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> I'd be more impressed if they committed to hiring employees that don't already have the skills they are looking for and doing on the job training I work for

by rifung 9y ago

> I'd be more impressed if they committed to hiring employees that don't already have the skills they are looking for and doing on the job training I work for Google and I find there's already a very large amount of on the job training required due to all the powerful but complicated internal tools. My manager has told me that I should not feel pressured to contribute at all for my first 6 months and I should feel free to just focus on learning as much as I can. I've been here for almost a year now and feel like I still know nothing so the training is still certainly not done. I didn't mean to jump to the defense of my employer as I'm obviously biased but do think we are far from perfect (although I am very happy here :). I just wonder what the right balance is. It seems like if people can't program at all then it's not really on the job training because they wouldn't be working right? At least my own experience has been that I came in with some college experience but no college degree and not really knowing anything besides the bare minimum to contribute (being able to program, having some grasp of CS fundamentals) and have learned a ton on the job and still have much much more to learn. I think there is an expectation (and pressure!) for all SWEs to hit the senior level, L5, so in a way everyone who is hired under that level is doing on the job training no? Sorry for the long post!

bradleyjg 9y ago
At the dawn of the computer age ATT, IBM, and other companies taught people how to program from scratch. Early on because there were no college programs to do so and later on because programs didn't graduate nearly enough people. And no one was self taught because there were no home computers. I don't see why Google couldn't do that today. I'm not saying they are morally obligated to do so. At the end of the day they are a for profit company and they don't have to do anything at all about this problem. And, sure, the donations they are making instead are probably better than nothing. But as I mentioned, and as top19 mentions on what is as of this writing the top post on this article, the track record for these job retraining programs going back decades isn't very good. What I'm saying is that if Google were to go to Pittsburgh, Youngstown, or Detroit, hire some bright unemployed people, pay them a decent but by no means exorbitant salary while it taught them how to code and then, as you point out, how to be a productive engineer at Google, at the end of the process those people would likely have very marketable skills to either continue moving up the ladder at Google or elsewhere. Of course this would cost Google something -- not only in the salaries while people were learning and not contributing but also in the salaries of people that were training and mentoring them. But Google is planning on spending a billion dollars anyway, so here's another way they could do that. A way that I think would be more effective. -- Congrats on getting what sounds like a great job.
- joshhart 9y ago
  My company, LinkedIn, has started an in-company program called Reach to do exactly that. https://careers.linkedin.com/reach https://careers.linkedin.com/reach Rather than hire a traditional Stanford CS graduate, we find people who have self-taught to some basic extent and give them the chance to work under an apprenticeship. We started with a class of about 25 with decent results and will tune it more based on what we learn
- goialoq 9y ago
  Training people on-the-job from scratch to be professional engineers is extreme. A more reasonable path is HelpDesk / Hardware Tech -> operations software / SysOp -> software engineering
- rifung 9y ago
  > At the dawn of the computer age ATT, IBM, and other companies taught people how to program from scratch. Early on because there were no college programs to do so and later on because programs didn't graduate nearly enough people. And no one was self taught because there were no home computers. I don't see why Google couldn't do that today. That does make sense and I think that would be super cool if companies could do that today. I admit I don't know much about the history but isn't building software today more complicated though not necessarily harder than it was before? My impression is that before we would just build programs that ran on computers. So in that sense, if you knew how to program and had a compiler to use, that was sufficient to do what companies wanted to do. However, now we have people building other things like services, which is requires additional complexity and tooling on top of what was previously necessary. The point I'm trying to make is that I suspect nowadays there's more prerequisite knowledge for most jobs than before. > But Google is planning on spending a billion dollars anyway, so here's another way they could do that. A way that I think would be more effective. That's a really good point. I imagine even if it takes a very long time to train people, with a billion dollars you have the time to do that.. The optimistic side of me wants to say it's because handling the logistics for that would be a nightmare and it's really outside of our core expertise. The realistic side of me thinks that it probably is too expensive to give the same benefits to those employees that we give to current full time employees. The pessimistic side of me also thinks that there's a certain level of prestige associated with working at Google that has been, at least to some level, successfully marketed both inwards and outwards, and hiring people who don't meet whatever "bar" would undermine that. > Congrats on getting what sounds like a great job. Thanks!
ehsankia 9y ago
But Google and maybe a few other really big tech companies are exceptions since they are so big they have their own internal tooling for everything. In general though, it's probably more useful teaching people the generic solutions that are used in most medium sized companies, rather than Google's specialized tooling. And generally a lot of the workflows are transferable.

by rifung 9y ago

bradleyjg 9y ago

At the dawn of the computer age ATT, IBM, and other companies taught people how to program from scratch. Early on because there were no college programs to do so and later on because programs didn't graduate nearly enough people. And no one was self taught because there were no home computers. I don't see why Google couldn't do that today. I'm not saying they are morally obligated to do so. At the end of the day they are a for profit company and they don't have to do anything at all about this problem. And, sure, the donations they are making instead are probably better than nothing. But as I mentioned, and as top19 mentions on what is as of this writing the top post on this article, the track record for these job retraining programs going back decades isn't very good. What I'm saying is that if Google were to go to Pittsburgh, Youngstown, or Detroit, hire some bright unemployed people, pay them a decent but by no means exorbitant salary while it taught them how to code and then, as you point out, how to be a productive engineer at Google, at the end of the process those people would likely have very marketable skills to either continue moving up the ladder at Google or elsewhere. Of course this would cost Google something -- not only in the salaries while people were learning and not contributing but also in the salaries of people that were training and mentoring them. But Google is planning on spending a billion dollars anyway, so here's another way they could do that. A way that I think would be more effective. -- Congrats on getting what sounds like a great job.

joshhart 9y ago
My company, LinkedIn, has started an in-company program called Reach to do exactly that. https://careers.linkedin.com/reach https://careers.linkedin.com/reach Rather than hire a traditional Stanford CS graduate, we find people who have self-taught to some basic extent and give them the chance to work under an apprenticeship. We started with a class of about 25 with decent results and will tune it more based on what we learn
goialoq 9y ago
Training people on-the-job from scratch to be professional engineers is extreme. A more reasonable path is HelpDesk / Hardware Tech -> operations software / SysOp -> software engineering
rifung 9y ago
> At the dawn of the computer age ATT, IBM, and other companies taught people how to program from scratch. Early on because there were no college programs to do so and later on because programs didn't graduate nearly enough people. And no one was self taught because there were no home computers. I don't see why Google couldn't do that today. That does make sense and I think that would be super cool if companies could do that today. I admit I don't know much about the history but isn't building software today more complicated though not necessarily harder than it was before? My impression is that before we would just build programs that ran on computers. So in that sense, if you knew how to program and had a compiler to use, that was sufficient to do what companies wanted to do. However, now we have people building other things like services, which is requires additional complexity and tooling on top of what was previously necessary. The point I'm trying to make is that I suspect nowadays there's more prerequisite knowledge for most jobs than before. > But Google is planning on spending a billion dollars anyway, so here's another way they could do that. A way that I think would be more effective. That's a really good point. I imagine even if it takes a very long time to train people, with a billion dollars you have the time to do that.. The optimistic side of me wants to say it's because handling the logistics for that would be a nightmare and it's really outside of our core expertise. The realistic side of me thinks that it probably is too expensive to give the same benefits to those employees that we give to current full time employees. The pessimistic side of me also thinks that there's a certain level of prestige associated with working at Google that has been, at least to some level, successfully marketed both inwards and outwards, and hiring people who don't meet whatever "bar" would undermine that. > Congrats on getting what sounds like a great job. Thanks!

ehsankia 9y ago

But Google and maybe a few other really big tech companies are exceptions since they are so big they have their own internal tooling for everything. In general though, it's probably more useful teaching people the generic solutions that are used in most medium sized companies, rather than Google's specialized tooling. And generally a lot of the workflows are transferable.