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This makes me never want to consider applying there. Can someone elaborate on why Google has this intimidating atmosphere?

antihero 16y ago
I'd hazard a guess at the fact that because Google is so prestigious, and because engineers there are reputed to be intellectually brilliant, people don't want to seem "dumb" in such an environment. Which is mad, because knowledge != intelligence.
nostrademons 16y ago
I don't really want to give the impression that it's this totally intimidating atmosphere all the time, because it does fade with time, and most engineers learn to ask questions abundantly, and most engineers are also really great at answering questions. One of the most commonly cited perks of being at Google is the ability to ask anything of anyone. Have a question about HTML 5? Shoot hixie an e-mail. Digging into the internals of Python? Guido works there, as do a number of other core Pythonistas. Building a Go app? Rob Pike can answer. That said, it is intimidating starting as a Noogler, largely because of the huge volume of proprietary material you need to learn. There's one true way to store structured data, and while it's open-sourced (Protobufs), you've probably never used it. There's a unified JavaScript library (Closure), but it wasn't open-sourced until recently. There're logging, and log-processing, and monitoring, and RPC, and cluster management systems to learn. There're a bunch of storage options, some of which you may've read about in public but never used (BigTable), some of which will be completely new to you. The scale of problems that Google tackles is also bigger than most people are accustomed to. In a lot of the industry, a few-dozen node cluster is fairly large. At Google, thousands of machines are routine. Big-O notation can be ignored at a lot of shops, but at Google-scale, anything that runs in greater than O(N log N) will usually take centuries. Most frontend web devs never worry about latency; at Google, we care very much. A/B testing has recently made a lot of headlines and had some neat libraries developed for it, but its centrally ingrained in Google's feature development processes. When you first start out - particularly if you're used to always having the answers, as many Google engineers were - that can be intimidating. There's suddenly so much you don't know, and yet you know (through Google's public reputation) that software obviously gets written there. Once in a while, it's even good software. For your first few weeks, you probably won't even know what questions to ask, because there's such a volume of knowledge out there. Oftentimes, somebody's already solved your problem, but you don't know about it because it might never occur to you that someone's already solved it. There're also things that Google pays attention to that many other shops don't - in many other employers, you'll never have to deal with internationalization, or handling Chinese characters, or right-to-left languages, or XSS, or managing HTTP resources when you have a large fleet of potentially-out-of-sync webservers. When I started doing code reviews for the websearch webserver, the tech lead said, "We don't expect you to know everything, but we expect that by now you've learned enough to know when you need to ask someone."
- plinkplonk 16y ago
  I've never really understood the fear of appearing dumb in comparison to people who are smarter or more knowledgable than you. Isn't it true in sw dev that almost everyone can be dumb relative to other people? Almost everything can be learned with dedication and effort and the better the people you sorround yourself with are, the faster you level up. And isn't being the dumbest person in the room/company a blessing? This just means that people are paying you to increase your skills and learn from people better than you. How much better can a job get? I have no intention of ever working for Google but the "lots of people there are way smarter than you" would be the biggest draw if I did. edit: Now that I think about it, my habit of asking "stupid" questions (not only about technology) and the fact that I don't really care what people think of me when I do so have stood me in good stead especially with advancing age. I've seen many friends get stuck trying to maintain the illusion of knowledge or understanding and "live in fear" of "being exposed for the ignoramus I am". I don't really care if someone thinks I am an idiot as long as I learn something. Attaching your ego to the perception of others is a dangerous hang up imho
  - kenjackson 16y ago
    In the abstract this is true, but can still be daunting. I remember early in my career I had done a fair bit of C. I'm in a meeting with some architects and they start writig up structs with bitfields. For some reason I must've skipped that section in K&R and never seen it code. My first thought was, "you can't do that in C", but then I noticed that no one else was having a problem with it. Then I realized I didn't know for sure what it was. I wanted to say, "What is that thing after the colon?", but I feared hearing, "This is 'C 101'. You haven't seen this? It's not possible to write good code w/o it. We need to revert all of his changes. Please escort him from the building now". In other words the concern is not that you'll feel dumb relative to smart people. But rather people thinking that this is so basic, how could you possibly not know that. With that said, I did consult at a place where one guy didn't know what free/delete was. He had only worked with garbage collected languages, and I was tracking down tons of memory leaks in his code. When he asked me why he had to free memory (in a C++ application) I did have to pause to avoid saying something I might regret. Everyone has their experiences, and I'm sure he would laugh at my naivette when it comes to Lisp macros.
srean 16y ago
From my experiences as an intern I can say that it has been quite the opposite. You get to mingle with all the unassuming icons of CS and Machine Learning. In fact the problem for me was not that it was intimidating, but that it was too easy to put your foot in your mouth. If you aren't paying attention to the name tags, you could well be explaining some C curiosity to Kerninghan, explaining longest common subsequence to someone who wrote the diff for unix. They would listen to you patiently and thank you. May be also subtly point out an error in your argument, while you never realize whom you were talking to, until much later. The Kerninghan incident did not happen, but several similar incidents did. Down voter: I assume you disagreed with my opinion and not that there is anything unsavory about the comment.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  That's one hell of a way to remember when to ask rather than tell though :) What I thought was the most interesting bit about your comment is the 'unassuming icons of CS and Machine Learning', as a rule I've found that the real experts in a field are usually humble to a fault and approachable (with some exceptions), it's the people with a little bit of knowledge that will do whatever the can to make it seem like they're the experts, as though they've just read one of those 'how to bluff your way in to computers' books.
  - leon_ 16y ago
    I don't think that Mr. Kerninghan runs around shouting "I made C! Bow to me, worms!". It's rather that other people make him the icon he is.
    - srean 16y ago
      Yeah Mr Kernighan is quite an extreme case of being the opposite of "Bow to me, worms". It felt like he would be more comfortable being invisible. He had his (open) cube diagonally behind mine and I did not know who he was. To add to my embarrassment I mispelled his name. Now its too late to edit. A conversation with a co-intern over lunch during the first week: Friend:"Hey, do you know who he is ?" Me (busy gorging awesome food): "No. But he got himself locked out and I had to let him in a few days ago. He was so profusely apologetic and thankful... I probably wouldn't have remembered otherwise. Checkout these steaks" Friend: "Take a look at his name tag on his cube sometime." And yes, more often than not humility co-habits with expertise. I have a moderate hearing impairment, so nothing was as inspiring and humility instilling as seeing T.V. Raman work. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/business/04blind.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/business/04blind.html
enneff 16y ago
It's not quite like that. It's more a case that since you're aware of how knowledgeable everyone is, you feel a bit intimidated by it all. I've never in my whole time at Google been made to feel inferior for not knowing things. Being a person that asks lots of questions is considered "Googley," and a respected trait of a good Engineer. What I think is being referred to is the insecurity that comes from within. A lot of engineers come to Google from an environment where they were often the most knowledgeable person in the room. It's tough to adjust to being the most ignorant.

antihero 16y ago

I'd hazard a guess at the fact that because Google is so prestigious, and because engineers there are reputed to be intellectually brilliant, people don't want to seem "dumb" in such an environment. Which is mad, because knowledge != intelligence.

nostrademons 16y ago

I don't really want to give the impression that it's this totally intimidating atmosphere all the time, because it does fade with time, and most engineers learn to ask questions abundantly, and most engineers are also really great at answering questions. One of the most commonly cited perks of being at Google is the ability to ask anything of anyone. Have a question about HTML 5? Shoot hixie an e-mail. Digging into the internals of Python? Guido works there, as do a number of other core Pythonistas. Building a Go app? Rob Pike can answer. That said, it is intimidating starting as a Noogler, largely because of the huge volume of proprietary material you need to learn. There's one true way to store structured data, and while it's open-sourced (Protobufs), you've probably never used it. There's a unified JavaScript library (Closure), but it wasn't open-sourced until recently. There're logging, and log-processing, and monitoring, and RPC, and cluster management systems to learn. There're a bunch of storage options, some of which you may've read about in public but never used (BigTable), some of which will be completely new to you. The scale of problems that Google tackles is also bigger than most people are accustomed to. In a lot of the industry, a few-dozen node cluster is fairly large. At Google, thousands of machines are routine. Big-O notation can be ignored at a lot of shops, but at Google-scale, anything that runs in greater than O(N log N) will usually take centuries. Most frontend web devs never worry about latency; at Google, we care very much. A/B testing has recently made a lot of headlines and had some neat libraries developed for it, but its centrally ingrained in Google's feature development processes. When you first start out - particularly if you're used to always having the answers, as many Google engineers were - that can be intimidating. There's suddenly so much you don't know, and yet you know (through Google's public reputation) that software obviously gets written there. Once in a while, it's even good software. For your first few weeks, you probably won't even know what questions to ask, because there's such a volume of knowledge out there. Oftentimes, somebody's already solved your problem, but you don't know about it because it might never occur to you that someone's already solved it. There're also things that Google pays attention to that many other shops don't - in many other employers, you'll never have to deal with internationalization, or handling Chinese characters, or right-to-left languages, or XSS, or managing HTTP resources when you have a large fleet of potentially-out-of-sync webservers. When I started doing code reviews for the websearch webserver, the tech lead said, "We don't expect you to know everything, but we expect that by now you've learned enough to know when you need to ask someone."

plinkplonk 16y ago
I've never really understood the fear of appearing dumb in comparison to people who are smarter or more knowledgable than you. Isn't it true in sw dev that almost everyone can be dumb relative to other people? Almost everything can be learned with dedication and effort and the better the people you sorround yourself with are, the faster you level up. And isn't being the dumbest person in the room/company a blessing? This just means that people are paying you to increase your skills and learn from people better than you. How much better can a job get? I have no intention of ever working for Google but the "lots of people there are way smarter than you" would be the biggest draw if I did. edit: Now that I think about it, my habit of asking "stupid" questions (not only about technology) and the fact that I don't really care what people think of me when I do so have stood me in good stead especially with advancing age. I've seen many friends get stuck trying to maintain the illusion of knowledge or understanding and "live in fear" of "being exposed for the ignoramus I am". I don't really care if someone thinks I am an idiot as long as I learn something. Attaching your ego to the perception of others is a dangerous hang up imho
- kenjackson 16y ago
  In the abstract this is true, but can still be daunting. I remember early in my career I had done a fair bit of C. I'm in a meeting with some architects and they start writig up structs with bitfields. For some reason I must've skipped that section in K&R and never seen it code. My first thought was, "you can't do that in C", but then I noticed that no one else was having a problem with it. Then I realized I didn't know for sure what it was. I wanted to say, "What is that thing after the colon?", but I feared hearing, "This is 'C 101'. You haven't seen this? It's not possible to write good code w/o it. We need to revert all of his changes. Please escort him from the building now". In other words the concern is not that you'll feel dumb relative to smart people. But rather people thinking that this is so basic, how could you possibly not know that. With that said, I did consult at a place where one guy didn't know what free/delete was. He had only worked with garbage collected languages, and I was tracking down tons of memory leaks in his code. When he asked me why he had to free memory (in a C++ application) I did have to pause to avoid saying something I might regret. Everyone has their experiences, and I'm sure he would laugh at my naivette when it comes to Lisp macros.

srean 16y ago

From my experiences as an intern I can say that it has been quite the opposite. You get to mingle with all the unassuming icons of CS and Machine Learning. In fact the problem for me was not that it was intimidating, but that it was too easy to put your foot in your mouth. If you aren't paying attention to the name tags, you could well be explaining some C curiosity to Kerninghan, explaining longest common subsequence to someone who wrote the diff for unix. They would listen to you patiently and thank you. May be also subtly point out an error in your argument, while you never realize whom you were talking to, until much later. The Kerninghan incident did not happen, but several similar incidents did. Down voter: I assume you disagreed with my opinion and not that there is anything unsavory about the comment.

jacquesm 16y ago
That's one hell of a way to remember when to ask rather than tell though :) What I thought was the most interesting bit about your comment is the 'unassuming icons of CS and Machine Learning', as a rule I've found that the real experts in a field are usually humble to a fault and approachable (with some exceptions), it's the people with a little bit of knowledge that will do whatever the can to make it seem like they're the experts, as though they've just read one of those 'how to bluff your way in to computers' books.
- leon_ 16y ago
  I don't think that Mr. Kerninghan runs around shouting "I made C! Bow to me, worms!". It's rather that other people make him the icon he is.
  - srean 16y ago
    Yeah Mr Kernighan is quite an extreme case of being the opposite of "Bow to me, worms". It felt like he would be more comfortable being invisible. He had his (open) cube diagonally behind mine and I did not know who he was. To add to my embarrassment I mispelled his name. Now its too late to edit. A conversation with a co-intern over lunch during the first week: Friend:"Hey, do you know who he is ?" Me (busy gorging awesome food): "No. But he got himself locked out and I had to let him in a few days ago. He was so profusely apologetic and thankful... I probably wouldn't have remembered otherwise. Checkout these steaks" Friend: "Take a look at his name tag on his cube sometime." And yes, more often than not humility co-habits with expertise. I have a moderate hearing impairment, so nothing was as inspiring and humility instilling as seeing T.V. Raman work. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/business/04blind.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/business/04blind.html

enneff 16y ago

It's not quite like that. It's more a case that since you're aware of how knowledgeable everyone is, you feel a bit intimidated by it all. I've never in my whole time at Google been made to feel inferior for not knowing things. Being a person that asks lots of questions is considered "Googley," and a respected trait of a good Engineer. What I think is being referred to is the insecurity that comes from within. A lot of engineers come to Google from an environment where they were often the most knowledgeable person in the room. It's tough to adjust to being the most ignorant.