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The "Not Enough Clarity about your Role" issue has killed Google with so many potentially outstanding employees. For years and years you wouldn't interview with

The "Not Enough Clarity about your Role" issue has killed Google with so many potentially outstanding employees. For years and years you wouldn't interview with your team, or even be told what team you would be joining. It is slightly better now, but you still don't interview with your specific team until very, very late in the process, if you even do. One of the worst things about interviewing at the big G.

cmrdporcupine 6y ago
Part of that is because of the expectation at Google that you will just move around. You don't really hire specifically into a given team, and that could be disconcerting, for sure. But you are also given enough respect by the company to assume that as a competent SWE you should be able to move around fairly easily to almost any team in the company. When I started (9 years ago) it was stated during onboarding that you would be expected to move every two years or so. That's probably softened a bit, but it's still a part of the culture. So even if you don't love where you're initially slotted, nobody is going to frown excessively when you transfer elsewhere after getting past your noogler phase. I've found it frustrating to interview at other places and get blank stares when I ask about how team mobility works within the company, what happens when the team is restructured, etc.
- dddbbb 6y ago
  Doesn't that put off a lot of very high-quality candidates though? If someone joins because they want to work in an interesting machine learning team, they probably don't want to be potentially moved on to a legacy Java CRUD app. Or is transferring determined more by what the employee wants?
  - cmrdporcupine 6y ago
    The latter. You transfer to where you want to go. There's an internal listing of open positions, but there's also word of mouth. Assuming the team has headcount and you get on with the manager, it's usually not hard, and doesn't take a lot of effort. Yes, the first bit doing something you don't like might suck. But I like that Google conceives of software engineering positions as a broader discipline than "I'm a fullstack developer who uses XXX language and YYY framework"; that isn't going to be of any use to Google anyways. We generally build our own tools and have our own frameworks. Does it put people off the hiring process? I'm sure. Luckily Google has lots of people to choose from.
  - vkou 6y ago
    Unless your job is going away, transfers are determined by what employees want.
  - compiler-guy 6y ago
    Employees usually get to ask where to go next, and the expectation is generally that you spend at least a year in a position. But I seriously doubt anyone who wants to do ML is going to sit through a year on the java team on the off chance that they could move to an ML position in a year.
  - kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
    1 point by kinkrtyavimoodh 0 minutes ago | edit | delete [–] Among the bigger companies, Google is by far the friendliest when it comes to intra-company transfers. All you need is the manager of the destination team to accept you. If the team is in a different country, the immigration teams will do what needs to be done. You don't need permission from your current manager. Maybe you don't care about this, but many would consider this a huge 'perk', that justifies Google's focus on hiring good generalist SWEs who are not too wedded to a specific team. It's a very strong part of Google culture, and it manifests itself in every aspect of Google life, such as general openness wrt code and documentation across the whole company, internal job boards etc. which make it easy to take a call about what team you want to work on next.
minhazm 6y ago
There are downsides to team specific interviewing. You can have situations where the team is desperate to hire someone and so they subconsciously lower their bar. It also leads to a less standardized interview process and introduces more bias in the process. The downside of course is you may not get the best person for the specific role/team. Google and many other tech companies optimize for a low false positive rate vs a low false negative rate. They would rather miss out on good talent than hire someone who doesn't fit their mould of what an engineer should be. This can work for Google since most people want to work at Google and they have a steady stream of applicants.
fragmede 6y ago
To be expound on "very, very late", interviewing with your specific team is done at the end, after passing the on-site, and there's a soft offer from the hiring committee. The last step is to get a team match where the candidate talks w/ teams' manager, and both the candidate and manager have to agree to the match.
kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
Among the bigger companies, Google is by far the friendliest when it comes to intra-company transfers. All you need is the manager of the destination team to accept you. If the team is in a different country, the immigration teams will do what needs to be done. You don't need permission from your current manager. Maybe you don't care about this, but many would consider this a huge 'perk', that justifies Google's focus on hiring good generalist SWEs who are not too wedded to a specific team. It's a very strong part of Google culture, and it manifests itself in every aspect of Google life, such as general openness wrt code and documentation across the whole company, internal job boards etc. which make it easy to take a call about what team you want to work on next.

cmrdporcupine 6y ago

Part of that is because of the expectation at Google that you will just move around. You don't really hire specifically into a given team, and that could be disconcerting, for sure. But you are also given enough respect by the company to assume that as a competent SWE you should be able to move around fairly easily to almost any team in the company. When I started (9 years ago) it was stated during onboarding that you would be expected to move every two years or so. That's probably softened a bit, but it's still a part of the culture. So even if you don't love where you're initially slotted, nobody is going to frown excessively when you transfer elsewhere after getting past your noogler phase. I've found it frustrating to interview at other places and get blank stares when I ask about how team mobility works within the company, what happens when the team is restructured, etc.

dddbbb 6y ago
Doesn't that put off a lot of very high-quality candidates though? If someone joins because they want to work in an interesting machine learning team, they probably don't want to be potentially moved on to a legacy Java CRUD app. Or is transferring determined more by what the employee wants?
- cmrdporcupine 6y ago
  The latter. You transfer to where you want to go. There's an internal listing of open positions, but there's also word of mouth. Assuming the team has headcount and you get on with the manager, it's usually not hard, and doesn't take a lot of effort. Yes, the first bit doing something you don't like might suck. But I like that Google conceives of software engineering positions as a broader discipline than "I'm a fullstack developer who uses XXX language and YYY framework"; that isn't going to be of any use to Google anyways. We generally build our own tools and have our own frameworks. Does it put people off the hiring process? I'm sure. Luckily Google has lots of people to choose from.
- vkou 6y ago
  Unless your job is going away, transfers are determined by what employees want.
- compiler-guy 6y ago
  Employees usually get to ask where to go next, and the expectation is generally that you spend at least a year in a position. But I seriously doubt anyone who wants to do ML is going to sit through a year on the java team on the off chance that they could move to an ML position in a year.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
  1 point by kinkrtyavimoodh 0 minutes ago | edit | delete [–] Among the bigger companies, Google is by far the friendliest when it comes to intra-company transfers. All you need is the manager of the destination team to accept you. If the team is in a different country, the immigration teams will do what needs to be done. You don't need permission from your current manager. Maybe you don't care about this, but many would consider this a huge 'perk', that justifies Google's focus on hiring good generalist SWEs who are not too wedded to a specific team. It's a very strong part of Google culture, and it manifests itself in every aspect of Google life, such as general openness wrt code and documentation across the whole company, internal job boards etc. which make it easy to take a call about what team you want to work on next.

minhazm 6y ago

There are downsides to team specific interviewing. You can have situations where the team is desperate to hire someone and so they subconsciously lower their bar. It also leads to a less standardized interview process and introduces more bias in the process. The downside of course is you may not get the best person for the specific role/team. Google and many other tech companies optimize for a low false positive rate vs a low false negative rate. They would rather miss out on good talent than hire someone who doesn't fit their mould of what an engineer should be. This can work for Google since most people want to work at Google and they have a steady stream of applicants.

fragmede 6y ago

To be expound on "very, very late", interviewing with your specific team is done at the end, after passing the on-site, and there's a soft offer from the hiring committee. The last step is to get a team match where the candidate talks w/ teams' manager, and both the candidate and manager have to agree to the match.

kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago

Among the bigger companies, Google is by far the friendliest when it comes to intra-company transfers. All you need is the manager of the destination team to accept you. If the team is in a different country, the immigration teams will do what needs to be done. You don't need permission from your current manager. Maybe you don't care about this, but many would consider this a huge 'perk', that justifies Google's focus on hiring good generalist SWEs who are not too wedded to a specific team. It's a very strong part of Google culture, and it manifests itself in every aspect of Google life, such as general openness wrt code and documentation across the whole company, internal job boards etc. which make it easy to take a call about what team you want to work on next.