to work on might be concentrated in (say) Mountain View and you want to live in Bangalore (or wherever)in which case (unless you are a superstar) you are out of luck. The best way to get hired (again from what my friends tell me) is to be actively sought after by a specific team for your specific expertise. Else you end up wanting to work on Search Quality and/or self driving cars, and end up fixing bugs in Gmail (nothing wrong with that if that is what you want to do. In any case, having a Googler submit your CV to HR is much better than a blind application/recruiter driven application. The good news is that they are now so large, that most tech people know someone who works for them.
iDemonix 11y ago
Great company, would love to work there but I lack the knowledge and motivation - my current company have worn me down too much. Obviously they harvest + use personal information on a global scale, but for the amazing free products they put out that enhance my life (I ride my motorbike a lot and get lost, I live in Google Maps), that's a fair trade. They do make some dumb decisions (i.e. the whole YouTube + Google+ thing) but what company doesn't.
johan_larson 11y ago
There are pluses and minuses to working for Google. On the plus side, they pay well, your colleagues will be uncommonly capable, and you'll get a chance to work on a vast scale. It's cool. On the minus side, the company is very, very strict, particularly around its codebase. For each language, there is an extensive set of coding guidelines (actually rules) covering even minute issues like spacing. And it's actually enforced. If you're looking for a high-trust environment, or just some elbow room to do things your way, stay the heck away. The company is also very bureaucratic, particularly around hiring and promotion. Promotions are done by independent boards, based on extensive documentation (the "perf packet") provided by the candidate and his manager/lead. At this point, these packets are hefty enough to beat a man to death with. To submit code, you'll also need to get certified for "readability" in each language you will be working in, a process that takes months. Finally, I'd say Google has a bit of false consciousness around what sort of culture they actually have. They want to think of themselves as a free, loose sort of place where people are empowered to look for problems and go fix them. That's why they still have 20% time, for example. In truth, what you'll be rewarded for is doing what your boss wants, to his satisfaction; everything else is at best marginal. And you know, I think the employees know that, since 20% time is taken by less than 5% of the engineering staff. A culture of "do what your boss tells you" isn't bad of course; what it is, is ordinary. So, some big pluses, oh yeah, but some big minuses too.
- ojbrien 11y ago
  I'm sure you're right about not having quite as much elbow room at google compared to other companies - but saying that I'm not sure strictly enforcing a style guide is great example a developers freedom being quashed. Anywhere you're working on a codebase that you want to be maintainable having a style guide that is strictly enforced seems like a no brainer. Keeping in my mind google could have any number of developers working on a codebase
  - johan_larson 11y ago
    I don't object to having a style guide. I object to the extent of it. Some rules of good practice make sense. But having a really extensive style guide shifts code review away from what it should be focusing on -- correctness, clarity, efficiency -- towards punctilious enforcement of minutiae. Here's Google's Java style guide, if you want to have a look yourself: https://google.github.io/styleguide/javaguide.html https://google.github.io/styleguide/javaguide.html
WorldMaker 11y ago
On the personal side, these days I find myself rather skeptical about Google's aims and interests and have worked to slowly divest myself from using their services (that remain [1]), several of which I do worry that I rely on but are on one sort of life support or another. Even as someone that has paid in the past for Google Apps services, I've never really felt like a customer of Google, per that adage that we aren't Google's customers, but its products (to advertisers). As for the culture and work environments, here's my very tiny slice of exposure, for what it may be worth: Interviewed twice last year for decreasingly technical positions. Impression I received was that I was not the hyperfocused autism-spectrum specialist insect they were looking for technically, and I definitely understand why they might feel that way. I preface with that so that you may take what follows with the appropriate grains of salt. Across two trips out to the Bay Area the majority of interviews were still held remotely over video conferencing, which was frustrating because I could have done Hangouts just as easily from home. This seemed to underline a sort of contradictory stance on remote work in the company to me. (I don't know how much of that was due to the nature of the specific groups I interviewed with, but certainly sounded somewhat par for the course given discussions with recruiters there.) I suppose it wasn't entirely a waste of time as I did get to see some impressions of the culture in the buildings themselves. I did not like Mountain View, but largely because I'm spoiled by where I live now and don't like driving and suburban sprawl all that much. The parts of the Google campus I saw seemed nice and happy places to be, but still seemed to be mostly a drive from anywhere interesting before/after work and even parts of themselves. The Google office in San Francisco proper was great and in an interesting part of downtown. It was also apparently woefully undersized, largely due to Google's contradictory unwillingness for bulk remote work from home but allowance for "work from another office" and the number of employees that wanted to live/work closer to SF downtown than commute out to Mountain View. Most of the employees I encountered seemed like good, smart people. I wish I would have had more actual face-to-face interactions. I had one technical interviewer I thought was not very good at social interaction, and I felt that unduly soured the already stressful and ugly reality of a non-face-to-face "whiteboard technical interview" performed via Google Docs and conference screen. I realize that a lot of that comes out seeming particularly negative and sour, and I'm probably an edge case in more than one way in my experiences. That said, hopefully my anecdotes here are helpful to someone else. [1] I was a heavy Reader user and its shutdown did a lot to lose favor from me.
eecks 11y ago
As a software dev I perceive Google to a place where people live to work for instead of working to live. As a normal person, I see Google as a company looking to collect all of my personal info. EDIT: To add: They really pissed me off joining all their services under one account (YouTube really). Their search is getting worse but it is still the best out there. I use DuckDuckGo normally but often have to go back to Google search.

22 points by baccheion 11y ago

That is, how do you perceive the company, its work environment, its employees, and its future prospects?

I worked for Google as a contractor for a small team a few years ago. What's most impressive looking back is that everyone I worked with was genuinely nice and smart including the cooks and janitors. I would be willing to hire literally everyone I worked with, no exceptions. Overall, Google treats its employees really well and receives good work from them. Working at Google exposes you to best practices. Overall, Google will continue to do well for the foreseeable future as they control ~90% of the online advertising market.

gdfbvbvc 11y ago

This article pretty much sums it up: https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e#.8pmgy7nzn https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo... I wouldnt work there even if I was smart enough to do so, for moral reasons.

stephenr 11y ago

They're one of the worlds biggest (my share market value, and mind share) companies, and almost the entirety of their revenue is generated by collecting huge amounts of personal information about people all over the web, and using that data to sell adverts, all over the web. Yes, a percentage of their revenues have been spent on things that help people without inflicting more harm (e.g. some of their software contributions to the world, some services they run "for free" which the industry uses for security purposes). That doesn't mean their other actions should be ignored or accepted as OK. Edit: Based on the other comment maybe this is about considering working for Google? I wouldn't work for Google for all the money in the world. I've had a high paying contract position doing work I didn't really enjoy that much, on projects that made questionable choices (I don't mean tech choices). The saying "you can't buy happiness" is fucking true. If you are doing something you hate, all the money in the world won't make you enjoy it.

argonaut 11y ago
Common sense (and my limited sample size of friends I know working at Google) tells me that the vast majority of people working at Google love their jobs.
- stephenr 11y ago
  > Common sense Why is it common sense that people would "love" to work at Google? A lot of posts/comments/etc in the last few years say "I love my job, <employer> provides free <snacks/food/hookers/whatever> and I have unlimited time off whenever I want it. That isn't a job you love. Thats literally a job that offers ridiculous "perks" because the job itself is not enough to attract the people they want.
  - christopher_ 11y ago
    It consistently tops the chats of "best places to work". Combine that with the fact that there's literally a movie about how great it is to work there and I'd say that's pretty common sense.
    - stephenr 11y ago
      > Common sense is a basic ability to perceive, understand, and judge things, which is shared by nearly all people and can reasonably be expected of nearly all people without any need for debate. You think that Google being a great place to work meets this definition, despite the fact that the vast majority of people have no idea what it's like to work there.? > It consistently tops the chats of "best places to work". Which are answered by who? I've never even seen one of those surveys and I've worked in the industry for 13 years. SV types tend to think the world is all like SV (which seems to be a focusing of the more general American view point) > Combine that with the fact that there's literally a movie about how great it is to work there There's a biographical movie about the life of Steve Jobs that has actual evidence about factual events, and they fucked it up massively. Why would you assume any movie is a true representation of something, especially a fucking comedy??

alexnewman 11y ago

Great company. Too arrogant. It may require a kick in the pants to become what it wants to become. Something more human altering than websearch. As far as one trick ponies go. It's not too bad. I wish they hadn't given up on space.

argonaut 11y ago

I know many people at the company and have visited several times. My perception: massive, massive company, with a stellar engineering-talent brand, and raw technology that is across the board superior to all competitors. They are mostly likely the technological leader in databases, search technology, operating systems, distributed computing, cloud computing, machine learning, and self-driving cars. I say technological leader, because while they are still pretty decent at it, product design and marketing is not their strength - which explains why IMO Apple beats them in mobile (yeah, yeah, please don't argue with me on this, this is just an opinion) and Amazon beats them with cloud computing. Great perks, high pay (especially since the stock is doing so well). Contrary to the HN popular opinion, I have never heard anything negative about work life balance at Google, although I'm sure lots of companies are better at this than Google - I think the stereotype comes from Google's earlier days and the fact that workaholic types tend to be attracted to companies like Google. The major negatives relate to the fact that Google is massive and somewhat elitist about credentials. Because it is so huge, it is unlikely you will get to work on any of these cool technologies (or any exact team you want to work on, for that matter) when you're just starting out at Google, unless you have some sort of "in" into Google, are from a top school, did an internship at Google already, or otherwise have some sort of significant leg up over everyone else. But regardless you'll be exposed to lots of engineering best practices. A related problem is that because many of the infrastructure/tools are internal (not to mention light years ahead of the competition), a lot of skills you learn won't be transferable to the startup world, for example.

TurboHaskal 11y ago

Most of what I know from the company comes from watching the movie The Internship. It seems to be packed full of eunuchs. They seem to pay and treat their employees well though.

mrmondo 11y ago

They know too much about everyone, I don't trust them, they are quick to drop software / platforms they develop. Their products are generally appear to be ugly to me. Their search result quality is good.

plinkplonk 11y ago

I have a dozen+ friends who work at Google(Engineering). Most of them are very happy with their jobs. As with any large company,the key to happiness is getting to work with the right team on the right problem. . The other factor here is that the specific projects you want to work on might be concentrated in (say) Mountain View and you want to live in Bangalore (or wherever)in which case (unless you are a superstar) you are out of luck. The best way to get hired (again from what my friends tell me) is to be actively sought after by a specific team for your specific expertise. Else you end up wanting to work on Search Quality and/or self driving cars, and end up fixing bugs in Gmail (nothing wrong with that if that is what you want to do. In any case, having a Googler submit your CV to HR is much better than a blind application/recruiter driven application. The good news is that they are now so large, that most tech people know someone who works for them.

iDemonix 11y ago

Great company, would love to work there but I lack the knowledge and motivation - my current company have worn me down too much. Obviously they harvest + use personal information on a global scale, but for the amazing free products they put out that enhance my life (I ride my motorbike a lot and get lost, I live in Google Maps), that's a fair trade. They do make some dumb decisions (i.e. the whole YouTube + Google+ thing) but what company doesn't.

johan_larson 11y ago

There are pluses and minuses to working for Google. On the plus side, they pay well, your colleagues will be uncommonly capable, and you'll get a chance to work on a vast scale. It's cool. On the minus side, the company is very, very strict, particularly around its codebase. For each language, there is an extensive set of coding guidelines (actually rules) covering even minute issues like spacing. And it's actually enforced. If you're looking for a high-trust environment, or just some elbow room to do things your way, stay the heck away. The company is also very bureaucratic, particularly around hiring and promotion. Promotions are done by independent boards, based on extensive documentation (the "perf packet") provided by the candidate and his manager/lead. At this point, these packets are hefty enough to beat a man to death with. To submit code, you'll also need to get certified for "readability" in each language you will be working in, a process that takes months. Finally, I'd say Google has a bit of false consciousness around what sort of culture they actually have. They want to think of themselves as a free, loose sort of place where people are empowered to look for problems and go fix them. That's why they still have 20% time, for example. In truth, what you'll be rewarded for is doing what your boss wants, to his satisfaction; everything else is at best marginal. And you know, I think the employees know that, since 20% time is taken by less than 5% of the engineering staff. A culture of "do what your boss tells you" isn't bad of course; what it is, is ordinary. So, some big pluses, oh yeah, but some big minuses too.

ojbrien 11y ago
I'm sure you're right about not having quite as much elbow room at google compared to other companies - but saying that I'm not sure strictly enforcing a style guide is great example a developers freedom being quashed. Anywhere you're working on a codebase that you want to be maintainable having a style guide that is strictly enforced seems like a no brainer. Keeping in my mind google could have any number of developers working on a codebase
- johan_larson 11y ago
  I don't object to having a style guide. I object to the extent of it. Some rules of good practice make sense. But having a really extensive style guide shifts code review away from what it should be focusing on -- correctness, clarity, efficiency -- towards punctilious enforcement of minutiae. Here's Google's Java style guide, if you want to have a look yourself: https://google.github.io/styleguide/javaguide.html https://google.github.io/styleguide/javaguide.html

WorldMaker 11y ago

On the personal side, these days I find myself rather skeptical about Google's aims and interests and have worked to slowly divest myself from using their services (that remain [1]), several of which I do worry that I rely on but are on one sort of life support or another. Even as someone that has paid in the past for Google Apps services, I've never really felt like a customer of Google, per that adage that we aren't Google's customers, but its products (to advertisers). As for the culture and work environments, here's my very tiny slice of exposure, for what it may be worth: Interviewed twice last year for decreasingly technical positions. Impression I received was that I was not the hyperfocused autism-spectrum specialist insect they were looking for technically, and I definitely understand why they might feel that way. I preface with that so that you may take what follows with the appropriate grains of salt. Across two trips out to the Bay Area the majority of interviews were still held remotely over video conferencing, which was frustrating because I could have done Hangouts just as easily from home. This seemed to underline a sort of contradictory stance on remote work in the company to me. (I don't know how much of that was due to the nature of the specific groups I interviewed with, but certainly sounded somewhat par for the course given discussions with recruiters there.) I suppose it wasn't entirely a waste of time as I did get to see some impressions of the culture in the buildings themselves. I did not like Mountain View, but largely because I'm spoiled by where I live now and don't like driving and suburban sprawl all that much. The parts of the Google campus I saw seemed nice and happy places to be, but still seemed to be mostly a drive from anywhere interesting before/after work and even parts of themselves. The Google office in San Francisco proper was great and in an interesting part of downtown. It was also apparently woefully undersized, largely due to Google's contradictory unwillingness for bulk remote work from home but allowance for "work from another office" and the number of employees that wanted to live/work closer to SF downtown than commute out to Mountain View. Most of the employees I encountered seemed like good, smart people. I wish I would have had more actual face-to-face interactions. I had one technical interviewer I thought was not very good at social interaction, and I felt that unduly soured the already stressful and ugly reality of a non-face-to-face "whiteboard technical interview" performed via Google Docs and conference screen. I realize that a lot of that comes out seeming particularly negative and sour, and I'm probably an edge case in more than one way in my experiences. That said, hopefully my anecdotes here are helpful to someone else. [1] I was a heavy Reader user and its shutdown did a lot to lose favor from me.

eecks 11y ago

As a software dev I perceive Google to a place where people live to work for instead of working to live. As a normal person, I see Google as a company looking to collect all of my personal info. EDIT: To add: They really pissed me off joining all their services under one account (YouTube really). Their search is getting worse but it is still the best out there. I use DuckDuckGo normally but often have to go back to Google search.