18 ms·

My Google Internship

359 points by goldsborough 10y ago

mikebay 10y ago
People should write articles instead of "How I loose my account with Google". That would be much more accurate and interesting reading.
steven777400 10y ago
I love reading accounts like this. It's fun and well written and I enjoy the photos too. I work in a cube farm of grey cubes on boring LoB applications. I know I'll never be skilled enough (or, more correctly, I'll never be ambitious enough to become skilled enough) to work at Google et al but it's really fun to sample the experience from the outside. :)
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  I really hate reading people believe they aren't skilled enough or won't be good enough to work at Google. When you realize all of the toys are part of an extremely successful strategy to keep you at the office as long as possible, and that Google is a huge company that has to hire thousands of people every year, you realize that this view that Google is "the best place to work" or that everyone who works there is a genius is silly. While some of the most intelligent people I know work at or have worked at Google at some point, I know just as many Googlers I would describe as incompetent company men incapable of seeing beyond a PR line. Please don't ever get the impression that Googlers are somehow above you, because they're not. They're just people doing jobs. You probably deserve more credit than you give yourself, and hey, humility is a virtue.
  - patrickxdaniel 10y ago
    Well said
  - bit_logic 10y ago
    Not sure why this is downvoted, it's mostly true. At this point, getting an offer from Google has nothing to do with engineer skill. Only one thing matters, spending time studying algorithms/data structures and being able to quickly pattern match it to random problems. It's just like cramming for a final exam in college. Massive amount of info pushed into short-term memory and then after finals week, flushed out. Has nothing to do with your skill or experience as an engineer. If I saw a resume and it had Google on it, it doesn't really tell me much other than they played the tech interview game well. It would actually be a signal that I should not interview them like the way Google and others do because they know how to do optimized studying for it. Instead, some other interview method should be used to find out if they're actually a good engineer instead of just good at studying.
    - goldsborough 10y ago
      Yes and no. Interviewing is definitely something you can become good at by practice (I can confirm). But I can tell you that studying algorithms and data structures for interviews (which I would not have done otherwise) has made me a much better engineer and I've taken a huge amount of knowledge from it that I use very often. So it's more like one of those exams that taught you a lot, even if you don't remember everything after a year :)
    - home_boi 10y ago
      almost every other good tech company interviews using the same types of questions
    - cromwellian 10y ago
      I'd say getting an offer from Google means nothing, but successfully working there for a few years at level 5 or above, does count for something. If you are recruiting for a startup, as my wife's recently did, the difference between the Xooglers she hired and non-Xooglers in terms of productivity and code quality was large. This would likewise apply to seasoned ex-Facebook, Twitter, Square, Amazon, etc engineers. These are likely people who had to work with teams on reliable complex systems that serve a big audience. It won't matter for the prototype you use to get seed funding, but I'd argue it matters for the eventual rewrite.
  - serge2k 10y ago
    The pay, company reputation (as a good employer AND top place technically), appearance on a resume, possibility of working on something cool, and actually managing to get through their interview is always going to appeal to people. I'd work at google if I got an offer, because why not. I know it's a big company and everything, oh well. I'd settle for passing the interview though. Don't like failing. :P
  - munificent 10y ago
    > When you realize all of the toys are part of an extremely successful strategy to keep you at the office as long as possible Ugh, I can't believe how often I see this repeated with zero evidence to support it. I work at Google. The office is a ghost town by 6:30. The work life balance on every team I'm aware of is great. Saying the perks are some underhanded strategy to keep people around hugely insults the intelligence of the people working here or at any other office for that matter. Do you honestly think there are people that are like, "God, I'm miserable! I've been here 16 hours and I hate my life but I just... can't... stop... playing foosball!" Damn you, Google, and your nefarious perks! No, that doesn't happen. The reality is that skilled software engineers are in very high demand and companies compete very hard for them. Salary is part of it but perks are a huge component. No matter how much cash you make, for eight hours of the day, you are not spending it on fun leisure, you are at work. So companies understand now that they have to make the workplace appealing too to keep talent. They also find, no surprise, that happy, stimulated people are productive, creative people too. > Please don't ever get the impression that Googlers are somehow above you, because they're not. I totally agree.
    - namelezz 10y ago
      > skilled software engineers are in very high demand and companies compete very hard for them I keep hearing this but when I ask how to identify skilled engineers things get confused. ;)
      - humanrebar 10y ago
        It's mostly about keeping the ones you already have.
      - chimmy88 10y ago
        To sound as snarky as you do, if you can't identify skilled engineers, you aren't one.
    - linkregister 10y ago
      I agree. I know a couple of outliers at Google who work long hours, but even the business folks aren't working much more than 45-50 hours per week. None of the engineers I know work more than 40 hours per week. I've heard that some engineering teams at Amazon and Apple work long hours, but never heard it about Airbnb, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft (last 5 years), or Uber.
  - cromwellian 10y ago
    I left the office at 5:40pm tonite, about majority of my team had already left. Most Googlers I encounter are extremely humble. I'd say one of the most valuable things about Googley culture is the lack of prima donna alpha-male macho-engineer behavior. Because Google has so many highly skilled engineers, and because it frowns in general on being an egotistical jerk, it's hard for even huge egos not to adopt some humility. How can I think I'm the bees knees, when I work at a company that employs Rob Pike and Jeff Dean? I've worked at IBM, Oracle, and several mid-sized companies over my 20 years as an engineer, and while many of those companies had high quality engineers, I'd say the biggest benefit of Google is the Company culture it created, not the skill levels of the people.
    - chrisseaton 10y ago
      > I left the office at 5:40pm tonite I can't tell if this is supposed to be evidence that you don't work long hours or an admission that you do.
      - bschwindHN 10y ago
        It all depends on the starting time.
      - cromwellian 10y ago
        I usually don't get into the office until after 10.
      - cromwellian 10y ago
        BTW, keep in mind, many people stay late or come in late to avoid traffic on the 101.
    - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
      That company culture must look really different from in there than it does from out here.
      - cromwellian 10y ago
  - coldcode 10y ago
    I have 35 years of programming experience in many varied things (and currently iOS Swift). The changes of Google hiring me is 0. The chances of Google hiring a bright young guy willing to stay at work 14 hours a day I expect is pretty high.
    - DesiLurker 10y ago
      same here, 15 years of solid experience in a bunch of startups & many successful projects from scratch but all they seem to care about is warm bodies that can solve their weird interview puzzles. nothing from core expertise area at all.
    - wsh91 10y ago
      Respectfully, I don't know anyone here who works 14 hours a day. Anyone. And two of my teammates are more than twice my age (and I'm 25). Don't get so down on yourself. :) The chances of Google hiring you are zero if you don't apply, but if you do, they're definitely positive.
- brian-armstrong 10y ago
  If you want to work there, then you should just apply. You never know
- linkregister 10y ago
  What are LoB applications? I think you suffer from an extreme case of imposter syndrome. Looking through your comment history, I conclude you are more than capable of working there. Whether it would fit with your location/work-life-balance/life goals, I am not sure. Google gets an inflated reputation as do many other prestigious firms. The interview process contains a large element of chance. 1. I would suspect that anyone who has a passion for including more high-level thinking in the classes they teach has the right approach to technology. Let alone that you actually teach a programming course to begin with. 2. Many of your comments show insights into computing and algorithms that I would say are of the same caliber of those of my friends who work at Google.
  - Tushon 10y ago
    Not OP, but LOB stands for Line of Business and the TL;DR is that it is any application which fulfills a critical business need https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_of_business https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_of_business
    - linkregister 10y ago
      It sounds like a perfect set of experience to go to freelancing and then remote development. It seems like going remote is the 2nd most popular endgame for most individual contributors on HN (lucrative startup exit being the first). steven777400 is ahead of the game!
  - leshow 10y ago
    What specifically struck you about his comment history? I spent a few minutes digging through it and nothing really jumped out at me, very little of it was about engineering at all really. At least that I could see in the few minutes I spent glancing at it. Do you work at google yourself? What are you basing this opinion on?
- gmurphy 10y ago
  I thought the same thing once, but applied anyway on a whim. Have now been at Google for 11 years. It can't hurt to try.
  - LaMarseillaise 10y ago
    How did you apply? What experience, skills, and education did you have when you applied?
    - gmurphy 10y ago
      A Googler posted on their blog that they were looking, so I emailed him and he referred me. At the time I had dropped out of an EE+CS degree, had four years of suit-wearing professional experience writing enterprise webapps in PHP and ColdFusion, was halfway through a part-time Masters Degree in Design, and had a bunch of small JavaScript/C++/Art side projects. They hired me as a SWE, am now in UX. I won't pretend that I wasn't very lucky in timing, interviewers, etc, but you won't get anywhere if you don't roll the dice.
      - photogrammetry 10y ago
        What's your salary/compensation?
        poikniok 10y ago
        You expect a director at Google to post their comp? Seriously?
        jrvarela56 10y ago
        Care to share your business acumen with us instead of mocking someone for asking a question?
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
        10y ago
- wsh91 10y ago
  Hey, I know others on here have already chimed in, but I joined Google not that long ago having been rejected twice before. Please don't sell yourself short. Give us a try.
  - thewhitetulip 10y ago
    I live in India, have written a tutorial on Go, https://github.com/thewhitetulip/web-dev-golang-anti-textbook/ https://github.com/thewhitetulip/web-dev-golang-anti-textboo..., am decent with Go, am learning Vue.js, writing book on it as well, http://github.com/thewhitetulip/intro-to-vuejs/ http://github.com/thewhitetulip/intro-to-vuejs/. I am a full geek, applied twice. Didn't get any reply! edit: changed book to tutorial
    - gaius 10y ago
      No disrespect intended, but if you have on your CV that you have "written a book" and it turns out not to be an actual book, with an actual publisher, in actual bookstores, it will create a bad impression with most interviewers. You should rephrase it as an "online tutorial" or something.
      - thewhitetulip 10y ago
        Thank you for the advice. I always tend to write a short tutorial, but then people ask, "what made you write the book" or "what's the structure of your book if I want to contribute". That's why I end up writing book. I will keep this tip in mind :-)
    - kidlj 10y ago
      Vue.js is nice!
    - rxlim 10y ago
      I read your tutorial some time ago and found it to be very good, probably one of the best introductions to Go I have read so far. Keep up the good work.
- nedsma 10y ago
  I suggest you read The Python Paradox (http://paulgraham.com/pypar.html http://paulgraham.com/pypar.html), if you haven't already. It's not that your projects are simple, stupid, don't require skills (I believe it's actually quite the opposite), it's that your current skillset/projects aren't that exciting/sought after in the SV.
  - rampage101 10y ago
    Python has come a long way since 2004 when it was not used much in industry. Now it's the top language for data science, along with some good web frameworks such as Flask/Django. Although, I'm pleased to see that Python was thought of highly then.
- mattlondon 10y ago
  Also to chime in with the other Googlers here: apply. Apply. Apply. Apply. There is a lot of varied work going on internally at Google. As well as the hard-core, intense, "pure" software engineering work that everyone thinks about going on at Google (search, self-driving cars, android, machine learning etc etc), there is also a lot of ... how can I put this nicely? erm ... lets say "less-pure" software engineering going on. The hiring-bar is understandably high for the pure software engineers, but there are other roles. I am not a "software engineer" at Google (I am in another "less-pure" engineering role in the same office that was in the pictures in the article) but I still spend all day every day coding using the same equipment, tools, technologies and infrastructure as the "pure" engineers and we all get the same perks. The difference is that my work is mostly internal-only and generally wont get used by our end-users. And even if you're not a coder, there are still lots of roles that require technical skills to help our customers sort out their own technical problems. Pre-emptive answers to potential questions: * I just applied from the website for a job that sounded like a reasonable fit (not referral, no prior contact). The recruiters took it from there. Prior experience was a few years at IBM and a CompSci degree. * Perks are good but I still do 8:30 - 5 each day, sometimes I work from home if I am feeling lazy. In my London office some people stay late, but usually just because it is easier to schedule meetings with team members in the US (time overlaps etc) I want to work with eager, intelligent people so please I really do encourage anyone reading this to go take a look and apply. https://www.google.com/about/careers/ https://www.google.com/about/careers/ Good luck!
  - _RPM 10y ago
    Why would you tells someone on HN who is probably a software engineer to apply to google for non software engineer roles?
    - sb8244 10y ago
      I didn't read the comment as such. Comment author assumes (correctly I'm sure) that some people reading feel like they aren't good enough to work at Google because they aren't hardcore software engineers. The point was you can still code and get the perks even if you aren't that, you just won't be on the self driving cars or customer facing projects.
- rybosome 10y ago
  I genuinely believed that I wasn't intelligent or confident enough to pass a Google interview. When a Google recruiter contacted me several years ago, my wife encouraged me to reply even though I liked the startup for which I was working and didn't think I'd make it. I prepped aggressively, got very lucky, and now I've been at Google for over 3 years. This is a truly wonderful place to work; if you are interested in being here, I'd encourage you to apply in spite of your self doubt. :)
ztratar 10y ago
Love how they docked you for Work/Life balance. Grats on the productivity and keep up the building. :)
randartie 10y ago
Kind of ridiculous IMO that Google does not extend offers before leaving the internship. In cases like this, it really does not make sense.
- tyingq 10y ago
  I believe the OP is a first year CS student, so a full time offer probably didn't make sense.
- amaks 10y ago
  It does. All interns that receive good evaluation feedback are offered to transition into full-time employees and this transition may not even require interview loop.
  - uiri 10y ago
    It always requires a partial interview loop (the "conversion" interviews) now; they changed it in the last year or two.
    - mining 10y ago
      Nah, 2 or more time interns (only in the US, at the moment? Wasn't the case in Sydney, but was for a friend in Seattle) can get a FTE role if they have really good feedback from t heir internships.
      - andrewflnr 10y ago
        If so, it's not publicized internally. I interned at Google this summer too, and I didn't hear anything about how I could bypass conversion interviews. Maybe it's a case-by-case discretion thing.
        mining 10y ago
        I /think/ (with only anecdata) that this only comes up when you try to convert.
kenjackson 10y ago
I'm curious about the negative on work/life balance. Did they really talk about how to improve it, or was it tongue-in-cheek?
- goldsborough 10y ago
  Well, they did mean it for real. They didn't directly give me feedback on how to improve it, other than "go home, man". It's a personal choice in the end :)
  - NamTaf 10y ago
    For a defined 3-month internship where your primary goal is to suck up as much experience as possible at a young age during said internship, I think you can give insane work hours a pass and just accept that they're making the most of the short-term opportunity. Just don't let it become habit in a fulltime job and you'll be sweet.
    - Cyph0n 10y ago
      Even for a 3 month period, I think 16 hours is overkill. I would say 12 hours is the upper limit. This is just my opinion of course. In any case, good on Google for warning people about that, especially younger interns/employees. Some people just get into the lifestyle and end up realizing what they lost way too late. Work isn't everything. It's important to wind down by doing things other than what you do at work/school, such as exercise, meditation, or a just developing a hobby in general.
      - xapata 10y ago
        Sometimes I like to do 16 hours one day and 0 hours the next.
tyingq 10y ago
Really well written...an interesting read. On this though: "On my last day, my team got me some cake and gave me some very sweet farewell gifts, such as the potato below." What's with the potato? Is that some inside joke at Google?
- Vexs 10y ago
  I think potatoes are just a joke in general. They're just... there.
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    I think this is why Dwight Schrute owned a beet farm, also. He could have farmed anything, but beets are just inherently funnier than wheat or soybeans.
- goldsborough 10y ago
  No it was more a joke between me and a colleague, because even though we got gourmet food three times a day he would just eat potatoes and eggs all the time
40acres 10y ago
You mentioned that you took some MIT OCW courses, did you actually do the psets and quizzes?
- goldsborough 10y ago
  No, I mainly used OCW to go deeper into more advanced dynamic programming and hashing techniques. I was more involved in the Princeton courses and especially Cracking The Coding Interview.
  - josepi_ 10y ago
    Mind referencing more (all? :D) of the resources you used?
tmptmp 10y ago
>>For most people, this means coming to work some time between 9 and 11 AM (breakfast ends at 10 AM) and leaving between 5 and 8 PM (dinner starts at 6:30 PM). My schedule was a little different: I came to work between 9 and 10 AM and left between 12 and 2 AM. Yes, you read that right. I spent a lot of time in the office, to the extent that my co-workers asked me if I lived there. This is the kind of devotion to work/study, I wish I could emulate. Especially, given his age, working for 8 hr on company work and then 6-8 hr on your personal work/study without getting distracted is amazing. He should, and he indicated would (which is good), not ignore the work/life balance. Congrats and thanks for posting.
ipince 10y ago
Glad you had a good time. Any concerns about working on personal projects using Google resources (whether or not you used their laptop, you used their building, wifi, snacks, etc.). Wouldn't they own the IP? (if they wanted to pursue it)
quickConclusion 10y ago
Interesting, well written. Gives a window on how a corporation manages relationships with young smart people, and the actual psychological impact it has, the effectiveness. Thank you. Nitpicking: "Disclaimer: All opinions expressed below are my own." ??? Who else? How does poor legalese help your story? I swear: nobody will sue you.
- alexpetralia 10y ago
  Actually this is good policy, professionally speaking.
- goldsborough 10y ago
  I learnt to be very careful about anything that's about Google and not from Google :)
rifung 10y ago
It's already insane that you got an internship (at Google too!) in your first year of college, but you seem to have done extremely well there too. Nicely done! Seems like you're well on your way to being a very successful engineer.
- popcorncolonel 10y ago
  And what's next in the path of a very successful engineer? 10 years down the line? 30? 40?
  - pearjuice 10y ago
    Writing snarky comments on HN seems to work for most people.
19guid 10y ago
> It’s Googley to stand up for diversity and inclusion, such as protesting against binary gendering on toilets So if I support binary gendering on toilets, I'm not welcome at Google? Why has it become necessary to subscribe to a particular set of political beliefs in order to work for Silicon Valley firms?
- bobdole1234 10y ago
  Because assholes who care about things that aren't really their business are difficult to deal with.
- CydeWeys 10y ago
  The toilets in question are individual room style toilets. You really can't handle that? Is that really a political belief? How do you go to the bathroom in smaller restaurants that have had toilets like that for decades?
- Veelox 10y ago
  I don't think 19guid has a problem with using a toilet or being an asshole. I think the question is why is dissent from specific political views looked down upon? I have been in Silicon Valley for almost a year now after moving from the Midwest. I have been able to talk freely with my coworkers about some of my conservative views. Yet when I have shared what would count as "traditional values" on internal forums I have been on the receiving end of redicual and name calling. I very much would like to hear a thoughtful response on why Silicon Valley is so unaccepting of political dissent.
  - andrewflnr 10y ago
    It never looks like a "political" issue when you're convinced it's a human rights issue. For a human rights issue, the other side's feelings don't matter because they're obviously assholes anyway, so you can do whatever you want to them to advance The Cause.
  - dancek 10y ago
    I'd also love to hear an explanation from someone intolerant of dissent. I attribute it to the history of feminism. First-wave feminism genuinely dealt with human rights issues where dissent was based on a twisted view of humanity (e.g. women are property of men, not autonomous subjects). The late third and fourth waves have kept the same assumption about the nature of their views. But the views themselves are very much more extreme and unintuitive. Again, I'd love to hear someone explain it better from their own feminist point of view.
preordained 10y ago
Sorry, it seems like some kind of pseudo-utopia for people who want to feel special and intelligent all the time. People in silly spaceship themed rooms, meditating or hacking upside down, or maybe in sensory deprivation chambers for deep focus? It all screams: I'm entitled to coddling and acceptance--nay, encouragement of my eccentricities--cause I'm special. I just don't know if that's healthy or necessary, if Google is so successful in part due to this, or despite it.
- minitech 10y ago
  Or maybe it’s just for the sake of fun! There are some eccentric people out there, but I don’t think the point of having upside-down work areas is to cater to eccentricities.
- jccalhoun 10y ago
  "for people who want to feel special and intelligent all the time." Who doesn't want that?
- lostboys67 10y ago
  So you think that everyone dressing like an IBM'r in the 70's is better its the eccentrics, hackers and od balls that often can produce the ground breaking work
  - lostboys67 10y ago
    Never thought id get down voted on here for standing up for "hacker" culture. And BTW one of the worlds leading IBM experts (ie IBM used to get him to give talks ) to used to meditate in his own home made flotation tank - he one saved a quarterly billing run that was measured in hundreds of millions.
wsh91 10y ago
Hey--congrats on a really successful internship! I'm glad you had fun, and maybe we'll see you when you've wrapped up your studies, too. :)
lambda_func 10y ago
Nice writeup. My favorite part is >> simply practiced interview questions for about three to four months, every day, from morning till night. I then had three phone interviews around November, which I passed. It's interesting (& funny) to see both high schoolers and experienced people spend similar amount of time (~several months) practicing for these types of technical interviews.
- rubicon33 10y ago
  What it should be, is sad. These types of questions are often very different from actual work. The fact that you have to study or train for an interview process specifically, is absurd. Just being qualified for the job, should suffice.
  - wheelerwj 10y ago
    Just being qualified does suffice. It's the definition of qualified that needs to change.
  - crucifiction 10y ago
    Actually its good. If you study for months on interview questions to be able to pass the interview, you have "gamed" the system to get in and will likely be washed back out in 1-2 years depending on the mercy if your leadership team. People who spend the night before brushing up on their CS and passing the interview are those that actually pass (and stay and grow) and that is who the company really wants. Its just hard to weed out people who are very determined to game their way through.
    - RhodesianHunter 10y ago
      ...or the people willing to put that much effort into "gaming" the system as you call it are those most likely to put in the effort to succeed and thrive on the job, and are therefore precisely who Google is looking for...
    - RhodesianHunter 10y ago
chmln 10y ago
Great read. However, he lost me at > Googley to stand up for diversity and inclusion, such as protesting against binary gendering on toilets Is it Google's business? Why should Google be involved? Why cater to 0.6% of the population, at the expense of convenience for the 99.4%? At my last job we had "non-binary", "all-inclusive" bathrooms. They're just awkward. Not the stalls themselves, but having to share the bathroom with females, who would also rather have their separate, female bathroom.
- madeofpalk 10y ago
  Have you never been in a place with unisex toilets? In Australia, many offices, pubs and clubs have 'unisex toilets' which are basically just a whole bunch of small individual stalls with toilets + basin. Most of the time it isn't necessarily about being progressive, just cost saving and practicality.
  - ta34534445 10y ago
    I am in Australia, and have never come across "unisex toilets". Perhaps I'm misreading your comment, but I think you suggest a room of stall that can be used by all genders. I think by law however, there needs to be an "accessible" bathroom. This will be a single room which would likely fulfil the role.
- CydeWeys 10y ago
  It's a good deal more than 0.6% at Google, fyi. And the toilets in question aren't stall toilets, they're room toilets, like you'd see in a smaller restaurant.
  - edblarney 10y ago
    I doubt that strongly. In fact - it's considerably less than 0.6% in real life. The manner in which they calculate 'non gender binary' is really, really soft - i.e. 'if don't feel entirely male or female' you can often be included in that group. Hell, I'm a pretty straight white dude, but I don't feel 'fully male' 100% of the time! Moreover - most trans people are actually still 'binary' - they still identify as one or the other. I'm inclined to agree that Google has more of share of people who are not binary, but in reality, the number is really, really small. Much smaller than 0.6%.
Zedmor 10y ago
Read you resume. Un-fuckin-real. wow.
- tedks 10y ago
  Geez. You weren't exaggerating.
Shank 10y ago
I love reading accounts like this. As someone who had an internship in high school, I'm always happy to hear what other people's experiences were going into and out of the process. I think my immediate reaction is that Google creates an environment that simply doesn't exist at most other places. I interned at two companies in the defense industry. You could argue that our experiences were different because of security, but I disagree. The environment you described sounds like an absolute heaven: you have challenging, fun work, and have extremely well placed and delivered benefits. At both of my internships, the problems were hard. They weren't particularly fun to solve so much as they "had" to be solved and I was the only one to solve them. I got similar rewarding experiences completing tasks, though everything I did had to be "on the clock." As soon as we stopped working, we were expected to stop billing or move to some other task. The offices were dull, boring, and expensive to spend time in. Your internship had availability of food and technology that kept you happy. Neither of mine did this. At one internship, we had a free snack room. That's it. If we wanted to eat lunch at the cafeteria at my second internship, we could at great personal cost. We were stuck with "hand me down" hardware that was a menagerie of hardware pulled from random places throughout the building. If you were given a bad keyboard on day one, too bad -- it was yours forever. I complain like this because you had the exact opposite of the experience I had. Your experience is an irregularity, at least compared to what I've seen. This all comes down to culture, I think. The Google corporate culture is modern, focused on employee happiness, and focused on diversity. Things like getting your own hardware choices and free food go a long way to adding goodwill, and failing to take basic measures like that shows what I consider to be a lack of caring. I wish more companies would copy Google on how they treat their employees and interns. Even if it might seem a bit cheesy to go after the low hanging fruit, employee happiness goes a long way to building a thriving, mutually beneficial relationship between an employee and a company. Seeing a post like this makes me feel like my internship hosts haven't cared in the slightest. That's pretty painful, if I'm brutally honest.
- galfarragem 10y ago
  > Even if it might seem a bit cheesy to go after the low hanging fruit, employee happiness goes a long way to building a thriving, mutually beneficial relationship between an employee and a company. This. While general funding (IT is a very well funded sector) also matters, most of this is cultural. As an anecdote, I interned in a place (not IT related) where we had to use our personal laptops and even pay for drinking water and toilet paper..
alexpetralia 10y ago
Incredible maturity at your age - Google does a great job at finding talent.
userbinator 10y ago
It's good that you found it enjoyable, but something worth keeping in mind beyond the fun-and-games atmosphere is whether you are in agreement with the company's overall direction and goals (and the fact that you are essentially contributing to that effort by working there); it reminds me of this article with a very much opposing view: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7689897 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7689897
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  It's not so much Google employees would tell you they agree with Google's goals and direction, but that they have an incredible cognitive dissonance about what direction that is. Most Google engineers will tell you that Google is trying to make the world a better place, rather than the reality that Google is trying to make incredibly large amounts of money at the expense of anything that gets in their way.
dancek 10y ago
> I spent around three days on my presentation, mainly because I did it in LaTeX instead of PowerPoint, as any sane person would in about one tenth of the time. This was the only part I could completely identify with. Perhaps even using Google Slides would have been acceptable! But what geek could resist the allure of Beamer... :)
danspencer 10y ago
Cool article. But I always find it funny how people try to convince you that so-and-so in their company is a big shot ("our director, the fourth highest rank at Google, after CEO, SVP and VP"). Trust me, outside of your company, that person is quite irrelevant. For most people, that person is just someone working at a big company.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  Hey now, at least the naming hierarchy makes sense. My favorite example is finance, where VP is such a meaningless title that Goldman Sachs argued in court that it doesn't carry any weight. https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2014-09-04/goldman-sachs-just-says-vice-president-to-be-polite https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2014-09-04/goldman-s...
HiroshiSan 10y ago
Jesus christ, there is a lot of jealousy in this thread. I don't have anything interesting to add to the conversation but I am in awe with how much you've been able to accomplish in life already. Good job and I look forward to seeing what else you put out in the world.
nofugsgiven 10y ago
The fine article describes exactly the environment one would expect of people who run the worlds largest search engine but who still couldnt see a Trump victory coming a mile away. People living in a well cocooned safe space. A superb fit for university students. Pretty much consolidates my view that AlphaGo was Google's IBM Deep Blue moment ie now past their peak. Their future products and services are going to be increasingly as distant from reality as the people themselves are, and thus much less useful or profitable.
amelius 10y ago
Instead of Google cherry-picking all of the talent out of the pool, why not let them pay corporate taxes, so we can spend the money on education?
amelius 10y ago
If only institutes like CERN had such good HR/recruitment techniques as Google, this world could be a better place.
- Insanity 10y ago
  Not sure how the experience is like as a CERN intern, but you can surely do internships there as a student: https://jobs.web.cern.ch/join-us/students https://jobs.web.cern.ch/join-us/students -- If someone happens to have experience with interning at CERN, I'd love to hear about that :-)
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    Second hand, but the CERN interns I know were over the moon about it. Obviously they didn't have the perks of Google because they don't have the sheer cash flow, but they both described it as a fun and interesting place to work, with an entertaining social side among the employees.
edblarney 10y ago
"It’s Googley to stand up for diversity and inclusion, such as protesting against binary gendering on toilets" This is BS. 99.99% of the world is find with the 'binary signage' on toilets, and it is absolutely not 'anti trans' or 'anti anyone else' frankly, to do so. BTW - this is not like a 1960's movement - you're not in the 'right side of history' here. 'Binary Gender' is, and will always be normative, simply because almost everyone is binary, and is fine with it. The number of people who actually have issues with 'binary' is very, very small. Even most people who are trans are still 'binary' (!) i.e. they identify as one gender or the other, not anything in between. I somehow doubt that 'it's Googley' to be this, this may be a little bit of a stretch, or 'mis-articulation' by the author. Though I don't have a problem at all with someone who is 'anti gender binary' (I don't really care) - I do have a problem with a company that pushes social extremism as part of their culture. It's just more evidence of the culty behaviour at Google. I make a hobby of studying cults. I used to go into the Scientology clinic to 'take the test' and kind of debate with them, to get an understanding of how they are. I used to read a lot of their stuff - not for the 'knowledge' but to grasp the nature of the organization. These kinds of 'ideals' are actually far more about creating a coherent group, than projecting any ideals. Google is a good company, generally, but they do some nefarious things with our data. One of the great things about having a 'we are morally superior' cult, is that any decision made by Google that can feasibly be considered unethical - won't be, using the internal logic of 'We don't do evil, so, what we are doing cannot be evil'. Anyhow, it takes working at several companies for a while to start to figure this out.
- tptacek 10y ago
  For someone who doesn't care much about toilet signage, you sure care a lot about toilet signage.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - edblarney 10y ago
    You misread, or I miscommunicated my statement: I don't care about 'signage'. If Google has a practical reason to have special signage, all the power to them. I care about the 'social ethos unwittingly imbued on people' as a function of an aggressive culture. The signage is an artifact of the culture, as implied by the author it's 'Googly', i.e. 'these are the values that we must have' - which may have nothing to do with the workplace, but more to do with projecting ideology. If an Atheist was required to have 'morning prayer' at a company ... would this be acceptable? I mean, why should an Atheist care? It's just a bunch of words that would effectively have no meaning to them? Of course, it wouldn't be right to have 'prayer', per say, as a 'cultural requirement' unless it was a religious org, or special in that manner. Imagine being the only one at your company who 'doesn't do it' ... you'd be the Black Sheep surely. Google may have an over-representation of people with gender ID issues, and may very well just have some pragmatic solutions, like 'individual bathrooms' that are just marked as 'bathrooms'. This seems like a rather good solution to me, and avoids the ideological issues entirely. There's no argument needed, anywhere. But to specifically foster 'anti gender binary ideals' as part of the culture is wrong. My guess is the author is projecting is own ideals onto what 'Googly' means. Ask someone 'what Burning Man means' - and you get 1000 different answers. Most of them 'authoritative'. :).
j23eima 10y ago
What languages did you find yourself coding in?
- goldsborough 10y ago
  Web stuff, Python and Go
hiddencost 10y ago
The volume of people hung up on bathrooms should illustrate, to anyone on the fence, how virulent transphobia is. Framing it as a political question rather than a question of basic rights is quite dark. For context, they'll have a hallway with a dozen single bathrooms. They're not even mixing genders. But folks are so obsessed with their own fears of the unknown that they happily jump on any excuse to deny trans personhood. For context, trans people are less likely to be predators or violent, and much more likely to be the victims of violent crimes. https://www.ovc.gov/pubs/forge/sexual_numbers.html https://www.ovc.gov/pubs/forge/sexual_numbers.html
i336_ 10y ago
I must admit I'll drown a bit if I check all the comments, so I'm not sure if this has already been said. IMHO, the author is playing the "I like you very much and I'm going to be agreeable with just about everything you say and do, so you won't go wrong if you pick me to come back" game. At least they're demonstrating they have a good understanding of social networking. This reads like it's supposed to be an experience review, but it's incredibly over-positive and unbalanced/unfair. There are no real negatives mentioned. So I can only experience it as "I want to come back very much". That the author has gone to this extent (and only mentioned their successes) suggests either insecurity (impostor syndome) or - likelier - fear they won't be accepted back. The author did mention that their reviewers showed them some instances where they went wrong, I'm wondering if this is the main reason for this or whether it was simply the overwhelming environment. -- On another note, since everyone's added their opinions of actually working at Google I might as well join in. First of all, I took a look at the link noted in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13086051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13086051 and I don't agree with any of the points raised in there; most of that article can be adequately explained as conspiracy theory and provocation/incitation, I don't think the points they raise (and attempt to inflame) have much substance. That said, I do have some concerns of my own. The issue that's likeliest to have the biggest practical impact for me personally is that I have absolutely no foundation in math, due to the fact that I was born with severe learning difficulties that I only began to correctly identify around 18-22 and which I'm still in the process of learning how to counter for (I'm 26 now). This means that while I'm well-developed in more areas today than ever, math is an area I'm so far behind on I have zero incentive to catch up because I'd have so much foundational stuff to deal with. For example, I was at the supermarket a few months ago basically pushing all the buttons on my calculator as I couldn't remember what operator(s) to use to figure out how many onions I could buy for the amount of money I had. This wasn't a cognition problem - it was simply the fact that I am that ignorant about math as a subject. Tackling that to get a compsci job just doesn't seem like a good use of my time since I'll be 40 in a bit over 10 years and it may take me that long (or longer) to catch up. Normal kids to start to learn rudimentary math concepts around 8 or so after all. (I tried, but none of it never made any sense.) So I definitely appreciated all these pictures, knowing I'll never be likely to call a place like this home. I most also admit I'm more than a little jealous at the "nearly free" store - I could certainly do with changing my trend of having computers that are always 10 years old (my very limited disability support pension prevents me from legally getting a job, while diagnosis and ongoing treatment are unbelievably expensive!). Consistently old tech is one of the major reasons I haven't been able to springboard myself off of my pension and get a job - I've always been incredibly fascinated with animation, the visual arts, 3D, etc, and I'm on computers that swap like mad if I have more than 3 or 4 browser tabs open. Beyond these issues, there's the very tricky problem of the fact that Google isn't a startup, and I can't say I'm too enthused by the fact that it's generally frowned upon to want to define your own job title - I can see this stifling a lot of innovation (Google Reader, Google Wave, etc) that isn't an immediately apparent hit. For perhaps obvious reasons I've grown up always looking at the long view, and Google's corporate culture seems to have a very short attention span. Nobody is likely to ever read this but I thought I'd leave this here as a real-world example of why someone might not be a good fit for an environment like Google. If someone from Google ever wants to prove me wrong I'd be very happy to hear about it! :D

359 points by goldsborough 10y ago

People should write articles instead of "How I loose my account with Google". That would be much more accurate and interesting reading.

steven777400 10y ago

I love reading accounts like this. It's fun and well written and I enjoy the photos too. I work in a cube farm of grey cubes on boring LoB applications. I know I'll never be skilled enough (or, more correctly, I'll never be ambitious enough to become skilled enough) to work at Google et al but it's really fun to sample the experience from the outside. :)

ocdtrekkie 10y ago
I really hate reading people believe they aren't skilled enough or won't be good enough to work at Google. When you realize all of the toys are part of an extremely successful strategy to keep you at the office as long as possible, and that Google is a huge company that has to hire thousands of people every year, you realize that this view that Google is "the best place to work" or that everyone who works there is a genius is silly. While some of the most intelligent people I know work at or have worked at Google at some point, I know just as many Googlers I would describe as incompetent company men incapable of seeing beyond a PR line. Please don't ever get the impression that Googlers are somehow above you, because they're not. They're just people doing jobs. You probably deserve more credit than you give yourself, and hey, humility is a virtue.
- patrickxdaniel 10y ago
  Well said
- bit_logic 10y ago
  Not sure why this is downvoted, it's mostly true. At this point, getting an offer from Google has nothing to do with engineer skill. Only one thing matters, spending time studying algorithms/data structures and being able to quickly pattern match it to random problems. It's just like cramming for a final exam in college. Massive amount of info pushed into short-term memory and then after finals week, flushed out. Has nothing to do with your skill or experience as an engineer. If I saw a resume and it had Google on it, it doesn't really tell me much other than they played the tech interview game well. It would actually be a signal that I should not interview them like the way Google and others do because they know how to do optimized studying for it. Instead, some other interview method should be used to find out if they're actually a good engineer instead of just good at studying.
  - goldsborough 10y ago
    Yes and no. Interviewing is definitely something you can become good at by practice (I can confirm). But I can tell you that studying algorithms and data structures for interviews (which I would not have done otherwise) has made me a much better engineer and I've taken a huge amount of knowledge from it that I use very often. So it's more like one of those exams that taught you a lot, even if you don't remember everything after a year :)
  - home_boi 10y ago
    almost every other good tech company interviews using the same types of questions
  - cromwellian 10y ago
    I'd say getting an offer from Google means nothing, but successfully working there for a few years at level 5 or above, does count for something. If you are recruiting for a startup, as my wife's recently did, the difference between the Xooglers she hired and non-Xooglers in terms of productivity and code quality was large. This would likewise apply to seasoned ex-Facebook, Twitter, Square, Amazon, etc engineers. These are likely people who had to work with teams on reliable complex systems that serve a big audience. It won't matter for the prototype you use to get seed funding, but I'd argue it matters for the eventual rewrite.
- serge2k 10y ago
  The pay, company reputation (as a good employer AND top place technically), appearance on a resume, possibility of working on something cool, and actually managing to get through their interview is always going to appeal to people. I'd work at google if I got an offer, because why not. I know it's a big company and everything, oh well. I'd settle for passing the interview though. Don't like failing. :P
- munificent 10y ago
  > When you realize all of the toys are part of an extremely successful strategy to keep you at the office as long as possible Ugh, I can't believe how often I see this repeated with zero evidence to support it. I work at Google. The office is a ghost town by 6:30. The work life balance on every team I'm aware of is great. Saying the perks are some underhanded strategy to keep people around hugely insults the intelligence of the people working here or at any other office for that matter. Do you honestly think there are people that are like, "God, I'm miserable! I've been here 16 hours and I hate my life but I just... can't... stop... playing foosball!" Damn you, Google, and your nefarious perks! No, that doesn't happen. The reality is that skilled software engineers are in very high demand and companies compete very hard for them. Salary is part of it but perks are a huge component. No matter how much cash you make, for eight hours of the day, you are not spending it on fun leisure, you are at work. So companies understand now that they have to make the workplace appealing too to keep talent. They also find, no surprise, that happy, stimulated people are productive, creative people too. > Please don't ever get the impression that Googlers are somehow above you, because they're not. I totally agree.
  - namelezz 10y ago
    > skilled software engineers are in very high demand and companies compete very hard for them I keep hearing this but when I ask how to identify skilled engineers things get confused. ;)
    - humanrebar 10y ago
      It's mostly about keeping the ones you already have.
    - chimmy88 10y ago
      To sound as snarky as you do, if you can't identify skilled engineers, you aren't one.
  - linkregister 10y ago
    I agree. I know a couple of outliers at Google who work long hours, but even the business folks aren't working much more than 45-50 hours per week. None of the engineers I know work more than 40 hours per week. I've heard that some engineering teams at Amazon and Apple work long hours, but never heard it about Airbnb, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft (last 5 years), or Uber.
- cromwellian 10y ago
  I left the office at 5:40pm tonite, about majority of my team had already left. Most Googlers I encounter are extremely humble. I'd say one of the most valuable things about Googley culture is the lack of prima donna alpha-male macho-engineer behavior. Because Google has so many highly skilled engineers, and because it frowns in general on being an egotistical jerk, it's hard for even huge egos not to adopt some humility. How can I think I'm the bees knees, when I work at a company that employs Rob Pike and Jeff Dean? I've worked at IBM, Oracle, and several mid-sized companies over my 20 years as an engineer, and while many of those companies had high quality engineers, I'd say the biggest benefit of Google is the Company culture it created, not the skill levels of the people.
  - chrisseaton 10y ago
    > I left the office at 5:40pm tonite I can't tell if this is supposed to be evidence that you don't work long hours or an admission that you do.
    - bschwindHN 10y ago
      It all depends on the starting time.
    - cromwellian 10y ago
      I usually don't get into the office until after 10.
    - cromwellian 10y ago
      BTW, keep in mind, many people stay late or come in late to avoid traffic on the 101.
  - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
    That company culture must look really different from in there than it does from out here.
    - cromwellian 10y ago
- coldcode 10y ago
  I have 35 years of programming experience in many varied things (and currently iOS Swift). The changes of Google hiring me is 0. The chances of Google hiring a bright young guy willing to stay at work 14 hours a day I expect is pretty high.
  - DesiLurker 10y ago
    same here, 15 years of solid experience in a bunch of startups & many successful projects from scratch but all they seem to care about is warm bodies that can solve their weird interview puzzles. nothing from core expertise area at all.
  - wsh91 10y ago
    Respectfully, I don't know anyone here who works 14 hours a day. Anyone. And two of my teammates are more than twice my age (and I'm 25). Don't get so down on yourself. :) The chances of Google hiring you are zero if you don't apply, but if you do, they're definitely positive.
brian-armstrong 10y ago
If you want to work there, then you should just apply. You never know
linkregister 10y ago
What are LoB applications? I think you suffer from an extreme case of imposter syndrome. Looking through your comment history, I conclude you are more than capable of working there. Whether it would fit with your location/work-life-balance/life goals, I am not sure. Google gets an inflated reputation as do many other prestigious firms. The interview process contains a large element of chance. 1. I would suspect that anyone who has a passion for including more high-level thinking in the classes they teach has the right approach to technology. Let alone that you actually teach a programming course to begin with. 2. Many of your comments show insights into computing and algorithms that I would say are of the same caliber of those of my friends who work at Google.
- Tushon 10y ago
  Not OP, but LOB stands for Line of Business and the TL;DR is that it is any application which fulfills a critical business need https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_of_business https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_of_business
  - linkregister 10y ago
    It sounds like a perfect set of experience to go to freelancing and then remote development. It seems like going remote is the 2nd most popular endgame for most individual contributors on HN (lucrative startup exit being the first). steven777400 is ahead of the game!
- leshow 10y ago
  What specifically struck you about his comment history? I spent a few minutes digging through it and nothing really jumped out at me, very little of it was about engineering at all really. At least that I could see in the few minutes I spent glancing at it. Do you work at google yourself? What are you basing this opinion on?
gmurphy 10y ago
I thought the same thing once, but applied anyway on a whim. Have now been at Google for 11 years. It can't hurt to try.
- LaMarseillaise 10y ago
  How did you apply? What experience, skills, and education did you have when you applied?
  - gmurphy 10y ago
    A Googler posted on their blog that they were looking, so I emailed him and he referred me. At the time I had dropped out of an EE+CS degree, had four years of suit-wearing professional experience writing enterprise webapps in PHP and ColdFusion, was halfway through a part-time Masters Degree in Design, and had a bunch of small JavaScript/C++/Art side projects. They hired me as a SWE, am now in UX. I won't pretend that I wasn't very lucky in timing, interviewers, etc, but you won't get anywhere if you don't roll the dice.
    - photogrammetry 10y ago
      What's your salary/compensation?
      - poikniok 10y ago
        You expect a director at Google to post their comp? Seriously?
        jrvarela56 10y ago
        Care to share your business acumen with us instead of mocking someone for asking a question?
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
        10y ago
wsh91 10y ago
Hey, I know others on here have already chimed in, but I joined Google not that long ago having been rejected twice before. Please don't sell yourself short. Give us a try.
- thewhitetulip 10y ago
  I live in India, have written a tutorial on Go, https://github.com/thewhitetulip/web-dev-golang-anti-textbook/ https://github.com/thewhitetulip/web-dev-golang-anti-textboo..., am decent with Go, am learning Vue.js, writing book on it as well, http://github.com/thewhitetulip/intro-to-vuejs/ http://github.com/thewhitetulip/intro-to-vuejs/. I am a full geek, applied twice. Didn't get any reply! edit: changed book to tutorial
  - gaius 10y ago
    No disrespect intended, but if you have on your CV that you have "written a book" and it turns out not to be an actual book, with an actual publisher, in actual bookstores, it will create a bad impression with most interviewers. You should rephrase it as an "online tutorial" or something.
    - thewhitetulip 10y ago
      Thank you for the advice. I always tend to write a short tutorial, but then people ask, "what made you write the book" or "what's the structure of your book if I want to contribute". That's why I end up writing book. I will keep this tip in mind :-)
  - kidlj 10y ago
    Vue.js is nice!
  - rxlim 10y ago
    I read your tutorial some time ago and found it to be very good, probably one of the best introductions to Go I have read so far. Keep up the good work.
nedsma 10y ago
I suggest you read The Python Paradox (http://paulgraham.com/pypar.html http://paulgraham.com/pypar.html), if you haven't already. It's not that your projects are simple, stupid, don't require skills (I believe it's actually quite the opposite), it's that your current skillset/projects aren't that exciting/sought after in the SV.
- rampage101 10y ago
  Python has come a long way since 2004 when it was not used much in industry. Now it's the top language for data science, along with some good web frameworks such as Flask/Django. Although, I'm pleased to see that Python was thought of highly then.
mattlondon 10y ago
Also to chime in with the other Googlers here: apply. Apply. Apply. Apply. There is a lot of varied work going on internally at Google. As well as the hard-core, intense, "pure" software engineering work that everyone thinks about going on at Google (search, self-driving cars, android, machine learning etc etc), there is also a lot of ... how can I put this nicely? erm ... lets say "less-pure" software engineering going on. The hiring-bar is understandably high for the pure software engineers, but there are other roles. I am not a "software engineer" at Google (I am in another "less-pure" engineering role in the same office that was in the pictures in the article) but I still spend all day every day coding using the same equipment, tools, technologies and infrastructure as the "pure" engineers and we all get the same perks. The difference is that my work is mostly internal-only and generally wont get used by our end-users. And even if you're not a coder, there are still lots of roles that require technical skills to help our customers sort out their own technical problems. Pre-emptive answers to potential questions: * I just applied from the website for a job that sounded like a reasonable fit (not referral, no prior contact). The recruiters took it from there. Prior experience was a few years at IBM and a CompSci degree. * Perks are good but I still do 8:30 - 5 each day, sometimes I work from home if I am feeling lazy. In my London office some people stay late, but usually just because it is easier to schedule meetings with team members in the US (time overlaps etc) I want to work with eager, intelligent people so please I really do encourage anyone reading this to go take a look and apply. https://www.google.com/about/careers/ https://www.google.com/about/careers/ Good luck!
- _RPM 10y ago
  Why would you tells someone on HN who is probably a software engineer to apply to google for non software engineer roles?
  - sb8244 10y ago
    I didn't read the comment as such. Comment author assumes (correctly I'm sure) that some people reading feel like they aren't good enough to work at Google because they aren't hardcore software engineers. The point was you can still code and get the perks even if you aren't that, you just won't be on the self driving cars or customer facing projects.
rybosome 10y ago
I genuinely believed that I wasn't intelligent or confident enough to pass a Google interview. When a Google recruiter contacted me several years ago, my wife encouraged me to reply even though I liked the startup for which I was working and didn't think I'd make it. I prepped aggressively, got very lucky, and now I've been at Google for over 3 years. This is a truly wonderful place to work; if you are interested in being here, I'd encourage you to apply in spite of your self doubt. :)

ztratar 10y ago

Love how they docked you for Work/Life balance. Grats on the productivity and keep up the building. :)

randartie 10y ago

Kind of ridiculous IMO that Google does not extend offers before leaving the internship. In cases like this, it really does not make sense.

tyingq 10y ago
I believe the OP is a first year CS student, so a full time offer probably didn't make sense.
amaks 10y ago
It does. All interns that receive good evaluation feedback are offered to transition into full-time employees and this transition may not even require interview loop.
- uiri 10y ago
  It always requires a partial interview loop (the "conversion" interviews) now; they changed it in the last year or two.
  - mining 10y ago
    Nah, 2 or more time interns (only in the US, at the moment? Wasn't the case in Sydney, but was for a friend in Seattle) can get a FTE role if they have really good feedback from t heir internships.
    - andrewflnr 10y ago
      If so, it's not publicized internally. I interned at Google this summer too, and I didn't hear anything about how I could bypass conversion interviews. Maybe it's a case-by-case discretion thing.
      - mining 10y ago
        I /think/ (with only anecdata) that this only comes up when you try to convert.

kenjackson 10y ago

I'm curious about the negative on work/life balance. Did they really talk about how to improve it, or was it tongue-in-cheek?

goldsborough 10y ago
Well, they did mean it for real. They didn't directly give me feedback on how to improve it, other than "go home, man". It's a personal choice in the end :)
- NamTaf 10y ago
  For a defined 3-month internship where your primary goal is to suck up as much experience as possible at a young age during said internship, I think you can give insane work hours a pass and just accept that they're making the most of the short-term opportunity. Just don't let it become habit in a fulltime job and you'll be sweet.
  - Cyph0n 10y ago
    Even for a 3 month period, I think 16 hours is overkill. I would say 12 hours is the upper limit. This is just my opinion of course. In any case, good on Google for warning people about that, especially younger interns/employees. Some people just get into the lifestyle and end up realizing what they lost way too late. Work isn't everything. It's important to wind down by doing things other than what you do at work/school, such as exercise, meditation, or a just developing a hobby in general.
    - xapata 10y ago
      Sometimes I like to do 16 hours one day and 0 hours the next.

tyingq 10y ago

Really well written...an interesting read. On this though: "On my last day, my team got me some cake and gave me some very sweet farewell gifts, such as the potato below." What's with the potato? Is that some inside joke at Google?

Vexs 10y ago
I think potatoes are just a joke in general. They're just... there.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  I think this is why Dwight Schrute owned a beet farm, also. He could have farmed anything, but beets are just inherently funnier than wheat or soybeans.
goldsborough 10y ago
No it was more a joke between me and a colleague, because even though we got gourmet food three times a day he would just eat potatoes and eggs all the time

40acres 10y ago

You mentioned that you took some MIT OCW courses, did you actually do the psets and quizzes?

goldsborough 10y ago
No, I mainly used OCW to go deeper into more advanced dynamic programming and hashing techniques. I was more involved in the Princeton courses and especially Cracking The Coding Interview.
- josepi_ 10y ago
  Mind referencing more (all? :D) of the resources you used?

tmptmp 10y ago

>>For most people, this means coming to work some time between 9 and 11 AM (breakfast ends at 10 AM) and leaving between 5 and 8 PM (dinner starts at 6:30 PM). My schedule was a little different: I came to work between 9 and 10 AM and left between 12 and 2 AM. Yes, you read that right. I spent a lot of time in the office, to the extent that my co-workers asked me if I lived there. This is the kind of devotion to work/study, I wish I could emulate. Especially, given his age, working for 8 hr on company work and then 6-8 hr on your personal work/study without getting distracted is amazing. He should, and he indicated would (which is good), not ignore the work/life balance. Congrats and thanks for posting.

ipince 10y ago

Glad you had a good time. Any concerns about working on personal projects using Google resources (whether or not you used their laptop, you used their building, wifi, snacks, etc.). Wouldn't they own the IP? (if they wanted to pursue it)

quickConclusion 10y ago

Interesting, well written. Gives a window on how a corporation manages relationships with young smart people, and the actual psychological impact it has, the effectiveness. Thank you. Nitpicking: "Disclaimer: All opinions expressed below are my own." ??? Who else? How does poor legalese help your story? I swear: nobody will sue you.

alexpetralia 10y ago
Actually this is good policy, professionally speaking.
goldsborough 10y ago
I learnt to be very careful about anything that's about Google and not from Google :)

rifung 10y ago

It's already insane that you got an internship (at Google too!) in your first year of college, but you seem to have done extremely well there too. Nicely done! Seems like you're well on your way to being a very successful engineer.

popcorncolonel 10y ago
And what's next in the path of a very successful engineer? 10 years down the line? 30? 40?
- pearjuice 10y ago
  Writing snarky comments on HN seems to work for most people.

19guid 10y ago

> It’s Googley to stand up for diversity and inclusion, such as protesting against binary gendering on toilets So if I support binary gendering on toilets, I'm not welcome at Google? Why has it become necessary to subscribe to a particular set of political beliefs in order to work for Silicon Valley firms?

bobdole1234 10y ago
Because assholes who care about things that aren't really their business are difficult to deal with.
CydeWeys 10y ago
The toilets in question are individual room style toilets. You really can't handle that? Is that really a political belief? How do you go to the bathroom in smaller restaurants that have had toilets like that for decades?
Veelox 10y ago
I don't think 19guid has a problem with using a toilet or being an asshole. I think the question is why is dissent from specific political views looked down upon? I have been in Silicon Valley for almost a year now after moving from the Midwest. I have been able to talk freely with my coworkers about some of my conservative views. Yet when I have shared what would count as "traditional values" on internal forums I have been on the receiving end of redicual and name calling. I very much would like to hear a thoughtful response on why Silicon Valley is so unaccepting of political dissent.
- andrewflnr 10y ago
  It never looks like a "political" issue when you're convinced it's a human rights issue. For a human rights issue, the other side's feelings don't matter because they're obviously assholes anyway, so you can do whatever you want to them to advance The Cause.
- dancek 10y ago
  I'd also love to hear an explanation from someone intolerant of dissent. I attribute it to the history of feminism. First-wave feminism genuinely dealt with human rights issues where dissent was based on a twisted view of humanity (e.g. women are property of men, not autonomous subjects). The late third and fourth waves have kept the same assumption about the nature of their views. But the views themselves are very much more extreme and unintuitive. Again, I'd love to hear someone explain it better from their own feminist point of view.

preordained 10y ago

Sorry, it seems like some kind of pseudo-utopia for people who want to feel special and intelligent all the time. People in silly spaceship themed rooms, meditating or hacking upside down, or maybe in sensory deprivation chambers for deep focus? It all screams: I'm entitled to coddling and acceptance--nay, encouragement of my eccentricities--cause I'm special. I just don't know if that's healthy or necessary, if Google is so successful in part due to this, or despite it.

minitech 10y ago
Or maybe it’s just for the sake of fun! There are some eccentric people out there, but I don’t think the point of having upside-down work areas is to cater to eccentricities.
jccalhoun 10y ago
"for people who want to feel special and intelligent all the time." Who doesn't want that?
lostboys67 10y ago
So you think that everyone dressing like an IBM'r in the 70's is better its the eccentrics, hackers and od balls that often can produce the ground breaking work
- lostboys67 10y ago
  Never thought id get down voted on here for standing up for "hacker" culture. And BTW one of the worlds leading IBM experts (ie IBM used to get him to give talks ) to used to meditate in his own home made flotation tank - he one saved a quarterly billing run that was measured in hundreds of millions.

wsh91 10y ago

Hey--congrats on a really successful internship! I'm glad you had fun, and maybe we'll see you when you've wrapped up your studies, too. :)

lambda_func 10y ago

Nice writeup. My favorite part is >> simply practiced interview questions for about three to four months, every day, from morning till night. I then had three phone interviews around November, which I passed. It's interesting (& funny) to see both high schoolers and experienced people spend similar amount of time (~several months) practicing for these types of technical interviews.

rubicon33 10y ago
What it should be, is sad. These types of questions are often very different from actual work. The fact that you have to study or train for an interview process specifically, is absurd. Just being qualified for the job, should suffice.
- wheelerwj 10y ago
  Just being qualified does suffice. It's the definition of qualified that needs to change.
- crucifiction 10y ago
  Actually its good. If you study for months on interview questions to be able to pass the interview, you have "gamed" the system to get in and will likely be washed back out in 1-2 years depending on the mercy if your leadership team. People who spend the night before brushing up on their CS and passing the interview are those that actually pass (and stay and grow) and that is who the company really wants. Its just hard to weed out people who are very determined to game their way through.
  - RhodesianHunter 10y ago
    ...or the people willing to put that much effort into "gaming" the system as you call it are those most likely to put in the effort to succeed and thrive on the job, and are therefore precisely who Google is looking for...
  - RhodesianHunter 10y ago

chmln 10y ago

Great read. However, he lost me at > Googley to stand up for diversity and inclusion, such as protesting against binary gendering on toilets Is it Google's business? Why should Google be involved? Why cater to 0.6% of the population, at the expense of convenience for the 99.4%? At my last job we had "non-binary", "all-inclusive" bathrooms. They're just awkward. Not the stalls themselves, but having to share the bathroom with females, who would also rather have their separate, female bathroom.

madeofpalk 10y ago
Have you never been in a place with unisex toilets? In Australia, many offices, pubs and clubs have 'unisex toilets' which are basically just a whole bunch of small individual stalls with toilets + basin. Most of the time it isn't necessarily about being progressive, just cost saving and practicality.
- ta34534445 10y ago
  I am in Australia, and have never come across "unisex toilets". Perhaps I'm misreading your comment, but I think you suggest a room of stall that can be used by all genders. I think by law however, there needs to be an "accessible" bathroom. This will be a single room which would likely fulfil the role.
CydeWeys 10y ago
It's a good deal more than 0.6% at Google, fyi. And the toilets in question aren't stall toilets, they're room toilets, like you'd see in a smaller restaurant.
- edblarney 10y ago
  I doubt that strongly. In fact - it's considerably less than 0.6% in real life. The manner in which they calculate 'non gender binary' is really, really soft - i.e. 'if don't feel entirely male or female' you can often be included in that group. Hell, I'm a pretty straight white dude, but I don't feel 'fully male' 100% of the time! Moreover - most trans people are actually still 'binary' - they still identify as one or the other. I'm inclined to agree that Google has more of share of people who are not binary, but in reality, the number is really, really small. Much smaller than 0.6%.

Zedmor 10y ago

Read you resume. Un-fuckin-real. wow.

tedks 10y ago
Geez. You weren't exaggerating.

Shank 10y ago

I love reading accounts like this. As someone who had an internship in high school, I'm always happy to hear what other people's experiences were going into and out of the process. I think my immediate reaction is that Google creates an environment that simply doesn't exist at most other places. I interned at two companies in the defense industry. You could argue that our experiences were different because of security, but I disagree. The environment you described sounds like an absolute heaven: you have challenging, fun work, and have extremely well placed and delivered benefits. At both of my internships, the problems were hard. They weren't particularly fun to solve so much as they "had" to be solved and I was the only one to solve them. I got similar rewarding experiences completing tasks, though everything I did had to be "on the clock." As soon as we stopped working, we were expected to stop billing or move to some other task. The offices were dull, boring, and expensive to spend time in. Your internship had availability of food and technology that kept you happy. Neither of mine did this. At one internship, we had a free snack room. That's it. If we wanted to eat lunch at the cafeteria at my second internship, we could at great personal cost. We were stuck with "hand me down" hardware that was a menagerie of hardware pulled from random places throughout the building. If you were given a bad keyboard on day one, too bad -- it was yours forever. I complain like this because you had the exact opposite of the experience I had. Your experience is an irregularity, at least compared to what I've seen. This all comes down to culture, I think. The Google corporate culture is modern, focused on employee happiness, and focused on diversity. Things like getting your own hardware choices and free food go a long way to adding goodwill, and failing to take basic measures like that shows what I consider to be a lack of caring. I wish more companies would copy Google on how they treat their employees and interns. Even if it might seem a bit cheesy to go after the low hanging fruit, employee happiness goes a long way to building a thriving, mutually beneficial relationship between an employee and a company. Seeing a post like this makes me feel like my internship hosts haven't cared in the slightest. That's pretty painful, if I'm brutally honest.

galfarragem 10y ago
> Even if it might seem a bit cheesy to go after the low hanging fruit, employee happiness goes a long way to building a thriving, mutually beneficial relationship between an employee and a company. This. While general funding (IT is a very well funded sector) also matters, most of this is cultural. As an anecdote, I interned in a place (not IT related) where we had to use our personal laptops and even pay for drinking water and toilet paper..

alexpetralia 10y ago

Incredible maturity at your age - Google does a great job at finding talent.

userbinator 10y ago

It's good that you found it enjoyable, but something worth keeping in mind beyond the fun-and-games atmosphere is whether you are in agreement with the company's overall direction and goals (and the fact that you are essentially contributing to that effort by working there); it reminds me of this article with a very much opposing view: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7689897 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7689897

ocdtrekkie 10y ago
It's not so much Google employees would tell you they agree with Google's goals and direction, but that they have an incredible cognitive dissonance about what direction that is. Most Google engineers will tell you that Google is trying to make the world a better place, rather than the reality that Google is trying to make incredibly large amounts of money at the expense of anything that gets in their way.

dancek 10y ago

> I spent around three days on my presentation, mainly because I did it in LaTeX instead of PowerPoint, as any sane person would in about one tenth of the time. This was the only part I could completely identify with. Perhaps even using Google Slides would have been acceptable! But what geek could resist the allure of Beamer... :)

danspencer 10y ago

Cool article. But I always find it funny how people try to convince you that so-and-so in their company is a big shot ("our director, the fourth highest rank at Google, after CEO, SVP and VP"). Trust me, outside of your company, that person is quite irrelevant. For most people, that person is just someone working at a big company.

Bartweiss 10y ago
Hey now, at least the naming hierarchy makes sense. My favorite example is finance, where VP is such a meaningless title that Goldman Sachs argued in court that it doesn't carry any weight. https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2014-09-04/goldman-sachs-just-says-vice-president-to-be-polite https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2014-09-04/goldman-s...

HiroshiSan 10y ago

Jesus christ, there is a lot of jealousy in this thread. I don't have anything interesting to add to the conversation but I am in awe with how much you've been able to accomplish in life already. Good job and I look forward to seeing what else you put out in the world.

nofugsgiven 10y ago

The fine article describes exactly the environment one would expect of people who run the worlds largest search engine but who still couldnt see a Trump victory coming a mile away. People living in a well cocooned safe space. A superb fit for university students. Pretty much consolidates my view that AlphaGo was Google's IBM Deep Blue moment ie now past their peak. Their future products and services are going to be increasingly as distant from reality as the people themselves are, and thus much less useful or profitable.

amelius 10y ago

Instead of Google cherry-picking all of the talent out of the pool, why not let them pay corporate taxes, so we can spend the money on education?

amelius 10y ago

If only institutes like CERN had such good HR/recruitment techniques as Google, this world could be a better place.

Insanity 10y ago
Not sure how the experience is like as a CERN intern, but you can surely do internships there as a student: https://jobs.web.cern.ch/join-us/students https://jobs.web.cern.ch/join-us/students -- If someone happens to have experience with interning at CERN, I'd love to hear about that :-)
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  Second hand, but the CERN interns I know were over the moon about it. Obviously they didn't have the perks of Google because they don't have the sheer cash flow, but they both described it as a fun and interesting place to work, with an entertaining social side among the employees.

edblarney 10y ago

"It’s Googley to stand up for diversity and inclusion, such as protesting against binary gendering on toilets" This is BS. 99.99% of the world is find with the 'binary signage' on toilets, and it is absolutely not 'anti trans' or 'anti anyone else' frankly, to do so. BTW - this is not like a 1960's movement - you're not in the 'right side of history' here. 'Binary Gender' is, and will always be normative, simply because almost everyone is binary, and is fine with it. The number of people who actually have issues with 'binary' is very, very small. Even most people who are trans are still 'binary' (!) i.e. they identify as one gender or the other, not anything in between. I somehow doubt that 'it's Googley' to be this, this may be a little bit of a stretch, or 'mis-articulation' by the author. Though I don't have a problem at all with someone who is 'anti gender binary' (I don't really care) - I do have a problem with a company that pushes social extremism as part of their culture. It's just more evidence of the culty behaviour at Google. I make a hobby of studying cults. I used to go into the Scientology clinic to 'take the test' and kind of debate with them, to get an understanding of how they are. I used to read a lot of their stuff - not for the 'knowledge' but to grasp the nature of the organization. These kinds of 'ideals' are actually far more about creating a coherent group, than projecting any ideals. Google is a good company, generally, but they do some nefarious things with our data. One of the great things about having a 'we are morally superior' cult, is that any decision made by Google that can feasibly be considered unethical - won't be, using the internal logic of 'We don't do evil, so, what we are doing cannot be evil'. Anyhow, it takes working at several companies for a while to start to figure this out.

tptacek 10y ago
For someone who doesn't care much about toilet signage, you sure care a lot about toilet signage.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- edblarney 10y ago
  You misread, or I miscommunicated my statement: I don't care about 'signage'. If Google has a practical reason to have special signage, all the power to them. I care about the 'social ethos unwittingly imbued on people' as a function of an aggressive culture. The signage is an artifact of the culture, as implied by the author it's 'Googly', i.e. 'these are the values that we must have' - which may have nothing to do with the workplace, but more to do with projecting ideology. If an Atheist was required to have 'morning prayer' at a company ... would this be acceptable? I mean, why should an Atheist care? It's just a bunch of words that would effectively have no meaning to them? Of course, it wouldn't be right to have 'prayer', per say, as a 'cultural requirement' unless it was a religious org, or special in that manner. Imagine being the only one at your company who 'doesn't do it' ... you'd be the Black Sheep surely. Google may have an over-representation of people with gender ID issues, and may very well just have some pragmatic solutions, like 'individual bathrooms' that are just marked as 'bathrooms'. This seems like a rather good solution to me, and avoids the ideological issues entirely. There's no argument needed, anywhere. But to specifically foster 'anti gender binary ideals' as part of the culture is wrong. My guess is the author is projecting is own ideals onto what 'Googly' means. Ask someone 'what Burning Man means' - and you get 1000 different answers. Most of them 'authoritative'. :).

j23eima 10y ago

What languages did you find yourself coding in?

goldsborough 10y ago
Web stuff, Python and Go

hiddencost 10y ago

The volume of people hung up on bathrooms should illustrate, to anyone on the fence, how virulent transphobia is. Framing it as a political question rather than a question of basic rights is quite dark. For context, they'll have a hallway with a dozen single bathrooms. They're not even mixing genders. But folks are so obsessed with their own fears of the unknown that they happily jump on any excuse to deny trans personhood. For context, trans people are less likely to be predators or violent, and much more likely to be the victims of violent crimes. https://www.ovc.gov/pubs/forge/sexual_numbers.html https://www.ovc.gov/pubs/forge/sexual_numbers.html

i336_ 10y ago

I must admit I'll drown a bit if I check all the comments, so I'm not sure if this has already been said. IMHO, the author is playing the "I like you very much and I'm going to be agreeable with just about everything you say and do, so you won't go wrong if you pick me to come back" game. At least they're demonstrating they have a good understanding of social networking. This reads like it's supposed to be an experience review, but it's incredibly over-positive and unbalanced/unfair. There are no real negatives mentioned. So I can only experience it as "I want to come back very much". That the author has gone to this extent (and only mentioned their successes) suggests either insecurity (impostor syndome) or - likelier - fear they won't be accepted back. The author did mention that their reviewers showed them some instances where they went wrong, I'm wondering if this is the main reason for this or whether it was simply the overwhelming environment. -- On another note, since everyone's added their opinions of actually working at Google I might as well join in. First of all, I took a look at the link noted in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13086051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13086051 and I don't agree with any of the points raised in there; most of that article can be adequately explained as conspiracy theory and provocation/incitation, I don't think the points they raise (and attempt to inflame) have much substance. That said, I do have some concerns of my own. The issue that's likeliest to have the biggest practical impact for me personally is that I have absolutely no foundation in math, due to the fact that I was born with severe learning difficulties that I only began to correctly identify around 18-22 and which I'm still in the process of learning how to counter for (I'm 26 now). This means that while I'm well-developed in more areas today than ever, math is an area I'm so far behind on I have zero incentive to catch up because I'd have so much foundational stuff to deal with. For example, I was at the supermarket a few months ago basically pushing all the buttons on my calculator as I couldn't remember what operator(s) to use to figure out how many onions I could buy for the amount of money I had. This wasn't a cognition problem - it was simply the fact that I am that ignorant about math as a subject. Tackling that to get a compsci job just doesn't seem like a good use of my time since I'll be 40 in a bit over 10 years and it may take me that long (or longer) to catch up. Normal kids to start to learn rudimentary math concepts around 8 or so after all. (I tried, but none of it never made any sense.) So I definitely appreciated all these pictures, knowing I'll never be likely to call a place like this home. I most also admit I'm more than a little jealous at the "nearly free" store - I could certainly do with changing my trend of having computers that are always 10 years old (my very limited disability support pension prevents me from legally getting a job, while diagnosis and ongoing treatment are unbelievably expensive!). Consistently old tech is one of the major reasons I haven't been able to springboard myself off of my pension and get a job - I've always been incredibly fascinated with animation, the visual arts, 3D, etc, and I'm on computers that swap like mad if I have more than 3 or 4 browser tabs open. Beyond these issues, there's the very tricky problem of the fact that Google isn't a startup, and I can't say I'm too enthused by the fact that it's generally frowned upon to want to define your own job title - I can see this stifling a lot of innovation (Google Reader, Google Wave, etc) that isn't an immediately apparent hit. For perhaps obvious reasons I've grown up always looking at the long view, and Google's corporate culture seems to have a very short attention span. Nobody is likely to ever read this but I thought I'd leave this here as a real-world example of why someone might not be a good fit for an environment like Google. If someone from Google ever wants to prove me wrong I'd be very happy to hear about it! :D