25 ms·
My Google job was tedious and pointless
- pm24601 9y agoJust proves ... its not the company: it is the job that counts.
- jxramos 9y agothat's exactly right! I tell my younger mentees that you can work for companies that are doing cutting edge stuff, but watch what you are actually doing and contributing to that. Are you growing and being challenged as a productive individual. At best one would have to be content playing an indirect role that aides the development of cutting edge research or whatever. I guess the fallacy for the author was assuming a few degrees of indirection in a supporting role was going to be life changing and doing things that mattered. I like seeing his honesty in reporting that things from him vantage point from all the action was in the end not all that meaningful for him.
- Animats 9y agoSo that's where those calls come from. I used to get cold calls from Google recruiters who seemed clueless. I finally told them to put me on their do-not-call list.
- selimthegrim 9y agoTwo words: mail merge
- GauntletWizard 9y agoThat's essentially what they're doing! They've got an automated form. The recruiter's job is to screen linkedin profiles for qualified candidates; The tedious bit of the mail (two keypresses and typing their name) is just gravy.
- tclancy 9y agoThe headline is a bit deceptive given it's written by an internal recruiter; I imagine anyone not working as part of a business' main thrust could find the same problem. That said, it does sound horribly tedious and pointless. Of my two interactions with Google hiring (both failures on my part, both pre-2006), one was enjoyable but messy and the second was brusque and confusing.
- waegawegawe 9y agoThis was my reaction too. Mike Rowe would probably look dimly upon the author's complaints. Sometimes, companies hire people to do unpleasant jobs, and convince them to do these jobs by paying them. But, it's tough to have that conversation from the position of privilege one sits in when one gets paid even more to do an interesting job, because of the scarcity of people capable of performing in that role. Presumably the kid understands this harsh reality, and the complaint is more reflective of a general disillusionment that the situation is as it is, rather than an aversion to the particularities of this role at Google.
- fortythirteen 9y ago> Sometimes, companies hire people to do unpleasant jobs, and convince them to do these jobs by paying them. What I got was that the requirement for overt enthusiasm over a mundane job became too much. I don't think Mike Row would see it the same way if a sewage technician was forced to pretend their job was "making a better world one bowel movement at a time" or face being ostracized.
- waegawegawe 9y agoI did not get the sense that the author was ostracized. Rather, they were put off by other people's enthusiasm. "Am I the only one here who can see this job is crap?" I can totally understand that feeling being crazy-making, but it's different than being ostracized.
- hw 9y agoI do think that the OP's job as a recruiter could have been better if the culture within his team or the recruiting dept was better. Sure, it's a monotonous job, but im guessing if the team was a small startup located in SF external to Google and they could do things their own way instead of answering to and belonging to a huge HR department with immense pressure to get as many candidates in as possible, and grow their own culture, the job wouldn't feel so tedious and pointless. Sometimes it's hard to feel like you're doing great things and making a difference when what you do is a drop of water in a great sea that is Google, vs the same drop in a smaller bucket of water.
- bistro 9y agoWouldn't working as a recruiter be tedious at any company?
- Apocryphon 9y agoGuess you'd expect a company with Google's level of innovation to make any process less tedious.
- user5994461 9y agoWell, the author says all he has to do is type 2 letters to send invites and rejection, maybe with a few words to make it look personal. The process is streamlined, that doesn't make it more interesting.
- rising-sky 9y agoSounds like the recruiter would rather type the entire correspondence.
- komali2 9y agoAs an ex-recruiter, here's what my dream job would have been like: 1. No arbitrary process numbers. Job and cost numbers fine, but "10 calls a day" "5 BD calls a day" "20 resume sends a week" is stupid - would rather have a manager helping me make strategic decisions, using my time intelligently. 2. Automated bullshit. No more downloading resumes to upload to our system. We either pay linkedin and use that exclusively, or outsource somebody to fill out our own CRM (actually good CRM that has functional searching, not that Bullhorn bullshit that barely worked). That's all it would take. If a recruiter annoys you, it's probably because you're Candidate Call #9 of the day and she has to get to 10 or she'll lose her job.
- s17n 9y agoSure sounds like that person's job can and should be automated, leaving the remaining recruiters doing more interesting work.
- foobaw 9y agoMost of the responsibility, minus the technical interview, seems like it could be done by an AI sometime in the future anyway. No more complaints afterwards!
- snorkel 9y agoI found Google's dev interview to be especially difficult, I personally hate doing hours of whiteboard coding (sorry, I tend to code on computers instead, silly me) ... So I wasn't hired, but those who worked as devs there told me that's a blessing because after all the rigorous interviewing bluster they'll assign devs to remedial code refactoring anyway. I'm not a rockstar coder above doing the housekeeping work but doesn't sound fun either. Why hire top coders then assign them intern busy work? I wonder if the strategy was to just drain the local talent pool of top coders so competitors had less of a candidate pool. Just odd to set the interview bar so high, and for what purpose?
- foota 9y agoYou leave your interns to do code quality refactors? Seems like something more experienced engineers should do.
- nradov 9y agoI don't work at Google, but code refactoring is critically important in the real world. It's not intern work.
- alexasmyths 9y agoRe-factoring is probably 80% of the job. New projects are rare, so very few are writing a lot of code from scratch.
- away2017throw 9y agoWhy not, like, test refactoring skills? Mind blown!
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ithilglin909 9y agoTo be fair to Google (can’t believe I said that), sounds about as painful as similar role at another large company would probably be. Most expect their employees to drink some Kool-Aid (one of the side benefits to being a contractor/mercenary is being able to exist somewhat outside that world).
- jxramos 9y agoI have family that works at Google and I remember a group of their friends reporting they very much preferred the switch to consultant for Google rather than Google employee. They wanted to be outside the internal political bubble. From what I recall the distaste surrounded a lot of the performance review song and dance and promotional squabbles.
- ogre_magi 9y agoI worked at Google in a more technical role but I sympathize with this guy. The culture was awful and empty. It was sugar-coated candies and colors and happy, happy, happy like it was meant for a kindergartener. The politics were thick and covered everything. Executives got on stage at a company meeting and cried about the election. It was a cult, and not in the good way that a startup can sometimes be, but in a stale way that felt like death.
- cromwellian 9y agoTo be fair, a lot of people were upset over the election, and given what's happened over the last ten months, those feelings seem to have been justified. But yeah, god damn a company for having a culture where people don't go around acting like jerks towards one another. God forbid we grow out of Kindergarten and get back to the real world where people are unhappy and take out their frustrations by raking their coworkers verbally over the coals.
- maxxxxx 9y agoI don't think an executive should ever complain about an election. They should focus on making their company successful and a good work place.
- mulletbum 9y agoWhy not? When the election is making their company have a difficult time becoming a more successful work place? I think it's a company, people can say what they like, if Google doesn't like it as a whole, they can fire said employee.
- maxxxxx 9y agoThey have all the tools to make their company a better place no matter who is elected. Complaining is just a cheap way to excuse not doing anything.
- for_i_in_range 9y agoThis was a good read up until the first few seconds when it became apparent it was whining drivel.
- dsschnau 9y agoQuicken Loans in Detroit is the same thing to a T
- Kyragem 9y agoIt doesn’t say anything about what it is to actually work at Google. Maybe rephrase to working in HR sucks. I doubt this person even worked at MTV. I worked at Google and it is an amazing place to work at (beercart Friday!) the only reason I left is because living in the Bay Area sucks.
- YuriNiyazov 9y agoSo, the single example that you reach for when describing google as an amazing place to work is "beercart Friday?"
- Kyragem 9y agoYes the bar at Google is very high and after busting my ass all week solving ridiculously hard problems having someone drop a cold beer and nachos on my desk on a Friday afternoon shows that Google takes employee satisfaction very seriously
- drharby 9y agoCant tell if sarcasm
- ythn 9y agoPoe's Law
- jstewartmobile 9y agoKyragem is channeling Ken M
- pizza234 9y agoI'm not sure about your exact experience (it looks like you're young), but that's quite common, at least in relatively young companies. Nachos and beer, or food in general, doesn't show anything special, since the cost to the company is negligible (compare it to your salary). One could even argue the opposite - that such conditions are part of a precise PR strategy targeted towards a certain demographic.
- georgiedown 9y agoWhy the Damore video without any kind of context? It's like they're trying to push a narrative here.
- CalChris 9y agoJust as this HR underling's life is a soulless tedium of selecting stock phrases, that video was chosen automatically (which is to say, even less soullessly) by a context matching algorithm. Now if you think that a narrative is being pushed here then I have a Rorschach test I'd like you to take.
- georgiedown 9y agoOr maybe it's fucking stupid to have an automatic system picking related videos and inserting them in posts in a way that makes them look like they're the main video of the post.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- wmf 9y agoOr they have an automated system that inserts semi-relevant clickbait videos into every story.
- cromwellian 9y agoRecruiting is outsourced at many companies. I'm not sure why this person thought it would be a hugely interesting job. Perhaps if they were an engineering major and were working on ways to automate recruiting searches, or improve the false positive/false negative rates, it would have been interesting, but it doesn't sound like this person was hired for anything but to man the phones. From that standpoint, it seems like #firstworldproblems. Someone who lacks the skills to be a SWE gets hired at one of the most prestigious companies, most likely has awesome benefits and a comfortable job, but boring and unfulfilling. Contrast that with the millions of people in who work for far less salary and benefits, in low end service sector jobs, and it just seems tone deaf to me. I understand the feelings of not having a good fit for your work and wanting to do other things, but there's a huge difference between "I need a change cause I find what I'm doing boring, even if the pay and benefits is good" and "This is the WORST! Clearly, I was owed an interesting job at a candy unicorn factory, and since I didn't get the toys I thought I would, I'm suffering worse than a Soviet gulag here."
- s73ver_ 9y agoThis narrative that only engineers deserve to have interesting and fulfilling jobs needs to end. It's nothing but elitism, and adding the "#firstworldproblems" doesn't do anything to help your cause.
- fav_collector 9y agoI read the OP post as "not everyone deserves an interesting and fulfilling job" rather than "only engineers deserve an interesting job"
- cromwellian 9y agoNeither, I wasn't saying what people deserve, only that so many in this country suffer in far worse jobs, and don't get editorials in the Washington Post about it. My mother worked for decades as a Cashier at Safeway, and before that, as a telephone operator connecting calls at AT&T. Her actual talent: singing, she wanted to be a singer. By comparison, this HR job was orders of magnitude better. My mom didn't have healthcare provided by her job when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, she had almost no vacation, we lived paycheck to paycheck. There's no voice given to these people, the truly suffering masses, in the news media. Instead, we hear the suffering of the upper middle class, who has a cushy deskjob, free gourmet food, massages, vacations, bonuses, stock, but finds their job boring. Why are we reading this story in the Washington Post and not the story of the person working 60 hours a week and living at the poverty line? It's a question of priorities for me, not who deserves what. Every human deserves a fulfilling life, but in the grand scheme of things, the suffering visited on the author of that editorial is one of angst, not basic survival, and he's being given a microphone for grievances of being pampered with benefits. If a trust fund baby complained he's bored with life because he still has to show up for boring meetings with his trustees, I'm sure we can find some sympathy for his ennui, but first I have to work my way through all the headlines of Puerto Ricans suffering, or those who make my iPhone.
- aresant 9y agoWhile the fluffy headline promises a revelation about Google, this article is actually a poignant lament on the future of work automation. The piece's author holds a humanities degree in Psych/Neuroscience. I point that out because while we've accepted that blue collar jobs are/were "going to be automated" or "going overseas", there's still a pervasive trope that an undergraduate degree provides some protection and is of value unto itself in the workforce. But - as evidenced by his systematic experience of key-pressing - his position @ Google is a stop gap, in the same way that the humans in Uber's vehicles are a tolerated inconvenience. This while the people the company ACTUALLY values, at present, are the engineers - tasked with devising new ways to automate, regulate, and systematically eliminate human fallibility from the equation. Solving the problem of what to do with the millions of us that take steps to educate ourselves, want to contribute, but realize that we're a poor facsimile of the machine that will eventually eliminate our jobs, is the central question of our generation.
- typetypetype 9y agoWell said!
- dcow 9y agoAnd yet people seem more interested in bickering about politics than addressing the root of the problem.
- zippergz 9y agoI'm not sure it's exactly breaking news that the most entry-level basic role in a department is boring and repetitive. The only reason this article is even getting run is because it has "Google" in the headline.
- Invictus0 9y agoIs working HR interesting at any company though? There's really nothing of substance in this rant at all; I'm curious why the wapo thought this was fit for publication.
- komali2 9y ago>Google HR uses the TextExpander program, which populates email templates with salutations, job description links and questions. All we have to do is press two keys (mine are semicolon followed by the letter “C”). There’s also space for fill-in-the-blanks: one for the candidate’s name (“Hey Mark”) and another at the end for the day of the week (“Enjoy your Thursday!”), so the message is personal. This step should have been 100% automated and I don't understand why it wasn't. As a recruiter this shit was my least favorite part of the job. The next step - the candidate calls - was my favorite part.
- to3m 9y agoIt’s just as it says: the personal touch.
- AnimalMuppet 9y agoBut it sounds like the "personal touch" was done the same way for every email, and therefore was such that it could have been automated. Not very "personal" of a personal touch...
- s73ver_ 9y agoAutomated emails are pretty shit, and easy to spot. They also tend to turn off most people, making recruiting more difficult.
- DarronWyke 9y agoYep. Any time I see a recruiter try to automate initial contact using a tool like Jobdiva or some such, it's an instant disqualification. Most of the time it's just plain shotgunned out and I never hear anything beyond the initial email. I had one recruiter, after doing that, call me and inquire -- I told him no, and explained to him that I don't do business with those who willingly use spamming tools.
- komali2 9y agoI get why it's frustrating, but one way or the other the job has to get filled. When I was a recruiter I'd blast out emails as well, but only to candidates I actually thought were qualified. Knowing that of 20 people the recruiter knows that are a good fit, only 2 might be available, what would your preferred method be of them going about their job?
- macspoofing 9y agoMaybe this person can try working a factory line and see how empowering other jobs can be. But Ok, I'll buy the author's point that the job sucked. What's the news here? The cynic in me says this is Bezos using WaPo as proxy for the Amazon/Google fight.
- dkobran 9y agoWhile the job doesn't sound like it involves "cool things that matter" and paints a pretty believable picture of working at a large corporation, I do find it interesting that this was published by thr Washington Post. Being owned by Amazon, a direct competitor to Google on many fronts (the war for cloud computing market share is/will continue to be huge), it seems suspicious that this is truly unbiased coverage. It strikes me as a possible next iteration of native advertising. This is not an attack on WP -- just something I thought might be worth discussing. The tech giants are becoming increasingly more powerful and this could be a new frontier to assert that power.
- fortenforge 9y agoThe Washington Post is not owned by Amazon. It is owned by Jeff Bezos, who also is CEO of Amazon.
- dhimes 9y agoDistinction without a difference maybe?
- peoplewindow 9y agoIt does seem an odd choice to publish. Sourcers (that's what Google calls people like that regardless of what his job title was) have existed for a long time there. I was recruited to Google by someone just like that. And yes it's clearly a very boring job: they're basically human search engines. Quite what the author thinks he'll gain by publishing this story is a little beyond me though. It doesn't sound like he was mistreated or anything.
- asdfaefasdf 9y agoThis person spent every day eating alone with headphones on... for two years... Is it just me or is there an unspoken story here that has nothing to do with Google...
- komali2 9y agoI really hope this article doesn't take off. I understand the pain of this person, but this has literally nothing to do with Google, and everything to do with: Recruitment Sucks. It's a fucking annoying, mind boggling job. If you're external, there's a couple highs when you negotiate a salary or are selling a candidate on a position or in a business development meeting with some bigshot at an engineering firm. But mostly, it's calling 10 candidates a day (at least) even if you have nothing to pitch, because you're fishing for information but really because your boss told you you have to make 10 candidate calls a day or you're fired. It's 5 business development calls a day, even if there really isn't anybody new to talk to, and if you already contacted you entire network that month, because... reasons? Because your boss said so. Hit your numbers, 5am hit the phones! Coffee is for closers ABC ALWAYS BE CLOSING "I gotta stay late and make these calls," he says as he sucks the recruitment/sales koolaid, despite knowing that extra calls will literally lead to no extra money for himself or the company. "I make 25 candidate calls a day because you never know what juicy tidbits of information a candidate might have," she says despite the fact that we all in the city know the same story - the oil and gas market is dead, everybody's losing their job, and any new project already has 5,000 applicants before the recruiters can touch "9" to dial out. Browsing linkedin - copy paste name into the name field of Bullhorn, then email, hmm do they have a resume? Download, upload to Bullhorn. Skip the "create candidate from resume" option because it sucks. Do this 20 times a day - "we need to build out our system with good candidates so we're ready when a position opens," despite the fact that linkedin and oilandgasjobsearch.com search function are 10x better than Bullhorn's so I'll just be using that anyway. God, sorry, rant, but this kid joined a job where you feel useless, where you know you'll be automated away, where you barely understand the field you're working in ("oh you're static tank mech E uh this position is looking for rotating"), where that super weird American/British "sales" culture has totally infiltrated and everyone gets their rocks off to Wolf of Wallstreet and glengarry glen ross. So, long story short, I was in this kid's shoes a little over 2 years ago, and I fucked off to San Francisco, went to a bootcamp, now I'm frontend and it rates among the top 3 decisions I have ever made in my life, and I'm sure that so far it's the most significant and far-reaching decision in terms of longterm happiness. In the bootcamp, I saw 2 projects come out from 3-month-trained frontend devs automate a large portion of my recruitment job. It's going.
- 9y ago
- soared 9y agoCan't believe the author can write this article and not see the glaring problems. This is a narrow minded article that speaks to one person not fitting in, not a widespread problem like he tries to make it seem. If you wear ear plugs at lunch something is obviously not clicking. It sounds much more like the author isn't a fit for the company.. there is no mention of having friends or anyone positivity about the job.
- jldugger 9y agoI've been interviewing with Google, and by my count I've interacted with about 5 different recruiters for two roles. It's strange how specialized they are, and the communication overhead seems high. > Google HR uses the TextExpander program, which populates email templates with salutations, job description links and questions. If it's any consolation, gmail's reply suggestions were frequently sufficient on the candidate's side.
- sealthedeal 9y agoMy fiance is a recruiter at Google, and while she still has issues with work or has a complaint every now and then, she embraces her job and is a top performer. She finds pride in finding people that normally wouldn't think they could get a job at Google, and push them through process, and once they get hired she takes satisfaction that yes, she in fact did help change their life and or career. Anyone can make the claim that there job sucks, or the company they work for tries to brainwash them, or maybe they feel overqualified for what they are doing. If you have an issue with your job you change it. I applaud the author for making the change, but I find it terribly unprofessional and kind of childish that he would rant about his previous employer when they didnt do anything wrong to him...
- johndoe489 9y agoI've been coding for 20 years but some random fresh face out of university goes into HR and looks over my CV and decides whether I'm suitable for an employer or not. Neverlmind that they can barely tell the difference between Java and Javascript. I mean what the fuck, you've got a university diploma, which I don't even have, and THAT's your job? What a waste. Your job is tedious and pointless, end of story.
- varjag 9y agoA Person With Boring Job Is Bored At Work.
- carlmcqueen 9y agoAs someone who has worked at a large corp. for a bunch of years I can say the job you have may feel awful but you're at a company where you can network with people who do anything you are curious about. The same could be said to the person writing this article. You work at Google.. your recruiting job might be awful but get your earbuds out during lunch and see if you might work at another team internally that is more in line with what you wanted to do. Take some ownership of what you'd like to do.
- zelos 9y ago>Yet Google’s low-level HR employees are barraged by higher-ups about Passion! and how we are Changing People’s Lives! Does anyone seriously listen to that kind of talk? It's a job - in this case helping to sell advertising - why try to pretend it's some kind of religious calling? Why do so many companies insist on spewing that claptrap?
- top256 9y agoI remember interviewing for them on site and saying "no thanks I'm not a good fit" after the first interview. They sounded so corporately boring...