4 ms·

I was interviewing at a startup in the Bay Area and the CEO insisted that since "being surrounded by people smarter than me and getting better at what I do" was

I was interviewing at a startup in the Bay Area and the CEO insisted that since "being surrounded by people smarter than me and getting better at what I do" was a huge driver for my professional life, I'd be better served by working at Google. I did not understand that then, and I don't understand it now. I don't blame the guy for saying that I guess, and maybe he's right. That said I don't want to work at a megacorp doing software engineering, even if that megacorp is Google. It's just not for me.

nostrademons 14y ago
I worked at two startups and founded one before joining Google, and I have a friend that's been bouncing between working for and founding startups since he's left Google. I understand what the CEO was saying. In a startup, there's a lot of grunt work that has to be done and there's nobody to do it, and so you frequently end up taking on a lot of tasks that really don't teach you anything. In a big company like Google, a lot of that work is automated, or there's a dedicated team of people who like doing that work, and you can just forget about it. Think about carrying pagers, repairing hardware, corporate IT, installing software, setting up your workstation, doing logs analysis, cooking for you, etc. It's less of a problem early on in your career when everything's new for you, particularly if you eventually want to found a startup where you have to do all that stuff anyway. A lot of engineers really want to be top of their field, though: they want to be the world expert in machine-learning, or in extraction of data from news articles, or in distributed parallel processing, and so on. You typically don't have the opportunity to do that in a startup, because you have to focus on the immediate business needs and on staying alive rather than on pushing the state of the art forwards. "Good enough" has to be good enough in a startup.
- pnathan 14y ago
  > You typically don't have the opportunity to do that in a startup, because you have to focus on the immediate business needs and on staying alive rather than on pushing the state of the art forwards. "Good enough" has to be good enough in a startup. Interesting. That's something you don't often hear... but it makes a ton of sense to me. I've only worked in academia and one mid-size corp, so startups are kind of a different world for me. :)
- mattdeboard 14y ago
  Interesting perspective. But like you said, at this point in my career I want to know how to do all this stuff. Thankfully I'm in a position where I get/have to do basically everything, so I'm getting very broad experience. There are specific areas where I want to focus -- search, data analysis, infrastructure -- and my next job I'll probably be looking for a focus in one or more of those areas (each of which Google would be a good option but without a degree and at my age I doubt I'd get hired). Be that as it may, I really, really don't want to work in a huge organization. I hate bureaucracy, central authority, people I never see in the organization making policy for me, etc. I spent my entire adult life in the military up til a couple years ago. I think that has something to do with it. edit: This comment really crystallizes the type of thing I want to avoid, which means eschewing employment at Google, IBM, Microsoft,etc: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4713802 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4713802 >Those were (are?) the designations for certain types of jobs over there. You might think that if you're hired into the company, your possibilities are wide open, but they aren't. System administrator flavored SREs (site reliability engineers) could only get other SA-flavored jobs, of which there are relatively few. Meanwhile, software engineer (SWE) type SREs could go into any other SWE job, of which there are many. If you were hired on as a SA-SRE as I was, then you have to do an internal interview to get to be a SWE-SRE. If you can't make it through that, you're stuck. I made it, and a friend did too, but I know people who didn't. I'm sure that makes them feel great, especially if they're already doing SWE type work in their daily jobs. I was told repeatedly there was no difference between the types, but found out the hard way when it was time to transfer from a toxic situation and there were few alternatives. It took over a year to finally get it all sorted out.
  - nostrademons 14y ago
    Again, YMMV. I was hired as a UI SWE, told my manager (repeatedly) that I wanted to do more backend algorithmic work, eventually refused to do any more UI work, then taught myself enough about Google Search's backend systems that I became known as a full-stack engineer that knows everything. It probably delayed my promotion by about a year, but it was worth it, and it's not like anyone stopped me. I'm now doing basically product-manager type work, despite officially being a SWE. Again, nobody stops me. I've found that if you're producing stuff of value, you can basically move into another role simply by doing the work entailed by that role. I know two other SWEs that are de-facto PMs, and one SRE who became a SWE (and core LLVM contributor in the process).

nostrademons 14y ago

I worked at two startups and founded one before joining Google, and I have a friend that's been bouncing between working for and founding startups since he's left Google. I understand what the CEO was saying. In a startup, there's a lot of grunt work that has to be done and there's nobody to do it, and so you frequently end up taking on a lot of tasks that really don't teach you anything. In a big company like Google, a lot of that work is automated, or there's a dedicated team of people who like doing that work, and you can just forget about it. Think about carrying pagers, repairing hardware, corporate IT, installing software, setting up your workstation, doing logs analysis, cooking for you, etc. It's less of a problem early on in your career when everything's new for you, particularly if you eventually want to found a startup where you have to do all that stuff anyway. A lot of engineers really want to be top of their field, though: they want to be the world expert in machine-learning, or in extraction of data from news articles, or in distributed parallel processing, and so on. You typically don't have the opportunity to do that in a startup, because you have to focus on the immediate business needs and on staying alive rather than on pushing the state of the art forwards. "Good enough" has to be good enough in a startup.

pnathan 14y ago
> You typically don't have the opportunity to do that in a startup, because you have to focus on the immediate business needs and on staying alive rather than on pushing the state of the art forwards. "Good enough" has to be good enough in a startup. Interesting. That's something you don't often hear... but it makes a ton of sense to me. I've only worked in academia and one mid-size corp, so startups are kind of a different world for me. :)
mattdeboard 14y ago
Interesting perspective. But like you said, at this point in my career I want to know how to do all this stuff. Thankfully I'm in a position where I get/have to do basically everything, so I'm getting very broad experience. There are specific areas where I want to focus -- search, data analysis, infrastructure -- and my next job I'll probably be looking for a focus in one or more of those areas (each of which Google would be a good option but without a degree and at my age I doubt I'd get hired). Be that as it may, I really, really don't want to work in a huge organization. I hate bureaucracy, central authority, people I never see in the organization making policy for me, etc. I spent my entire adult life in the military up til a couple years ago. I think that has something to do with it. edit: This comment really crystallizes the type of thing I want to avoid, which means eschewing employment at Google, IBM, Microsoft,etc: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4713802 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4713802 >Those were (are?) the designations for certain types of jobs over there. You might think that if you're hired into the company, your possibilities are wide open, but they aren't. System administrator flavored SREs (site reliability engineers) could only get other SA-flavored jobs, of which there are relatively few. Meanwhile, software engineer (SWE) type SREs could go into any other SWE job, of which there are many. If you were hired on as a SA-SRE as I was, then you have to do an internal interview to get to be a SWE-SRE. If you can't make it through that, you're stuck. I made it, and a friend did too, but I know people who didn't. I'm sure that makes them feel great, especially if they're already doing SWE type work in their daily jobs. I was told repeatedly there was no difference between the types, but found out the hard way when it was time to transfer from a toxic situation and there were few alternatives. It took over a year to finally get it all sorted out.
- nostrademons 14y ago
  Again, YMMV. I was hired as a UI SWE, told my manager (repeatedly) that I wanted to do more backend algorithmic work, eventually refused to do any more UI work, then taught myself enough about Google Search's backend systems that I became known as a full-stack engineer that knows everything. It probably delayed my promotion by about a year, but it was worth it, and it's not like anyone stopped me. I'm now doing basically product-manager type work, despite officially being a SWE. Again, nobody stops me. I've found that if you're producing stuff of value, you can basically move into another role simply by doing the work entailed by that role. I know two other SWEs that are de-facto PMs, and one SRE who became a SWE (and core LLVM contributor in the process).