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I worked at Google for a short stint. I found the tech interview easy and I wasn't asked anything particularly ridiculous. I received a job offer shortly ther

by varelse 14y ago

I worked at Google for a short stint. I found the tech interview easy and I wasn't asked anything particularly ridiculous. I received a job offer shortly thereafter and accepted. As someone who regularly interviews prospective engineers at my current gig, I see no problem with expecting candidates to arrive prepared to answer algorithm questions or questions about their strongest programming language. Ditto for someone who wishes to change assignment within their organization, however they arrived there. If you're unwilling to provide proof you're not a bozo, you're probably going to be just awful to work with as well. However, the blind allocation policy at Google sucks, and it continues to suck. I came in as an expert in field D and therefore according to Google's magic sorting hat I ended up a natural for assignment in field Q. I tried my hand at it for several months, but as someone else has already said, bored employees quit: http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2011/07/12/bored_people_quit.html http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2011/07/12/bored_peopl... In order to avoid that fate, I futilely attempted to get reassigned to something close to field D (really, B, C, E, or F would have been just peachy) and that seemingly got me flagged as trouble internally. Shortly thereafter, I got a higher offer to go somewhere else and left. However, unlike the author of this post, while Google recruiters regularly stalk my linkedin profile, none of them ever contact me, which is good.

ajross 14y ago
I don't follow why being an "expert" in D would make you "bored" of Q. If Q is simply a boring field to you, that's one thing (and the appropriate response is to quit and find something better). But it's not your employer's job to give you your dream assignment. If they need Q geeks and you're available, then that's what you're stuck with. That's what being an employee is all about.
- hnhg 14y ago
  It reads like the parent got brought in as an expert in D, not Q, and then got told to work on Q, which wasn't their expectation. You'd be unhappy at that happening to you, right?
  - enduser 14y ago
    My understanding is that people don't find out their assignment until after the hiring. Sounds like the Air Force: dream of flying jets, end up cleaning toilets. At least at Google one can quit.
    - vidarh 14y ago
      It's one of the reason why every time a Google recruiter contacts me, the conversation starts with me interrogating them about what exactly they are able to promise, and so far all but one were able to give answers that made it worthwhile to accept an interview. If Google had been the hottest place in the world to work, and I'd been fresh out of university, then maybe.
- josefresco 14y ago
  "it's not your employer's job" It's in their best interest however to do so, as replacing him costs money.
  - ajross 14y ago
    Yes and no. Replacing someone who can't possibly be happy with the work you have available is cheaper than keeping them on. It depends critically on the details of D and Q. If you get hired by, say, Facebook and refuse to do web development you're going to be a bad fit. The goof here may have been hiring him in the first place. It's important for both sides to accomodate. But sometimes fits just don't work. If what someone wants to do isn't something you need, or if they aren't as good at it as the other people you have on staff, then the correct fix is just to part amiably. It's no more Google's "fault" than it is varelse's.
    - Jabbles 14y ago
      If Facebook hired someone who wants to work on their compiler and put them on web development I'd regard that as an extremely bad decision.
    - phillmv 14y ago
      It's a matter of resource allocation. If you hire lots of, I don't know, compiler specialists but you allocate them to write web apps we're all possibly worse off. The issue is, and what you're not cottoning on to, is that in a company the size of Google there's probably a team working on x for all values of x that could maybe use another member. They're only tolerant of their resource allocation scheme because they probably don't worry about their employee acquisition cost. With a company the size of Google, it'd be really interesting to deregulate their internal labour market (i.e. what Valve does). Let people switch all the time! If you need to prioritize one boring, yet necessary team allocate higher salaries to it.
      - barrkel 14y ago
        If you hire lots of [...] compiler specialists but you allocate them to write web apps we're all possibly worse off. Speaking from direct experience, faced with the job of developing a framework for web data entry apps, what I ended up doing was writing a dataflow language for data binding. Another ex-Delphi compiler developer, Danny Thorpe, ended up co-creating Google Gears. IMO compiler development is a great basis for a certain kind of thinking about solving problems; but I'm also biased.
- SkyMarshal 14y ago
  Depends on what he meant by "expert". If he meant he has PhD level expertise in D and that is his life's work, then it's completely understandable he wouldn't be happy doing Q, and would seek to do D elsewhere. People tend to misuse words like "expert" and "fluent" though, when they're really not, but on HN odds are higher that they're using at least "expert" correctly.
- possibilistic 14y ago
  There are some among us that won't do tasks we don't enjoy. Even if it meant that our pay was to be cut, we'd flock elsewhere to seek the fulfillment of being applied to a more meaningful duty. The key here is that 'meaningful duty' is self-evaluated and the organization's value of that position holds no merit or sway to the individual.
- seanmcdirmid 14y ago
  As if geeks are so interchangeable like sprockets! I'm an expert in my field, I have a PhD in it, if someone asked me to do machine learning or data mining or image processing, it would be a huge ramp up time for me, say about 2 or 3 years to get to the point of expertise I have in my current field. It would be a boring 2-3 years, and something that I'm probably not very interested in. If there are other jobs out there that make use of my expertise and interest, why bother with something else?
  - quomopete 14y ago
    why would you be bored learning something new?
    - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
      Depends what it is. I'm actually trying to get into machine learning, but I'm not into databases or knowledge representation even though there is some cross over on my field. My point is that I wouldn't appreciate just being thrown into a new field without any say. I might transition to a new field over time as my interests evolve, or as part of some negotiation where there is a crisis need. But no, I'm not an interchangeable part.
    - JabavuAdams 14y ago
      It's not absolute, but relative. E.g. I'd learn some interesting things studying either databases, or rocketry, but I'm pretty damn sure I'd be more interested in rocketry.
    - michaelochurch 14y ago
      One of the things I disliked about Google was the tyranny of At Google. If you didn't do it At Google, it doesn't count. You don't really know the first thing about anything unless you did it At Google. It's an extreme case of institutional arrogance. This explains the blind allocation policy. If knowledge that is not At Google doesn't count, then there's no point in matching people with their expertise or interests, because a Noogler by definition doesn't know anything. In July 2011, I did some research on the strategy of the Google+ Games team and saw that the going plan was doomed to failure and seriously risked such embarrassment as to kill the entire product. (Lots of Zyngarbage, preferential treatment to mainstream publishers.) I had some domain expertise from designing a game and spending a lot of time hanging around game designers. So it was pretty easy for me to come up with a strategy that had a damn good chance of actually succeeding. I posted it internally and got a huge amount of engineer support. The strategy was to establish a quality-centered community first by providing a platform for independent developers, integrate it with Hangouts, and become a center for the "German-style" board game sphere. The high quality starting community would establish G+ Games as cognitively upscale, creating a comparative brand advantage that would persist in perpetuity. By the way, the Google+ Games engineers also got wind of what I'd been proposing and they supported me. It was as obvious as it can be to humans (obviously, no one can predict the future) that this strategy would work. I got a ridiculous number of emails from engineers telling me that I was right on and that they wished they were implementing "Real Games" instead of giving ridiculous preferential treatment to mainstream publishers (who were throwing us mediocre product because they didn't expect us to succeed). What got me in trouble was that a lot of high-level people didn't like that an FNG had so much engineer support. I was a recognized domain expert, but not an At Google domain expert. There were no At Google games experts, because Google had never gone into the Games space before (and that's smart, because Google did extremely well on web search by being ideologically non-editorial, but for the games space quality is so damn important that you must be editorial.) So it came down to politics, because Google's At-Google bias rendered it incapable of recognizing domain expertise and discovering a correct decision. Finally I got an email to the effect of, "domain expertise isn't relevant here, deal with it. Besides, you're only a SWE 3." Well, fuck you very much. I don't see why job titles matter when you're about to lose millions of dollars and would have been making as much had you listened to me. A year later, I was proven right, but it doesn't matter in the least. Google+ Games is a non-concern, and I'm not a part of Google. The lesson I learned from that ordeal is not to try to "save" a company from itself because you can't. You'll be seen as right, and possibly even lionized, long after you leave... but it won't matter in the least. Keep your head down, stay employed, and enjoy the middle-row seat to the show-- that "show" being the people in charge making fools of themselves.
- enraged_camel 14y ago
  Wrong. Any company that wants to be successful has to allocate their employees to positions they will excel at. Not doing so is a gross waste of resources.
  - chii 14y ago
    Its more nuanced than that. A company might want to hire an expert in Q because having expertise in Q means they are of a high skill level, and thus is able to also do D very well. D might be very mundane, boring or inconsequential from the point of view of the employee (and whether it is in reality as well is quite moot at this point). THe employee might _want_ to do Q, but D is what makes the company money. Hiring someone who does D (but may not come up with novel solutions for D), or hiring someone who does Q very well, and assigning him/her to D in the hopes that they do a great job - which is better for the company?
michaelochurch 14y ago
I futilely attempted to get reassigned to something close to field D (really, B, C, E, or F would have been just peachy) and that seemingly got me flagged as trouble internally. "Meets Expectations" ranges from 3.0 to 3.4, and employees in this range have no idea where in that interval they landed, even the career effects of the numbers are dramatically different. 3.4 is above average, while 3.0 is fatal to transfer and promotion, even years later, but unlikely to get someone actually fired. There are several managers who've been caught using 3.0-3.1 to keep people captive but unaware of the fact that they've been internally blacklisted. It's disgusting but it happens. Whoever came up with the "innovation" of making review history part of a transfer packet (and that has nothing to do with Google; it pre-dates it) is a domestic terrorist and should get the same treatment that all the other terrorists get. It's a horrible system that eats companies from the inside. Enron's cultural decline (leading in macroscopic ethical lapses and bankruptcy) has been established to be a direct result of its globally-visible, mobility-destroying review system. Google's Perf is a play-for-play copy of Enron's PRC, but Google probably won't go the way of Enron for extrinsic reasons. A lot of Enron employees had nowhere to go (for geographical and specialty reasons) and had to make ethical compromises to beat PRC, whereas a lot Googlers leave for greener pastures when that happens.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- tptacek 14y ago
  WAT? Enron was a scam from the very highest levels of the corporation. Unless you're suggesting that Kenneth Lay got a 3.0 from his board of directors and reacted accordingly, this is a ridiculous comparison.
  - dpritchett 14y ago
    Apologies in advance for the Gladwell link, but he's likely referring to Enron's "star system": http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_07_22_a_talent.htm http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_07_22_a_talent.htm
Jabbles 14y ago
What prevented you from moving to a different field? Is Google not the dynamic, chaotic mass of teams that I've been led to believe?
- utopkara 14y ago
  LOL. Google is still a company, and the employees are hired to deliver stuff that the executives decide is important. It is not a college or grad school where you can switch between majors or research topics at will. Usually you have to stay for about 18 months in an assignment before you can successfully change to another group. Otherwise, there's always the door; which almost everybody prefers, considering how easy it is for them to find jobs they like outside of the big G.
  - Jabbles 14y ago
    Interesting. I thought the various groups inside Google competed for engineers? To the extent that there are posters advertising working on Chrome/Android etc. Given that it is "easy" for people to leave, I would have thought the policies would be forced to change?
    - rohern 14y ago
      > "Given that it is "easy" for people to leave, I would have thought the policies would be forced to change?" I wish this were true. Certainly, if people were more careful about how they spend their lives, this would be true. However, you need to consider the average (or even above average) young engineer and how he makes decisions. Sit in a computer lab at a major engineering university and start a conversation with the CS and EE students to see what kind of work they want to do. They have no idea. These kids work themselves raw to get perfect grades in EECS programs that require all-nighters to get the work done, but at the end of the day, they are as confused about The Good Life as anyone. Most of these kids have had heavy pressure from their families to do well in school, and that same pressure pushes them into a "prestigious" company like Google. Recruiting flyers actually use the word "prestigious" (same for recruiting flyers for the various engineering student groups and fraternities), which I think must be specifically targeted as Asian students' cultural background. A lot of great minds I have studied with simply shrug when asked what they want to do for a career. Hence Google has its pick.
samstave 14y ago
I went through a 3-month long interview with google in 2007, they said I did great in the interview and told me they'd be sending me an offer. Two days later they rescinded and said they would not be giving me an offer without explanation. I was really pissed off. A couple years later they contacted me again for a job and started the interview process, then I told them what happened the last time. They then said they didn't want to proceed. Then a few month ago they contacted me again (these were all for basically the same job) - I sent the recruiter a rather terse email stating my experiences and said "stop wasting my time - either give me the job at salary $X or stop contacting me." They replied that they couldnt meet my salary requirements. Personally their recruiting method is farking ridiculous.
- mcguire 14y ago
  Same thing here, almost exactly, although they didn't wait a couple of years before contacting me again---more like a month. On a third go-around, I asked what the deal was and haven't heard much from them since.
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  Get any offer in writing, and if it's rescinded, the words you want are: promissory estoppel.
  - eli_gottlieb 14y ago
    At-will employment, unfortunately, makes that doctrine legally useless for workers in America. A friend of mine came to this country (Israel) to work as a chemical engineer. His salary isn't large by American standards ($27,000 USD/year take-home pay), but for here it's pretty good and the benefits package is superb. The thing that really hit me, though, was that his job offer was a literal, written contract specifying, in legally binding terms, the conditions and compensation of his employment. It was one of those "Why don't we have that back home?" moments. Why don't Americans get binding contracts for jobs? Honestly, which bastard came up with at-will employment?
    - 14y ago
vidarh 14y ago
If Googles interviews had seemed to be remotely reasonable, I'm sure the people complaining would have been fewer. As it is, they seems very much to have the attitude that it doesn't matter if they weed out tons of great candidates as long as they weed out the bozos too. I once went through technical phone screening with them for a management position, and was bizarrely asked lots of probing questions about unix filesystem internals. Which I answered with descriptions of how it varied by implementation for 3-4 different filesystems I've worked with over the years. But I hadn't worked with his pet filesystem and so couldn't answer everything the way he liked. In the end the recruiter came back to me totally exasperated after he'd failed me. She'd looked at my feedback and taken it to some committee, and had the tech interview thrown out after they realised the type of questions I'd been given. But by then I'd have time to reflect about the fact that the guy who interviewed me was on the team I'd been expected to manage, and I did not like the thought of a team like that. Couple that with a process that seems almost designed to push away people who aren't desperate to work there, and particularly people who have plenty of other alternatives, and I lost interest. (Blind allocation for example, is not something I'd subject myself to - the only reason I said yes to that interview round was because it was for a specific position)
- ScottBurson 14y ago
  they seem very much to have the attitude that it doesn't matter if they weed out tons of great candidates as long as they weed out the bozos too Yes, this is their explicitly stated intention, as I recall.
- endtime 14y ago
  >the attitude that it doesn't matter if they weed out tons of great candidates as long as they weed out the bozos too. What would you do if you got over 2 million applications a year for a few thousand positions?
  - 23david 14y ago
    I guess I'd do just like Google and hire an army of non-technical recruiters to interview my top prospects.
rb2k_ 14y ago
> If you're unwilling to provide proof you're not a bozo, you're probably going to be just awful to work with as well. I always liked the idea of people looking at your previous work (github, ...) and having a pleasant conversation about it rather than making engineers jump through hoops. Especially if the company comes to you I think it's a weird thing that they'd assume you're a "bozo". Given how lax the US employment laws are, you can always fire somebody if they turn out to be a bozo after all.
- varelse 14y ago
  So here's where we have to agree to disagree. A pleasant conversation about your previous work is great, really, and as part of a complete package, likely to send you right to the top of my list. However, in my experience, the tech industry is overflowing with pretenders. If I haven't met you personally, those github records are of limited use as there's no way to prove you actually did the work in question. I apologize for the paranoia upfront, but once a bozo gets into the foodchain, they can do a lot of damage before getting expelled. And in the end, the kind of technical questions I ask are so basic that unless you haven't programmed in years or you've never read a programming or algorithms book in your life, you'll get them. What's really disappointing is how few do get them lately. But I attribute that more to the current environment of recruiter cold-calling as opposed to a decline in the expertise of programmers. Much like in dating, most of the "good ones" are taken, and if not, they don't stay on the market very long.
  - jessedhillon 14y ago
    Is your mentality typical of Google hiring practices? As long as we're going by anecdotal evidence here, nothing you've said here rings true. I've found great engineers by chatting with them -- if you can't separate a great, well-accomplished engineer from a faker by talking with him/her at length about their previous work, then IMHO the problem is with you, not them. You said it best -- the process you describe above is reflective of a paranoid, neurotic obsession to have "the best" engineers, for some definition of best. Whether or not we agree on what constitutes "best" is not important, but if you insist that people who refuse, or fail, your particular method are bozos then you have your head stuck firmly up your ass.
sxp 14y ago
The allocation policy is something that people are not fans of, but it isn't as bad as you make it sound. When I joined Google, I also initially joined a team that was a bad fit for me. However, I transferred to a completely different team (from enterprise server software to consumer mobile software) after 4 months of near zero productivity, and the new team was a perfect fit. Much of Google's culture is based on being willing to tolerate mistakes and fix them rather getting everything perfect the first time. This applies to both the computer systems (the system should keep running even if part of the network fails) and people. In the latter case, it means the person should be aware that things aren't always perfect and proactively try to adapt and improve the situation. Unfortunately, this chaotic method doesn't always work for everyone and people who want perfect order end up getting stuck in a position they don't like, burn out, and leave. Ultimately, this is bad because it results in the loss of good employees who don't like this chaos, and I'm sorry that it happened to you, varelse. However, I prefer this over a situation where I would interview for a given position and my offer would be based on whether or not I was a good fit for the position that particular position. That method would result in losing people who would be able to fit in well somewhere at Google but not with that specific team.
- Jabbles 14y ago
  Could you say more about how you arranged to transfer? Others have suggested it is impossible or very difficult, but perhaps they are outliers or victims of older policies. Was it 4 months of trying to be moved, or did you move quickly after trying your assigned role for a while? (I think I would move the other way, into servers :))
  - sxp 14y ago
    It was <3 weeks from the time I decided I would be more productive in a different group until the time I was at my new desk. The stages were roughly 1) meeting with my manager and manager's manager to notify them that I wanted to transfer. 2) Meet with other teams to find one that was a good fit. 3) Get all the sign offs from people who needed to sign off. Step 2 took most of the time because I didn't want to make the same mistake that I made the first time. Others who have run into problems and left might be outliers, but it's difficult to come to a solid conclusion based on anecdotes. People who have bad experiences will have stronger feelings and bring up their experiences whenever possible (E.g. michaelochurch who complains about Google every chance he gets) while those who have good experiences like myself don't mention it as much. I only mentioned my case because it was a counterexample to varelse's case, and this is probably true of many others who have had good experiences and don't bother talking about it. Just remember that the plural of anecdote isn't data, and negative anecdotes tend to suffer from selection bias because they have a greater emotional impact upon the person.
jjwiseman 14y ago
Blind allocation got me too. They told me how allocation worked before I joined, but I was hopeful that they would put me on a project that had some overlap with what I was interested in and what I had worked on for the past 15 years (computer vision, robotics, natural language processing). No. I found out on the last day of orientation I would be doing YouTube ads. I knew there was no way I could do that for 18 months, and I told my manager. He was understanding, but there wasn't really anything he could do. He passed my concerns up the management chain. A couple weeks later my manager gave me their response, which was, literally, "We don't care." That shocked me a little, and I knew at that point I wouldn't be at Google for very long. Maybe that was even the right thing for them to do, since I was proving myself to be the kind of employee who wouldn't work on a project they weren't interested in for a year and a half just because it was good for Google, or good for their potential career at Google. For a short time I led a 20% project with three other engineers that was in my interest area, and after we won an innovation award I hoped that it might make the Google bureaucracy more sympathetic to my preferences, but management didn't care. I left not long after that. (tl;dr: I learned that Google is a bureaucratic megacorp.)
- varelse 14y ago
  Pretty much my naivete and experience as well (minus the 20% project because the one I wanted to do would have tipped some sacred cows had it succeeded)...
  - jjwiseman 14y ago
    Exactly--I didn't quite say it explicitly, but part of the problem was my naiveté about working for a large company after a career of mostly startups. (And my summary of the project may have been overly short. It was a week of full-time work, with a plan of making it an ongoing 20% project.)
    - greenyoda 14y ago
      I don't think this is a large company vs. startup thing. In most companies, large or small, you're hired to fill a particular job opening (that's described as part of the recruitment process) and usually interviewed by the group of people who you'd be working with. Does anyone know of any other companies that do this kind of random assignment the way Google does?
rohern 14y ago
> " If you're unwilling to provide proof you're not a bozo, you're probably going to be just awful to work with as well." I do not see any justification for this in the general case. It is true, I have seen it myself, that even students who receive good grades in a CS program can be bozos when it comes to actually building things. However, these same people are likely to do well on a coding interview because these people study for coding interviews. These students can also be miserable to work with, as their high opinion of themselves leads them to be uncooperative and terrible at communication. I would much prefer to work with someone who has built wonderful things than with someone who can study to ace a coding interview. I would also much prefer to befriend someone in the first category (who wouldn't?). I do not see the fault in an engineer with a full portfolio of past projects, be they personal or open source, expecting to be evaluated on the basis of that work rather than on some arbitrary algorithms assignment. In fact, I would be likely to have greater respect for such a person should she refuse the quiz, as clearly she values her time and is not willing to have it wasted to satisfy a recruiting bureaucracy. And let's be clear about why algorithmic questions and interviews of this sort exist at all: because companies like Google are not interested in finding the next Thomas Edison, Nicola Tesla, etc. They are interested in finding engineers to do grunt work. Google already knows who its stars are, they are the guys sitting in the room during executive meetings.
eli_gottlieb 14y ago
As someone who regularly interviews prospective engineers at my current gig, I see no problem with expecting candidates to arrive prepared to answer algorithm questions or questions about their strongest programming language. And as someone growing to be an expert in programming languages, I'd appreciate if Google didn't immediately peg me as "useless academic" for using something other than C++, Java, and Python. Ditto on Amazon. I'm reasonably sure I failed a couple of job interviews for being more familiar with Scala than Java.
- varelse 14y ago
  Scala is great, I wish it saw wider use. But given your claim to be an expert in programming languages and that many teams need C++, Java, and Python skills, perhaps a little flexibility on your part would go a long way? Or given that such flexibility is not an option, why not target teams that need Scala skills instead of complaining about the teams that don't?
  - eli_gottlieb 14y ago
    I actually can program in C, C++, Java and Python just fine, and I've repeatedly told the companies so (and have published portfolio work in Java and Python). Where they faulted me was for falling back on Scala syntax in my psuedocode answers to interview questions, rather than immediately jumping into "ordinary thought" in an imperative, weakly-typed, object-oriented language. If I worked with X most recently and I tell you so, could you allow that I'll have X at the top of my head in the interview rather than Y, Z, A or B? I'm not going to totally swap-out everything about my last job and my hobby projects from my brain for the sake of someone who hasn't even offered me a job yet.
    - bluetshirt 14y ago
      "being more familiar with Scala than Java" is a few miles east from "cannot/will not write pseudocode comprehensible to people who don't grok functional languages".

by varelse 14y ago

ajross 14y ago

I don't follow why being an "expert" in D would make you "bored" of Q. If Q is simply a boring field to you, that's one thing (and the appropriate response is to quit and find something better). But it's not your employer's job to give you your dream assignment. If they need Q geeks and you're available, then that's what you're stuck with. That's what being an employee is all about.

hnhg 14y ago
It reads like the parent got brought in as an expert in D, not Q, and then got told to work on Q, which wasn't their expectation. You'd be unhappy at that happening to you, right?
- enduser 14y ago
  My understanding is that people don't find out their assignment until after the hiring. Sounds like the Air Force: dream of flying jets, end up cleaning toilets. At least at Google one can quit.
  - vidarh 14y ago
    It's one of the reason why every time a Google recruiter contacts me, the conversation starts with me interrogating them about what exactly they are able to promise, and so far all but one were able to give answers that made it worthwhile to accept an interview. If Google had been the hottest place in the world to work, and I'd been fresh out of university, then maybe.
josefresco 14y ago
"it's not your employer's job" It's in their best interest however to do so, as replacing him costs money.
- ajross 14y ago
  Yes and no. Replacing someone who can't possibly be happy with the work you have available is cheaper than keeping them on. It depends critically on the details of D and Q. If you get hired by, say, Facebook and refuse to do web development you're going to be a bad fit. The goof here may have been hiring him in the first place. It's important for both sides to accomodate. But sometimes fits just don't work. If what someone wants to do isn't something you need, or if they aren't as good at it as the other people you have on staff, then the correct fix is just to part amiably. It's no more Google's "fault" than it is varelse's.
  - Jabbles 14y ago
    If Facebook hired someone who wants to work on their compiler and put them on web development I'd regard that as an extremely bad decision.
  - phillmv 14y ago
    It's a matter of resource allocation. If you hire lots of, I don't know, compiler specialists but you allocate them to write web apps we're all possibly worse off. The issue is, and what you're not cottoning on to, is that in a company the size of Google there's probably a team working on x for all values of x that could maybe use another member. They're only tolerant of their resource allocation scheme because they probably don't worry about their employee acquisition cost. With a company the size of Google, it'd be really interesting to deregulate their internal labour market (i.e. what Valve does). Let people switch all the time! If you need to prioritize one boring, yet necessary team allocate higher salaries to it.
    - barrkel 14y ago
      If you hire lots of [...] compiler specialists but you allocate them to write web apps we're all possibly worse off. Speaking from direct experience, faced with the job of developing a framework for web data entry apps, what I ended up doing was writing a dataflow language for data binding. Another ex-Delphi compiler developer, Danny Thorpe, ended up co-creating Google Gears. IMO compiler development is a great basis for a certain kind of thinking about solving problems; but I'm also biased.
SkyMarshal 14y ago
Depends on what he meant by "expert". If he meant he has PhD level expertise in D and that is his life's work, then it's completely understandable he wouldn't be happy doing Q, and would seek to do D elsewhere. People tend to misuse words like "expert" and "fluent" though, when they're really not, but on HN odds are higher that they're using at least "expert" correctly.
possibilistic 14y ago
There are some among us that won't do tasks we don't enjoy. Even if it meant that our pay was to be cut, we'd flock elsewhere to seek the fulfillment of being applied to a more meaningful duty. The key here is that 'meaningful duty' is self-evaluated and the organization's value of that position holds no merit or sway to the individual.
seanmcdirmid 14y ago
As if geeks are so interchangeable like sprockets! I'm an expert in my field, I have a PhD in it, if someone asked me to do machine learning or data mining or image processing, it would be a huge ramp up time for me, say about 2 or 3 years to get to the point of expertise I have in my current field. It would be a boring 2-3 years, and something that I'm probably not very interested in. If there are other jobs out there that make use of my expertise and interest, why bother with something else?
- quomopete 14y ago
  why would you be bored learning something new?
  - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
    Depends what it is. I'm actually trying to get into machine learning, but I'm not into databases or knowledge representation even though there is some cross over on my field. My point is that I wouldn't appreciate just being thrown into a new field without any say. I might transition to a new field over time as my interests evolve, or as part of some negotiation where there is a crisis need. But no, I'm not an interchangeable part.
  - JabavuAdams 14y ago
    It's not absolute, but relative. E.g. I'd learn some interesting things studying either databases, or rocketry, but I'm pretty damn sure I'd be more interested in rocketry.
  - michaelochurch 14y ago
    One of the things I disliked about Google was the tyranny of At Google. If you didn't do it At Google, it doesn't count. You don't really know the first thing about anything unless you did it At Google. It's an extreme case of institutional arrogance. This explains the blind allocation policy. If knowledge that is not At Google doesn't count, then there's no point in matching people with their expertise or interests, because a Noogler by definition doesn't know anything. In July 2011, I did some research on the strategy of the Google+ Games team and saw that the going plan was doomed to failure and seriously risked such embarrassment as to kill the entire product. (Lots of Zyngarbage, preferential treatment to mainstream publishers.) I had some domain expertise from designing a game and spending a lot of time hanging around game designers. So it was pretty easy for me to come up with a strategy that had a damn good chance of actually succeeding. I posted it internally and got a huge amount of engineer support. The strategy was to establish a quality-centered community first by providing a platform for independent developers, integrate it with Hangouts, and become a center for the "German-style" board game sphere. The high quality starting community would establish G+ Games as cognitively upscale, creating a comparative brand advantage that would persist in perpetuity. By the way, the Google+ Games engineers also got wind of what I'd been proposing and they supported me. It was as obvious as it can be to humans (obviously, no one can predict the future) that this strategy would work. I got a ridiculous number of emails from engineers telling me that I was right on and that they wished they were implementing "Real Games" instead of giving ridiculous preferential treatment to mainstream publishers (who were throwing us mediocre product because they didn't expect us to succeed). What got me in trouble was that a lot of high-level people didn't like that an FNG had so much engineer support. I was a recognized domain expert, but not an At Google domain expert. There were no At Google games experts, because Google had never gone into the Games space before (and that's smart, because Google did extremely well on web search by being ideologically non-editorial, but for the games space quality is so damn important that you must be editorial.) So it came down to politics, because Google's At-Google bias rendered it incapable of recognizing domain expertise and discovering a correct decision. Finally I got an email to the effect of, "domain expertise isn't relevant here, deal with it. Besides, you're only a SWE 3." Well, fuck you very much. I don't see why job titles matter when you're about to lose millions of dollars and would have been making as much had you listened to me. A year later, I was proven right, but it doesn't matter in the least. Google+ Games is a non-concern, and I'm not a part of Google. The lesson I learned from that ordeal is not to try to "save" a company from itself because you can't. You'll be seen as right, and possibly even lionized, long after you leave... but it won't matter in the least. Keep your head down, stay employed, and enjoy the middle-row seat to the show-- that "show" being the people in charge making fools of themselves.
enraged_camel 14y ago
Wrong. Any company that wants to be successful has to allocate their employees to positions they will excel at. Not doing so is a gross waste of resources.
- chii 14y ago
  Its more nuanced than that. A company might want to hire an expert in Q because having expertise in Q means they are of a high skill level, and thus is able to also do D very well. D might be very mundane, boring or inconsequential from the point of view of the employee (and whether it is in reality as well is quite moot at this point). THe employee might _want_ to do Q, but D is what makes the company money. Hiring someone who does D (but may not come up with novel solutions for D), or hiring someone who does Q very well, and assigning him/her to D in the hopes that they do a great job - which is better for the company?

michaelochurch 14y ago

I futilely attempted to get reassigned to something close to field D (really, B, C, E, or F would have been just peachy) and that seemingly got me flagged as trouble internally. "Meets Expectations" ranges from 3.0 to 3.4, and employees in this range have no idea where in that interval they landed, even the career effects of the numbers are dramatically different. 3.4 is above average, while 3.0 is fatal to transfer and promotion, even years later, but unlikely to get someone actually fired. There are several managers who've been caught using 3.0-3.1 to keep people captive but unaware of the fact that they've been internally blacklisted. It's disgusting but it happens. Whoever came up with the "innovation" of making review history part of a transfer packet (and that has nothing to do with Google; it pre-dates it) is a domestic terrorist and should get the same treatment that all the other terrorists get. It's a horrible system that eats companies from the inside. Enron's cultural decline (leading in macroscopic ethical lapses and bankruptcy) has been established to be a direct result of its globally-visible, mobility-destroying review system. Google's Perf is a play-for-play copy of Enron's PRC, but Google probably won't go the way of Enron for extrinsic reasons. A lot of Enron employees had nowhere to go (for geographical and specialty reasons) and had to make ethical compromises to beat PRC, whereas a lot Googlers leave for greener pastures when that happens.

deleted 14y ago
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tptacek 14y ago
WAT? Enron was a scam from the very highest levels of the corporation. Unless you're suggesting that Kenneth Lay got a 3.0 from his board of directors and reacted accordingly, this is a ridiculous comparison.
- dpritchett 14y ago
  Apologies in advance for the Gladwell link, but he's likely referring to Enron's "star system": http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_07_22_a_talent.htm http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_07_22_a_talent.htm

Jabbles 14y ago

What prevented you from moving to a different field? Is Google not the dynamic, chaotic mass of teams that I've been led to believe?

utopkara 14y ago
LOL. Google is still a company, and the employees are hired to deliver stuff that the executives decide is important. It is not a college or grad school where you can switch between majors or research topics at will. Usually you have to stay for about 18 months in an assignment before you can successfully change to another group. Otherwise, there's always the door; which almost everybody prefers, considering how easy it is for them to find jobs they like outside of the big G.
- Jabbles 14y ago
  Interesting. I thought the various groups inside Google competed for engineers? To the extent that there are posters advertising working on Chrome/Android etc. Given that it is "easy" for people to leave, I would have thought the policies would be forced to change?
  - rohern 14y ago
    > "Given that it is "easy" for people to leave, I would have thought the policies would be forced to change?" I wish this were true. Certainly, if people were more careful about how they spend their lives, this would be true. However, you need to consider the average (or even above average) young engineer and how he makes decisions. Sit in a computer lab at a major engineering university and start a conversation with the CS and EE students to see what kind of work they want to do. They have no idea. These kids work themselves raw to get perfect grades in EECS programs that require all-nighters to get the work done, but at the end of the day, they are as confused about The Good Life as anyone. Most of these kids have had heavy pressure from their families to do well in school, and that same pressure pushes them into a "prestigious" company like Google. Recruiting flyers actually use the word "prestigious" (same for recruiting flyers for the various engineering student groups and fraternities), which I think must be specifically targeted as Asian students' cultural background. A lot of great minds I have studied with simply shrug when asked what they want to do for a career. Hence Google has its pick.

samstave 14y ago

I went through a 3-month long interview with google in 2007, they said I did great in the interview and told me they'd be sending me an offer. Two days later they rescinded and said they would not be giving me an offer without explanation. I was really pissed off. A couple years later they contacted me again for a job and started the interview process, then I told them what happened the last time. They then said they didn't want to proceed. Then a few month ago they contacted me again (these were all for basically the same job) - I sent the recruiter a rather terse email stating my experiences and said "stop wasting my time - either give me the job at salary $X or stop contacting me." They replied that they couldnt meet my salary requirements. Personally their recruiting method is farking ridiculous.

mcguire 14y ago
Same thing here, almost exactly, although they didn't wait a couple of years before contacting me again---more like a month. On a third go-around, I asked what the deal was and haven't heard much from them since.
michaelochurch 14y ago
Get any offer in writing, and if it's rescinded, the words you want are: promissory estoppel.
- eli_gottlieb 14y ago
  At-will employment, unfortunately, makes that doctrine legally useless for workers in America. A friend of mine came to this country (Israel) to work as a chemical engineer. His salary isn't large by American standards ($27,000 USD/year take-home pay), but for here it's pretty good and the benefits package is superb. The thing that really hit me, though, was that his job offer was a literal, written contract specifying, in legally binding terms, the conditions and compensation of his employment. It was one of those "Why don't we have that back home?" moments. Why don't Americans get binding contracts for jobs? Honestly, which bastard came up with at-will employment?
  - 14y ago

vidarh 14y ago

If Googles interviews had seemed to be remotely reasonable, I'm sure the people complaining would have been fewer. As it is, they seems very much to have the attitude that it doesn't matter if they weed out tons of great candidates as long as they weed out the bozos too. I once went through technical phone screening with them for a management position, and was bizarrely asked lots of probing questions about unix filesystem internals. Which I answered with descriptions of how it varied by implementation for 3-4 different filesystems I've worked with over the years. But I hadn't worked with his pet filesystem and so couldn't answer everything the way he liked. In the end the recruiter came back to me totally exasperated after he'd failed me. She'd looked at my feedback and taken it to some committee, and had the tech interview thrown out after they realised the type of questions I'd been given. But by then I'd have time to reflect about the fact that the guy who interviewed me was on the team I'd been expected to manage, and I did not like the thought of a team like that. Couple that with a process that seems almost designed to push away people who aren't desperate to work there, and particularly people who have plenty of other alternatives, and I lost interest. (Blind allocation for example, is not something I'd subject myself to - the only reason I said yes to that interview round was because it was for a specific position)

ScottBurson 14y ago
they seem very much to have the attitude that it doesn't matter if they weed out tons of great candidates as long as they weed out the bozos too Yes, this is their explicitly stated intention, as I recall.
endtime 14y ago
>the attitude that it doesn't matter if they weed out tons of great candidates as long as they weed out the bozos too. What would you do if you got over 2 million applications a year for a few thousand positions?
- 23david 14y ago
  I guess I'd do just like Google and hire an army of non-technical recruiters to interview my top prospects.

rb2k_ 14y ago

> If you're unwilling to provide proof you're not a bozo, you're probably going to be just awful to work with as well. I always liked the idea of people looking at your previous work (github, ...) and having a pleasant conversation about it rather than making engineers jump through hoops. Especially if the company comes to you I think it's a weird thing that they'd assume you're a "bozo". Given how lax the US employment laws are, you can always fire somebody if they turn out to be a bozo after all.

varelse 14y ago
So here's where we have to agree to disagree. A pleasant conversation about your previous work is great, really, and as part of a complete package, likely to send you right to the top of my list. However, in my experience, the tech industry is overflowing with pretenders. If I haven't met you personally, those github records are of limited use as there's no way to prove you actually did the work in question. I apologize for the paranoia upfront, but once a bozo gets into the foodchain, they can do a lot of damage before getting expelled. And in the end, the kind of technical questions I ask are so basic that unless you haven't programmed in years or you've never read a programming or algorithms book in your life, you'll get them. What's really disappointing is how few do get them lately. But I attribute that more to the current environment of recruiter cold-calling as opposed to a decline in the expertise of programmers. Much like in dating, most of the "good ones" are taken, and if not, they don't stay on the market very long.
- jessedhillon 14y ago
  Is your mentality typical of Google hiring practices? As long as we're going by anecdotal evidence here, nothing you've said here rings true. I've found great engineers by chatting with them -- if you can't separate a great, well-accomplished engineer from a faker by talking with him/her at length about their previous work, then IMHO the problem is with you, not them. You said it best -- the process you describe above is reflective of a paranoid, neurotic obsession to have "the best" engineers, for some definition of best. Whether or not we agree on what constitutes "best" is not important, but if you insist that people who refuse, or fail, your particular method are bozos then you have your head stuck firmly up your ass.

sxp 14y ago

The allocation policy is something that people are not fans of, but it isn't as bad as you make it sound. When I joined Google, I also initially joined a team that was a bad fit for me. However, I transferred to a completely different team (from enterprise server software to consumer mobile software) after 4 months of near zero productivity, and the new team was a perfect fit. Much of Google's culture is based on being willing to tolerate mistakes and fix them rather getting everything perfect the first time. This applies to both the computer systems (the system should keep running even if part of the network fails) and people. In the latter case, it means the person should be aware that things aren't always perfect and proactively try to adapt and improve the situation. Unfortunately, this chaotic method doesn't always work for everyone and people who want perfect order end up getting stuck in a position they don't like, burn out, and leave. Ultimately, this is bad because it results in the loss of good employees who don't like this chaos, and I'm sorry that it happened to you, varelse. However, I prefer this over a situation where I would interview for a given position and my offer would be based on whether or not I was a good fit for the position that particular position. That method would result in losing people who would be able to fit in well somewhere at Google but not with that specific team.

Jabbles 14y ago
Could you say more about how you arranged to transfer? Others have suggested it is impossible or very difficult, but perhaps they are outliers or victims of older policies. Was it 4 months of trying to be moved, or did you move quickly after trying your assigned role for a while? (I think I would move the other way, into servers :))
- sxp 14y ago
  It was <3 weeks from the time I decided I would be more productive in a different group until the time I was at my new desk. The stages were roughly 1) meeting with my manager and manager's manager to notify them that I wanted to transfer. 2) Meet with other teams to find one that was a good fit. 3) Get all the sign offs from people who needed to sign off. Step 2 took most of the time because I didn't want to make the same mistake that I made the first time. Others who have run into problems and left might be outliers, but it's difficult to come to a solid conclusion based on anecdotes. People who have bad experiences will have stronger feelings and bring up their experiences whenever possible (E.g. michaelochurch who complains about Google every chance he gets) while those who have good experiences like myself don't mention it as much. I only mentioned my case because it was a counterexample to varelse's case, and this is probably true of many others who have had good experiences and don't bother talking about it. Just remember that the plural of anecdote isn't data, and negative anecdotes tend to suffer from selection bias because they have a greater emotional impact upon the person.

jjwiseman 14y ago

Blind allocation got me too. They told me how allocation worked before I joined, but I was hopeful that they would put me on a project that had some overlap with what I was interested in and what I had worked on for the past 15 years (computer vision, robotics, natural language processing). No. I found out on the last day of orientation I would be doing YouTube ads. I knew there was no way I could do that for 18 months, and I told my manager. He was understanding, but there wasn't really anything he could do. He passed my concerns up the management chain. A couple weeks later my manager gave me their response, which was, literally, "We don't care." That shocked me a little, and I knew at that point I wouldn't be at Google for very long. Maybe that was even the right thing for them to do, since I was proving myself to be the kind of employee who wouldn't work on a project they weren't interested in for a year and a half just because it was good for Google, or good for their potential career at Google. For a short time I led a 20% project with three other engineers that was in my interest area, and after we won an innovation award I hoped that it might make the Google bureaucracy more sympathetic to my preferences, but management didn't care. I left not long after that. (tl;dr: I learned that Google is a bureaucratic megacorp.)

varelse 14y ago
Pretty much my naivete and experience as well (minus the 20% project because the one I wanted to do would have tipped some sacred cows had it succeeded)...
- jjwiseman 14y ago
  Exactly--I didn't quite say it explicitly, but part of the problem was my naiveté about working for a large company after a career of mostly startups. (And my summary of the project may have been overly short. It was a week of full-time work, with a plan of making it an ongoing 20% project.)
  - greenyoda 14y ago
    I don't think this is a large company vs. startup thing. In most companies, large or small, you're hired to fill a particular job opening (that's described as part of the recruitment process) and usually interviewed by the group of people who you'd be working with. Does anyone know of any other companies that do this kind of random assignment the way Google does?

rohern 14y ago

> " If you're unwilling to provide proof you're not a bozo, you're probably going to be just awful to work with as well." I do not see any justification for this in the general case. It is true, I have seen it myself, that even students who receive good grades in a CS program can be bozos when it comes to actually building things. However, these same people are likely to do well on a coding interview because these people study for coding interviews. These students can also be miserable to work with, as their high opinion of themselves leads them to be uncooperative and terrible at communication. I would much prefer to work with someone who has built wonderful things than with someone who can study to ace a coding interview. I would also much prefer to befriend someone in the first category (who wouldn't?). I do not see the fault in an engineer with a full portfolio of past projects, be they personal or open source, expecting to be evaluated on the basis of that work rather than on some arbitrary algorithms assignment. In fact, I would be likely to have greater respect for such a person should she refuse the quiz, as clearly she values her time and is not willing to have it wasted to satisfy a recruiting bureaucracy. And let's be clear about why algorithmic questions and interviews of this sort exist at all: because companies like Google are not interested in finding the next Thomas Edison, Nicola Tesla, etc. They are interested in finding engineers to do grunt work. Google already knows who its stars are, they are the guys sitting in the room during executive meetings.

eli_gottlieb 14y ago

As someone who regularly interviews prospective engineers at my current gig, I see no problem with expecting candidates to arrive prepared to answer algorithm questions or questions about their strongest programming language. And as someone growing to be an expert in programming languages, I'd appreciate if Google didn't immediately peg me as "useless academic" for using something other than C++, Java, and Python. Ditto on Amazon. I'm reasonably sure I failed a couple of job interviews for being more familiar with Scala than Java.

varelse 14y ago
Scala is great, I wish it saw wider use. But given your claim to be an expert in programming languages and that many teams need C++, Java, and Python skills, perhaps a little flexibility on your part would go a long way? Or given that such flexibility is not an option, why not target teams that need Scala skills instead of complaining about the teams that don't?
- eli_gottlieb 14y ago
  I actually can program in C, C++, Java and Python just fine, and I've repeatedly told the companies so (and have published portfolio work in Java and Python). Where they faulted me was for falling back on Scala syntax in my psuedocode answers to interview questions, rather than immediately jumping into "ordinary thought" in an imperative, weakly-typed, object-oriented language. If I worked with X most recently and I tell you so, could you allow that I'll have X at the top of my head in the interview rather than Y, Z, A or B? I'm not going to totally swap-out everything about my last job and my hobby projects from my brain for the sake of someone who hasn't even offered me a job yet.
  - bluetshirt 14y ago
    "being more familiar with Scala than Java" is a few miles east from "cannot/will not write pseudocode comprehensible to people who don't grok functional languages".