5 ms·

no because chances are all your skills will go towards doing some mundane task. you heard of a land grab...well Google is in the process of doing a talent grab

by vaksel 15y ago

no because chances are all your skills will go towards doing some mundane task. you heard of a land grab...well Google is in the process of doing a talent grab, hiring engineers left and right, so chances are unless you made a name for yourself, you'll be stuck doing something stupid

nostrademons 15y ago
I'm curious why there's this perception that the vast majority of Google engineers work on mundane stuff. Yes, there's mundane work in any job. There is less of it in Google than in other places, even including the startups I've worked at, because when you operate at Google-scale, even simple things become an interesting technical challenge. It's sorta hard for me to point out specifics because most of Google's internal infrastructure is quite secret, but if you can point out some things that you think would be mundane and boring, I can try to illustrate some of the challenges involved, up to the limits of my confidentiality agreement.
- vaksel 15y ago
  It comes down to math. Google has 25,000 employees, and let's say 100 different projects. They have a higher percentage of engineers than most companies, so you end up with quite a large # of people on every project. Sure the guys who made a name for themselves are working on something cool and doing big things. But some peon? They are stuck doing the mundane busy work that the big guys don't want to bother with. It's like automotive design...most people go to design schools thinking they'll be designing cars, but in the real world, you end up being one out of the five designers working on designing the side mirrors.
  - nostrademons 15y ago
    It's not organized like that. Rather, there are perhaps 100 public-facing products. And then each product has lots of individual features that have teams working on them. For example, I work on Google Search, but the actual projects that I've worked on include Wonder Wheel, the left-nav, the move of all the properties (books.google.com, video.google.com, etc.) to www.google.com, the May 2010 visual redesign, the occasional doodle, some consulting on last week's visual redesign, and Authorship. If you mention those to most people, they go "huh?" until you point it out to them, because they just think of Google Search as one integrated product. And then there's the infrastructure supporting that, which is technically fascinating but never gets any public recognition, because it's all confidential. If your goal is to be famous, then yes, this is mundane work. But if your goal is to work on interesting technical challenges, it is a lot more challenging and fascinating than slapping together a RoR app. I'll point out that the startup world is like this too. For every Mark Zuckerburg on the cover of time magazine, there are a dozen DropBoxes and Herokus that get some acclaim within their niches but are unknown to the world at large. And then for every Heroku, there're a dozen FreshAddress.coms or Bingo Card Creators that have a very tiny niche that can support their founder but is virtually unknown outside their customer base. And for every BCG, there are a dozen startups that fail completely and nobody knows about. One thing that really surprised me about the real world was just how deep the iceberg goes. I was an outsider until I was about 27, first as a student, then as an employee in a startup with big dreams but small successes, then as a founder in a startup with big dreams but small successes. People know the Zuckerburgs of the world because the media write about them; the media write about them because they need larger than life personalities to get people to buy their magazines. The "celebrity programmer" is a creation of the media. Just look what happened with Google+ and Andy Hertzfeld. He worked on one aspect (UI) of one feature (Circles) of one product (Google+). He is just as much of a peon as the rest of us, but because he has a prior track record and people love a good hero story, somehow that got blown up into "the lead designer for all of Google+". Andy, to his credit, didn't take the credit and shared it with all the people who were actually involved in creating the UI for Google+. (Actually, I worry sometimes that listing projects I've worked on here will result in the same thing happening, since I'm at least a recognizable personality on HN. I was not the primary developer for Wonder Wheel - the guy who was is a kickass developer with his own startup now. I was not the primary driving force behind merging all properties into one - the woman who was is now working on a cool data analysis problem in an overseas office. I was the first engineer on the 2010 visual redesign, but I was not the tech lead, and many many other people helped out. I'm not the primary doodler, I've only done one or two when that guy was busy. I'm one of three co-TLs on Authorship...I'd like to think I contribute a lot, but many other people contribute a lot too.)
    - tytso 15y ago
      Well, not all infrastructure work is confidential. I work on the Production Linux team at Google, and we're quite open about a lot of the work we do, and we try to push as much as possible of the work we do upstream. I do have to second this thing about the "celebrity programmer". We have a group of people working on ext4, some of whom have been working on it at Google before I decided to start working there. (In fact, I learned about Google adopting ext4 from their contributions of no-journal mode for ext4 to the upstream.) I may be one of the more visible persons at Google, but I'm certainly not the only one working on ext4, and ext4 wouldn't be where it is today without some really talented folks who have been working on it with me for the last 2-3 years --- and I've only been at Google for 18 months! One of the reasons why I am at Google is precisely because it is a big company. It is only when have a very, very large number of machines in your data center does it make sense to put a whole team of people working on infrastructure code such as file systems. (I'm pretty confident, by the way, that Sun never recouped all of the money they poured into ZFS --- it's a project which is highly impressive from a business perspective, but from a business person's ROI perspective, not so much.) One of the things I can definitely say about Google is that while it may be a large company, compared to IBM, it has a minuscule amount of bureaucracy. I used to sit on the team that worked on the annual budget for the Linux Technology Center, and that would be weeks and weeks of conference calls where the ROI of work items at the granularity of 6 to 12 persons months worth of effort for the next fiscal year would be weighed, judged, and decided. Which is something I'm glad IBM does as a shareholder --- but as someone who had to sit on those interminable conference calls, not so much. I get to do far more real, honest coding work at Google than I did at MIT (where I spent the bulk of my time on Lotus Notes, PowerPoint via Crossover Office, and conference calls.) The one good thing about having gone through a very dispassionate review on the ROI of various different bits of technical work is I can say with fairly great authority that there is huge amounts of work which makes sense from an ROI perspective for me (and a whole team besides) to do at Google, but which wouldn't make sense at most other companies, just because of the scale at which it operates. If you are interested in working on very large scale systems problems, Google is definitely one of the best places in the world for you to do this kind of stuff. I know a tenured faculty member at Harvard who decided that it was far more fun to do systems work at Google, and who left his tenured faculty position for this reason.
- neilk 15y ago
  > even simple things become an interesting technical challenge. It depends on your perspective. This also means that you can spin for a year or more just getting one feature out the door. I think I had about 10 meetings over six months on whether addresses for Google Checkout would contain two or three address lines, and whether we needed a separate field for France's CEDEX postal codes. Some of this was justified as it involved complicated negotiations with external vendors too, and I had to negotiate with the guy who was hired to unify Google's internationalization libraries for Java. But seriously, I'm not sure this was the best thing I could have been doing with my life. If I remember correctly we simply came around to the exact same hacks I proposed on the very first day.
  - nostrademons 15y ago
    Yeah, some of the bikeshedding that goes on around UI gets ridiculous. I remember running into a quote board from very early (~2000) in Google's history. Marissa (who ended up in charge of the search UI anyways) said, "Maybe we should have a mailing list where anyone who's interested in UI can contribute" and then Amit (who came up with "Don't be evil", alongside Paul Buchheit) said "Bad idea. That's every engineer in the company." On the plus side, you learn from many, many different perspectives this way. It's like Peter Norvig's advice in "Teach yourself to be a programmer in 10 years": 1.) Get involved in a language standardization effort. 2.) Have the good sense to get yourself off the language standardization effort as quickly as possible. Great way to learn, perhaps not such a great way to get things done.
    - neilk 15y ago
      This wasn't UI as much as it was data model. Also, the guy they had doing the official i18n libraries had a default position of We Only Do The Right Thing. Admirable, but not fun to work with. So even if I proved to him that our downstream vendors, and indeed almost all French companies, handled these special French zip codes with a simple hack... that wasn't good enough for him.
  - gregholmberg 15y ago
    > If I remember correctly we simply came around to the exact same hacks I proposed on the very first day. Your story could be read in a positive way by an MBA class: "After much careful company-wide introspection, the smart guy's instinctive solutions were allowed to prevail." Me? I would have given up on the process long before a year had passed.

by vaksel 15y ago

nostrademons 15y ago

I'm curious why there's this perception that the vast majority of Google engineers work on mundane stuff. Yes, there's mundane work in any job. There is less of it in Google than in other places, even including the startups I've worked at, because when you operate at Google-scale, even simple things become an interesting technical challenge. It's sorta hard for me to point out specifics because most of Google's internal infrastructure is quite secret, but if you can point out some things that you think would be mundane and boring, I can try to illustrate some of the challenges involved, up to the limits of my confidentiality agreement.

vaksel 15y ago
It comes down to math. Google has 25,000 employees, and let's say 100 different projects. They have a higher percentage of engineers than most companies, so you end up with quite a large # of people on every project. Sure the guys who made a name for themselves are working on something cool and doing big things. But some peon? They are stuck doing the mundane busy work that the big guys don't want to bother with. It's like automotive design...most people go to design schools thinking they'll be designing cars, but in the real world, you end up being one out of the five designers working on designing the side mirrors.
- nostrademons 15y ago
  It's not organized like that. Rather, there are perhaps 100 public-facing products. And then each product has lots of individual features that have teams working on them. For example, I work on Google Search, but the actual projects that I've worked on include Wonder Wheel, the left-nav, the move of all the properties (books.google.com, video.google.com, etc.) to www.google.com, the May 2010 visual redesign, the occasional doodle, some consulting on last week's visual redesign, and Authorship. If you mention those to most people, they go "huh?" until you point it out to them, because they just think of Google Search as one integrated product. And then there's the infrastructure supporting that, which is technically fascinating but never gets any public recognition, because it's all confidential. If your goal is to be famous, then yes, this is mundane work. But if your goal is to work on interesting technical challenges, it is a lot more challenging and fascinating than slapping together a RoR app. I'll point out that the startup world is like this too. For every Mark Zuckerburg on the cover of time magazine, there are a dozen DropBoxes and Herokus that get some acclaim within their niches but are unknown to the world at large. And then for every Heroku, there're a dozen FreshAddress.coms or Bingo Card Creators that have a very tiny niche that can support their founder but is virtually unknown outside their customer base. And for every BCG, there are a dozen startups that fail completely and nobody knows about. One thing that really surprised me about the real world was just how deep the iceberg goes. I was an outsider until I was about 27, first as a student, then as an employee in a startup with big dreams but small successes, then as a founder in a startup with big dreams but small successes. People know the Zuckerburgs of the world because the media write about them; the media write about them because they need larger than life personalities to get people to buy their magazines. The "celebrity programmer" is a creation of the media. Just look what happened with Google+ and Andy Hertzfeld. He worked on one aspect (UI) of one feature (Circles) of one product (Google+). He is just as much of a peon as the rest of us, but because he has a prior track record and people love a good hero story, somehow that got blown up into "the lead designer for all of Google+". Andy, to his credit, didn't take the credit and shared it with all the people who were actually involved in creating the UI for Google+. (Actually, I worry sometimes that listing projects I've worked on here will result in the same thing happening, since I'm at least a recognizable personality on HN. I was not the primary developer for Wonder Wheel - the guy who was is a kickass developer with his own startup now. I was not the primary driving force behind merging all properties into one - the woman who was is now working on a cool data analysis problem in an overseas office. I was the first engineer on the 2010 visual redesign, but I was not the tech lead, and many many other people helped out. I'm not the primary doodler, I've only done one or two when that guy was busy. I'm one of three co-TLs on Authorship...I'd like to think I contribute a lot, but many other people contribute a lot too.)
  - tytso 15y ago
    Well, not all infrastructure work is confidential. I work on the Production Linux team at Google, and we're quite open about a lot of the work we do, and we try to push as much as possible of the work we do upstream. I do have to second this thing about the "celebrity programmer". We have a group of people working on ext4, some of whom have been working on it at Google before I decided to start working there. (In fact, I learned about Google adopting ext4 from their contributions of no-journal mode for ext4 to the upstream.) I may be one of the more visible persons at Google, but I'm certainly not the only one working on ext4, and ext4 wouldn't be where it is today without some really talented folks who have been working on it with me for the last 2-3 years --- and I've only been at Google for 18 months! One of the reasons why I am at Google is precisely because it is a big company. It is only when have a very, very large number of machines in your data center does it make sense to put a whole team of people working on infrastructure code such as file systems. (I'm pretty confident, by the way, that Sun never recouped all of the money they poured into ZFS --- it's a project which is highly impressive from a business perspective, but from a business person's ROI perspective, not so much.) One of the things I can definitely say about Google is that while it may be a large company, compared to IBM, it has a minuscule amount of bureaucracy. I used to sit on the team that worked on the annual budget for the Linux Technology Center, and that would be weeks and weeks of conference calls where the ROI of work items at the granularity of 6 to 12 persons months worth of effort for the next fiscal year would be weighed, judged, and decided. Which is something I'm glad IBM does as a shareholder --- but as someone who had to sit on those interminable conference calls, not so much. I get to do far more real, honest coding work at Google than I did at MIT (where I spent the bulk of my time on Lotus Notes, PowerPoint via Crossover Office, and conference calls.) The one good thing about having gone through a very dispassionate review on the ROI of various different bits of technical work is I can say with fairly great authority that there is huge amounts of work which makes sense from an ROI perspective for me (and a whole team besides) to do at Google, but which wouldn't make sense at most other companies, just because of the scale at which it operates. If you are interested in working on very large scale systems problems, Google is definitely one of the best places in the world for you to do this kind of stuff. I know a tenured faculty member at Harvard who decided that it was far more fun to do systems work at Google, and who left his tenured faculty position for this reason.
neilk 15y ago
> even simple things become an interesting technical challenge. It depends on your perspective. This also means that you can spin for a year or more just getting one feature out the door. I think I had about 10 meetings over six months on whether addresses for Google Checkout would contain two or three address lines, and whether we needed a separate field for France's CEDEX postal codes. Some of this was justified as it involved complicated negotiations with external vendors too, and I had to negotiate with the guy who was hired to unify Google's internationalization libraries for Java. But seriously, I'm not sure this was the best thing I could have been doing with my life. If I remember correctly we simply came around to the exact same hacks I proposed on the very first day.
- nostrademons 15y ago
  Yeah, some of the bikeshedding that goes on around UI gets ridiculous. I remember running into a quote board from very early (~2000) in Google's history. Marissa (who ended up in charge of the search UI anyways) said, "Maybe we should have a mailing list where anyone who's interested in UI can contribute" and then Amit (who came up with "Don't be evil", alongside Paul Buchheit) said "Bad idea. That's every engineer in the company." On the plus side, you learn from many, many different perspectives this way. It's like Peter Norvig's advice in "Teach yourself to be a programmer in 10 years": 1.) Get involved in a language standardization effort. 2.) Have the good sense to get yourself off the language standardization effort as quickly as possible. Great way to learn, perhaps not such a great way to get things done.
  - neilk 15y ago
    This wasn't UI as much as it was data model. Also, the guy they had doing the official i18n libraries had a default position of We Only Do The Right Thing. Admirable, but not fun to work with. So even if I proved to him that our downstream vendors, and indeed almost all French companies, handled these special French zip codes with a simple hack... that wasn't good enough for him.
- gregholmberg 15y ago
  > If I remember correctly we simply came around to the exact same hacks I proposed on the very first day. Your story could be read in a positive way by an MBA class: "After much careful company-wide introspection, the smart guy's instinctive solutions were allowed to prevail." Me? I would have given up on the process long before a year had passed.