4 ms·

My First Week at Google (2005)

53 points by coffeeaddict1 3y ago

Kwpolska 3y ago
(2005) i.e. back when Google was a desirable place to work at and not a big corporation which loves killing projects and firing people.
- hn8305823 3y ago
  Just checking if this is still an accurate description of the culture at Google today? > Google is the opposite: it's like a giant grad-school. Half the programmers have PhD's, and everyone treats the place like a giant research playground. While the company is hush-hush to the outside world, it's 100% open on the inside. Everyone knows what everyone is doing, everyone is working on pet projects. Every once in a while, a manager skims over the bubbling activity, looking for products to "reap" from the creative harvest. The programmers completely drive the company, it's really amazing. I kept waiting for people to walk up to me and ask me if I had declared my major yet. They not only encourage personal experimentation and innovation, they demand it. Every programmer is required to spend 20% of their time working on random personal projects. If you get overloaded by a crisis, then that 20% personal time accrues anyway. Nearly every Google technology you know (maps, earth, gmail) started out as somebody's 20% project, I think.
  - thesandlord 3y ago
    I left Google in 2020. It is not like this anymore. I heard its gotten even worse.
  - cornstalks 3y ago
    I've been at Google since 2015 and it is nothing like that. I've never met another Googler that actually has a 20% project (though there are many internal tools that are widely used that are stated as being unsupported as they are only 20% projects).
  - summerlight 3y ago
    I don't think so, though the team culture might differ orgs to orgs. Engineers still have a relatively strong voice compared to other companies though.
  - bigmanwalter 3y ago
    Not at all. The MBAs have taken over at this point and expectations are far too aggressive for anything like 20% time to exist. The rule of thumb is that they give so much work that even if we only complete 80% of it, that should be considered "meeting expectations". I've heard people refer to 20% projects now as "120% projects".
  - hex4def6 3y ago
    I was in Google / Nest in ~2018 or so. I knew 20% projects existed, but I'd heard they were considered a good way to not get promoted. I knew a few people that had a 20% project they were working on, but it was the exception, not the norm.
  - glimshe 3y ago
    Google is just another big software company with solid pay and benefits. There is nothing quirky, unique or special about it otherwise. My Googler buddies describe their work as pedestrian and while Engineers still retain more power than the average company, this is counterbalanced by upper management incompetence which destroys/misaligns most good initiatives leading to a lot of work being done with limited results.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- r0m4n0 3y ago
  No one likes working on lame projects, I feel like canceling projects is a symptom of the engineering driven product culture of a place. Maintenance and flat growth is not something I personally like to work on. These products aren’t canceled because they are doing great
dcchambers 3y ago
(2005)
sorokod 3y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
evmar 3y ago
Man, I remember* getting "coffee encrusted filet mingon with a vanilla glaze" at Charlie's back around this time, and thinking both "this is amazing" and also "this can never last". Also I remember many years later when they were instead serving stuff like hot dogs. RIP the good times! * likely corrupted by memory's distance
- laidoffamazon 3y ago
  > "this is amazing" and also "this can never last". A I think a lot of people seem to want to tie these things to greater tech industry trends but I don't think it applies (people that claim x, y z was a ZIRP etc). I feel like that ignores the fact that most companies were never this generous! I never even got bananas at my last company!
- ryandrake 3y ago
  It's weird to see so much ink spilled about free food at Google, which is, in monetary terms, a pretty trivial perk. Compared to things like their generous 401(k) match, many 401(k) contribution options (pre-tax, Roth, after-tax), their health plan which includes an HSA that gets seeded with a chunk of free money each year, tuition reimbursement, and so on which probably adds up to an order of magnitude more dollar value than some coffee-encrusted meat. Yet, everyone talks about the food, maybe just because it's an unusual perk.
  - boiler_up800 3y ago
    HSA seeded with money is indeed amazing. I learned recently that HSA’s benefit from a triple tax advantage: the money goes in pretax, the money is withdrawn without tax, and any investment gains are tax free. Which - if you’re willing to do the paperwork - means you can just save the HSA money forever and pay yourself back out of it when you retire to cover medical expenses you previously incurred.
  - Salgat 3y ago
    I never understood the food thing, to me it comes with the implication of them wanting you to stick around longer. Not inherently a bad thing, but there's definitely companies that I've interviewed for that told me up front that I was expected to work 10-12 hours and they would provide free meals to cover those hours, as if it was even remotely making up for it.
refulgentis 3y ago
Xoogler who was a noogler in 2016, left in 2023: it's surprising how much survived through 2016, and how little, if any, is left now. I'm guessing more was gone by 2016 than I realize. The last tales I heard of intrinsically motivated engineers banding together to build _products_ was 2014-ish.
dukeofdoom 3y ago
[flagged]
grdvnl 3y ago
There is an interesting line in the end > All in all, I guess this is the result of a company that has more money than they possibly know what to do with. I wonder how long this utopian "do no evil" culture can last. Wealth creates power, and power corrupts. And boy, have I seen a lot of power this last week. > "May you live in interesting times." Now, juxtapose that with the authors other recent post: https://social.clawhammer.net/blog/posts/2024-01-10-GoogleExitLetter/ https://social.clawhammer.net/blog/posts/2024-01-10-GoogleEx... Interesting times in deed!
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
samstave 3y ago
I should have been able to FN charge google for my interview process. Fuck you google... with failing me because I didnt have a college degree but was good enough to design several of your datacenters.
- theideaofcoffee 3y ago
  You may have designed it, but can you tell me how many ping pong balls it would take to fill up one of the rooms? We are only interested if you can answer trivialities. (/s of course) (And I’m assuming you could, too!)
  - dekhn 3y ago
    Google typically didn't ask fermi problems like that. Although, actually, sphere packing problems are pretty interesting, mathematically... A common classic era Google question would be roughly "find an O(n) or O(logn) solution to a problem that most people would solve quadratically, and write pseudocode for your solution, handling important edge cases, while also intuiting the special details that your interviewer is fishing for (because they learned it in their PhD)". So many people I knew at google were great math and science folks who ended up writing CRUD apps. Really depressing for them.
    - samstave 3y ago
      My final question after 3-month panel interviews: "How do you do a global replace in vi?" -- I blanked and said "I'd google it" They said "thats the best answer" (they also asked me what a type of comapny Google was... I said "Most think youre a search company, but really, you're an advertising company" 2008. When I interviewed at Twitter in 2009-ish, they asked what type of company I thought Twitter was; "You're a global sentiment engine" -- Go ghosted by both after saying I ranked super high on their metrics... (goog actually stated they were going to give me an offer, then called the next morning telling me they were rescinding offer)
      - dekhn 3y ago
laidoffamazon 3y ago
[flagged]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jabedude 3y ago
Sure seems like pessimism is becoming prevalent in the US tech industry. I'm reminded of Tony Soprano explaining his depression to his psychiatrist: "It's good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that and I know. But lately, I'm getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over". I think that attitude is going around and it's quite sad. VR and AI show incredible promise to me and I think we have plenty of innovations ahead of us
dang 3y ago
Recent and related: FAQ on Leaving Google - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39034277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39034277 - Jan 2024 (291 comments)
Hydraulix989 3y ago
Ah yes, halcyon days before the interest rate crisis.
onetimeuse92304 3y ago
> Nearly every Google technology you know (maps, earth, gmail) started out as somebody's 20% project, I think. "Google Maps began as a C++ desktop program developed by brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen at Where 2 Technologies. In October 2004, the company was acquired by Google, which converted it into a web application." "In 2004 Google bought Keyhole Inc., which was partially funded by the Central Intelligence Agency's venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel. Keyhole had developed an online mapping service that Google rebranded in 2005 as Google Earth." "Gmail was a project started by Google developer Paul Buchheit, who had already explored the idea of web-based email in the 1990s, before the launch of Hotmail, while working on a personal email software project as a college student. Buchheit began his work on Gmail in August 2001."
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  It's definitely hard to see how those constitute as '20% projects' for engineering, maybe the author meant 'somebody' in a very broad sense, including the corporate development teams.
peterangular 3y ago
> I wonder how long this utopian "do no evil" culture can last. Apparently, about 12-13 years.
neilv 3y ago
> Google is the opposite: it's like a giant grad-school. Half the programmers have PhD's, and everyone treats the place like a giant research playground. While the company is hush-hush to the outside world, it's 100% open on the inside. Everyone knows what everyone is doing, everyone is working on pet projects. Every once in a while, a manager skims over the bubbling activity, looking for products to "reap" from the creative harvest. I tried to join Google in that era, unsuccessfully. (I got surprised by a weird whiteboard interview, with an interviewer who seemed to implicitly assume they were better than me, and came off as dismissive.) In hindsight, I wonder whether I would've 100% liked a company driven by software engineers (other than the apparent aspect of recent grads with senior-sized egos). At the time, I would've thought that would be a total fit for me, since I was full of application ideas, a diversity of skills to help execute on the ideas, and drive to see it done. But I've since worked in a place that hired a lot of PhDs from top schools/advisors as engineers, many of whom had no non-academic experience yet, and then they weren't managed towards the definite this-isn't-grad-school goals of the company. The minority of us who had experience in startups and/or in Big Tech companies -- where the company had to determine a product, make it work, and ship it -- were baffled by this, and then alarmed. It wasn't the PhDs' fault. I suspect that most of them just needed a few of the right nudges, and to be spared the wrong nudges they were being given. But if you do have to make a working product, or even just collaborate between teams to build two pieces that will fit together, then hearing "giant research playground" today sounds like a warning sign to me. (Though, in Google's case, they did ship some great things, so obviously they weren't stuck entirely. Their big problem today might be the big-corp careerism they seem to have locked in, starting with interview rituals, and continuing with promotion criteria and bigger dollar signs.)
- CountGeek 3y ago
  >I tried to join Google in that era, unsuccessfully. (I got surprised by a weird whiteboard interview, with an interviewer who seemed to implicitly assume they were better than me, and came off as dismissive.) >In hindsight, I wonder whether I would've 100% liked a company driven by software engineers (other than the apparent aspect of recent grads with senior-sized egos). The same thing happened to me and left feeling the same in the early 2010s. (Great experience however and any interview after that was a walk in the park)
ydnaclementine 3y ago
Can't believe they fired this dude. The talks his co-presented are legendary

53 points by coffeeaddict1 3y ago

(2005) i.e. back when Google was a desirable place to work at and not a big corporation which loves killing projects and firing people.

hn8305823 3y ago
Just checking if this is still an accurate description of the culture at Google today? > Google is the opposite: it's like a giant grad-school. Half the programmers have PhD's, and everyone treats the place like a giant research playground. While the company is hush-hush to the outside world, it's 100% open on the inside. Everyone knows what everyone is doing, everyone is working on pet projects. Every once in a while, a manager skims over the bubbling activity, looking for products to "reap" from the creative harvest. The programmers completely drive the company, it's really amazing. I kept waiting for people to walk up to me and ask me if I had declared my major yet. They not only encourage personal experimentation and innovation, they demand it. Every programmer is required to spend 20% of their time working on random personal projects. If you get overloaded by a crisis, then that 20% personal time accrues anyway. Nearly every Google technology you know (maps, earth, gmail) started out as somebody's 20% project, I think.
- thesandlord 3y ago
  I left Google in 2020. It is not like this anymore. I heard its gotten even worse.
- cornstalks 3y ago
  I've been at Google since 2015 and it is nothing like that. I've never met another Googler that actually has a 20% project (though there are many internal tools that are widely used that are stated as being unsupported as they are only 20% projects).
- summerlight 3y ago
  I don't think so, though the team culture might differ orgs to orgs. Engineers still have a relatively strong voice compared to other companies though.
- bigmanwalter 3y ago
  Not at all. The MBAs have taken over at this point and expectations are far too aggressive for anything like 20% time to exist. The rule of thumb is that they give so much work that even if we only complete 80% of it, that should be considered "meeting expectations". I've heard people refer to 20% projects now as "120% projects".
- hex4def6 3y ago
  I was in Google / Nest in ~2018 or so. I knew 20% projects existed, but I'd heard they were considered a good way to not get promoted. I knew a few people that had a 20% project they were working on, but it was the exception, not the norm.
- glimshe 3y ago
  Google is just another big software company with solid pay and benefits. There is nothing quirky, unique or special about it otherwise. My Googler buddies describe their work as pedestrian and while Engineers still retain more power than the average company, this is counterbalanced by upper management incompetence which destroys/misaligns most good initiatives leading to a lot of work being done with limited results.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
r0m4n0 3y ago
No one likes working on lame projects, I feel like canceling projects is a symptom of the engineering driven product culture of a place. Maintenance and flat growth is not something I personally like to work on. These products aren’t canceled because they are doing great

dcchambers 3y ago

(2005)

sorokod 3y ago

[flagged]

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

evmar 3y ago

Man, I remember* getting "coffee encrusted filet mingon with a vanilla glaze" at Charlie's back around this time, and thinking both "this is amazing" and also "this can never last". Also I remember many years later when they were instead serving stuff like hot dogs. RIP the good times! * likely corrupted by memory's distance

laidoffamazon 3y ago
> "this is amazing" and also "this can never last". A I think a lot of people seem to want to tie these things to greater tech industry trends but I don't think it applies (people that claim x, y z was a ZIRP etc). I feel like that ignores the fact that most companies were never this generous! I never even got bananas at my last company!
ryandrake 3y ago
It's weird to see so much ink spilled about free food at Google, which is, in monetary terms, a pretty trivial perk. Compared to things like their generous 401(k) match, many 401(k) contribution options (pre-tax, Roth, after-tax), their health plan which includes an HSA that gets seeded with a chunk of free money each year, tuition reimbursement, and so on which probably adds up to an order of magnitude more dollar value than some coffee-encrusted meat. Yet, everyone talks about the food, maybe just because it's an unusual perk.
- boiler_up800 3y ago
  HSA seeded with money is indeed amazing. I learned recently that HSA’s benefit from a triple tax advantage: the money goes in pretax, the money is withdrawn without tax, and any investment gains are tax free. Which - if you’re willing to do the paperwork - means you can just save the HSA money forever and pay yourself back out of it when you retire to cover medical expenses you previously incurred.
- Salgat 3y ago
  I never understood the food thing, to me it comes with the implication of them wanting you to stick around longer. Not inherently a bad thing, but there's definitely companies that I've interviewed for that told me up front that I was expected to work 10-12 hours and they would provide free meals to cover those hours, as if it was even remotely making up for it.

refulgentis 3y ago

Xoogler who was a noogler in 2016, left in 2023: it's surprising how much survived through 2016, and how little, if any, is left now. I'm guessing more was gone by 2016 than I realize. The last tales I heard of intrinsically motivated engineers banding together to build _products_ was 2014-ish.

dukeofdoom 3y ago

[flagged]

grdvnl 3y ago

There is an interesting line in the end > All in all, I guess this is the result of a company that has more money than they possibly know what to do with. I wonder how long this utopian "do no evil" culture can last. Wealth creates power, and power corrupts. And boy, have I seen a lot of power this last week. > "May you live in interesting times." Now, juxtapose that with the authors other recent post: https://social.clawhammer.net/blog/posts/2024-01-10-GoogleExitLetter/ https://social.clawhammer.net/blog/posts/2024-01-10-GoogleEx... Interesting times in deed!

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

samstave 3y ago

I should have been able to FN charge google for my interview process. Fuck you google... with failing me because I didnt have a college degree but was good enough to design several of your datacenters.

theideaofcoffee 3y ago
You may have designed it, but can you tell me how many ping pong balls it would take to fill up one of the rooms? We are only interested if you can answer trivialities. (/s of course) (And I’m assuming you could, too!)
- dekhn 3y ago
  Google typically didn't ask fermi problems like that. Although, actually, sphere packing problems are pretty interesting, mathematically... A common classic era Google question would be roughly "find an O(n) or O(logn) solution to a problem that most people would solve quadratically, and write pseudocode for your solution, handling important edge cases, while also intuiting the special details that your interviewer is fishing for (because they learned it in their PhD)". So many people I knew at google were great math and science folks who ended up writing CRUD apps. Really depressing for them.
  - samstave 3y ago
    My final question after 3-month panel interviews: "How do you do a global replace in vi?" -- I blanked and said "I'd google it" They said "thats the best answer" (they also asked me what a type of comapny Google was... I said "Most think youre a search company, but really, you're an advertising company" 2008. When I interviewed at Twitter in 2009-ish, they asked what type of company I thought Twitter was; "You're a global sentiment engine" -- Go ghosted by both after saying I ranked super high on their metrics... (goog actually stated they were going to give me an offer, then called the next morning telling me they were rescinding offer)
    - dekhn 3y ago

laidoffamazon 3y ago

[flagged]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

jabedude 3y ago

Sure seems like pessimism is becoming prevalent in the US tech industry. I'm reminded of Tony Soprano explaining his depression to his psychiatrist: "It's good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that and I know. But lately, I'm getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over". I think that attitude is going around and it's quite sad. VR and AI show incredible promise to me and I think we have plenty of innovations ahead of us

dang 3y ago

Recent and related: FAQ on Leaving Google - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39034277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39034277 - Jan 2024 (291 comments)

Hydraulix989 3y ago

Ah yes, halcyon days before the interest rate crisis.

onetimeuse92304 3y ago

> Nearly every Google technology you know (maps, earth, gmail) started out as somebody's 20% project, I think. "Google Maps began as a C++ desktop program developed by brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen at Where 2 Technologies. In October 2004, the company was acquired by Google, which converted it into a web application." "In 2004 Google bought Keyhole Inc., which was partially funded by the Central Intelligence Agency's venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel. Keyhole had developed an online mapping service that Google rebranded in 2005 as Google Earth." "Gmail was a project started by Google developer Paul Buchheit, who had already explored the idea of web-based email in the 1990s, before the launch of Hotmail, while working on a personal email software project as a college student. Buchheit began his work on Gmail in August 2001."

MichaelZuo 3y ago
It's definitely hard to see how those constitute as '20% projects' for engineering, maybe the author meant 'somebody' in a very broad sense, including the corporate development teams.

peterangular 3y ago

> I wonder how long this utopian "do no evil" culture can last. Apparently, about 12-13 years.

neilv 3y ago

> Google is the opposite: it's like a giant grad-school. Half the programmers have PhD's, and everyone treats the place like a giant research playground. While the company is hush-hush to the outside world, it's 100% open on the inside. Everyone knows what everyone is doing, everyone is working on pet projects. Every once in a while, a manager skims over the bubbling activity, looking for products to "reap" from the creative harvest. I tried to join Google in that era, unsuccessfully. (I got surprised by a weird whiteboard interview, with an interviewer who seemed to implicitly assume they were better than me, and came off as dismissive.) In hindsight, I wonder whether I would've 100% liked a company driven by software engineers (other than the apparent aspect of recent grads with senior-sized egos). At the time, I would've thought that would be a total fit for me, since I was full of application ideas, a diversity of skills to help execute on the ideas, and drive to see it done. But I've since worked in a place that hired a lot of PhDs from top schools/advisors as engineers, many of whom had no non-academic experience yet, and then they weren't managed towards the definite this-isn't-grad-school goals of the company. The minority of us who had experience in startups and/or in Big Tech companies -- where the company had to determine a product, make it work, and ship it -- were baffled by this, and then alarmed. It wasn't the PhDs' fault. I suspect that most of them just needed a few of the right nudges, and to be spared the wrong nudges they were being given. But if you do have to make a working product, or even just collaborate between teams to build two pieces that will fit together, then hearing "giant research playground" today sounds like a warning sign to me. (Though, in Google's case, they did ship some great things, so obviously they weren't stuck entirely. Their big problem today might be the big-corp careerism they seem to have locked in, starting with interview rituals, and continuing with promotion criteria and bigger dollar signs.)

CountGeek 3y ago
>I tried to join Google in that era, unsuccessfully. (I got surprised by a weird whiteboard interview, with an interviewer who seemed to implicitly assume they were better than me, and came off as dismissive.) >In hindsight, I wonder whether I would've 100% liked a company driven by software engineers (other than the apparent aspect of recent grads with senior-sized egos). The same thing happened to me and left feeling the same in the early 2010s. (Great experience however and any interview after that was a walk in the park)

ydnaclementine 3y ago

Can't believe they fired this dude. The talks his co-presented are legendary