14 ms·

Running a software team at Google

149 points by phenylene 14y ago

ultimoo 14y ago
This is a nice article giving an insight into how it is working for one of the most successful engineering companies of our time. However, the OP comes from a strong academic background and Google is quite hand-in-glove with premier universities and research institutes. Hence he already has credibility inside of Google. I however am told that it is quite an uphill task to join Google without an already established credibility and get to work with their core set of products. It'll be nice if someone could shed more light on this. I have always been very curious about how it is working at Google. I mean except a few, using Google products are such an everyday (everyhour?) thing for the average software engineer.
- nostrademons 14y ago
  What counts as already established credibility? I've worked in Search since joining 4 years ago; my experience is fairly similar to Matt's, certainly more like his than certain rather vocal personalities on Hacker News. I don't have a management role at all though I've occasionally served as a tech lead, and tend to prefer engineering or product-design roles. I was about 3 years out of college when I joined Google. I'd spent 2 years as an employee at a financial software startup and a year founding my own company (which failed, but the postmortem is now the #1 Google result for [failed startup]). I'd also done some moderately impressive open-source/volunteer work: I'd worked on a website in college that grew to 100,000 registered users, I wrote one of the top Haskell tutorials on the web, and I ported Arc to Javascript. Nothing with a huge userbase, nothing terribly famous, but enough to demonstrate that I had solid technical chops.
  - kamaal 14y ago
    >>I wrote one of the top Haskell tutorials on the web Can you provide links to your tutorial?
    - ivanjovanovic 14y ago
      I guess it is "Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours". I went through it and can tell that it is really a nice introduction to basic and some of the more advanced Haskell concepts. https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_Hours https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_...
  - ultimoo 14y ago
    Thanks for sharing your story. That's established credibility right there. You already had stellar open-source contributions which are probably more credible than an ivy league degree. I am currently in (a non-ivy) graduate school and should start focussing more on open-source involvement. Thanks! :-)
    - cdibona 14y ago
      I think that tactic will help quite a bit no matter where you might apply, not just Google (though I can confirm it almost always helps to be an active open source developer. It's consistently help us decide positively on a number of candidates.)
- endtime 14y ago
  >However, the OP comes from a strong academic background and Google is quite hand-in-glove with premier universities and research institutes. Hence he already has credibility inside of Google. I don't think it really works that way. Being associated with a top school helps a lot in getting an interview, but past that I don't think it helps with anything at all (if I'm wrong, please let me know, I am missing out :) ).
  - acchow 14y ago
    From my brief view on the inside, it certainly didn't feel like anyone cares what school you went to.
  - ultimoo 14y ago
    I would think it would also help in forging the right affiliations with influential alumni, especially in a large corporation. I'm only second guessing though, I didn't go to a top notch school and neither do I work in a large corporation like Google.
  - sheri 14y ago
    It does help getting an interview, but can also help tilt the balance in tight interview decisions. I presume it would be easier to make the case for folks with degrees from elite schools.
    - Nitramp 14y ago
      Is that your actual experience on a Google hiring committee, or are you guessing (can't tell from your comment)?
  - pseut 14y ago
    The OP taught at a top school which is a much bigger deal than graduating from one.
  - Nitramp 14y ago
    Seconded, I have no idea where my colleagues went to University, and I don't really care either. The only things that gets you credibility within Google in my experience is delivering good stuff and being helpful/knowledgeable in conversations with your peers.
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  However, the OP comes from a strong academic background and Google is quite hand-in-glove with premier universities and research institutes. Hence he already has credibility inside of Google. His academic background helped him. CS graduates and PhDs are a dime a dozen and neither is enough to make you a Real Googler, but the fact that he had 8+ years of research experience definitely gave him an inside track to the best projects. I would guess he was hired at Senior SWE (which is respectable; unlike the title-inflated startups out there, it actually is fairly senior) or Staff SWE. The Real Googler Line is somewhere within those two tiers. It's not just about title, but location and project play a role. Most Staff are Real Googlers, some Senior are, SWE 2-3 are not unless they're hired as proteges (which is rare). What's Google like? Well, if you're above the RGL, it's an excellent place to work. Even now, I'd recommend it. Being a Real Googler gives you free rein to transfer about the company. SWE 2-3 are considered a burden so transfer to a good project is very uncommon-- the first thing you'll be asked is why you didn't wait for Senior before transferring as you're "supposed to", but some projects make promotion impossible because there isn't enough visibility-- while Senior are considered about neutral (will add as much as he takes away in on-ramp time) and Staff are slightly favored. At Sr. Staff and beyond, it actually gets rougher, if only because you can't fully participate in the Real Googler freedoms if you want to keep going. At Staff you should have full freedom of the castle (open allocation) unless you're in a terrible location; above it, you have less freedom if you want to keep getting promoted, because having taken on an important-but-undesirable (2nd Quadrant; see: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/01/01/fourth-quadrant-work/ http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/01/01/fourth-quadra... ) project is expected in the promotion packet. I however am told that it is quite an uphill task to join Google without an already established credibility and get to work with their core set of products. It depends. It's easier to get on Search at Google than to get on the top trading desk at a bank, but I actually hated that about Google. See, banks and trading desks are conservative and risk-averse and slow to promote, but they're fair about it. At Google, front doors have stopped working, but you'll still see a 26-year-old now and then who manages to politick his way into getting a real project. A Facebook offer helps with that. So it creates the impression that everyone is getting this back-channel advancement, but very few actually are. In fact, I think the only way to get fired at Google (advanced rank culture) is for your boss to catch wind that you're looking for transfer or back-channel mobility. I used to admire Google, and I hate what the recent (post-2008, if it didn't start earlier) crop of terrible managers has done to it, but even now I'd say it's worth it to try the place out. There are good managers at Google and it's a pretty neat place if you get a good one. You can get on a good project as a SWE 3. It's rare, but it does happen. It helps if you're in Mt. View, if you have other offers, and if you have a good manager.
- munificent 14y ago
  > I however am told that it is quite an uphill task to join Google without an already established credibility and get to work with their core set of products. I joined Google a little under three years ago. I dropped out of college, worked at a startup for a few years, then worked at EA for eight years. So, from Google's perspective I had essentially no cred when I started. My current project (working on Dart) is basically my dream job and I work with a fantastic set of people. I've never once gotten the impression that my lack of education or relevant job experience was being held against me. Once I got in, I was a Googler. At that point, everyone just assumed I knew what I was doing or I wouldn't be here. Aside from occasional bouts of imposter syndrome, it seems to work out pretty well.
codeonfire 14y ago
The real story with big tech workplaces is that everyone wants to be in charge, everyone wants to establish credibility, no one wants to do the coding. I see this all the time. "I'm a part time coder" to me gets categorized with non-coder. The fact is that from day one it's mental and political combat. Everyone is telling everyone else they are a "lead" or building a team, or whatever. Titles are meaningless as anyone can get their title changed to Sr tech lead or some acronym. If you are a software engineer and want to call yourself a lead manager all you have to do is blog about it and hope someone believes you. All that matters is what you know, what you can do, and can you manipulate perceptions enough to get credit for your own work. Having "influence" just means you've found some people that don't understand these thing yet or you got some dirt.
- napoleoncomplex 14y ago
  This seems largely in contradiction with the original post, unless you're saying Matt isn't being truthful. He says he spends 50% time coding, which seems like a huge chunk of his time considering his "unofficial" title, definitely not a non-coder amount of time. What you're describing sounds pretty terrible, is that based on personal experience with Google?
  - codeonfire 14y ago
    The idea that you can be competitive developer with only a couple days of practice per week is not feasible. It's like being a pro athlete that only trains one day a week while telling the everyone you're a coach. They have the outward appearance of being a credible athlete while trying to gain the powers of a coach. When it's time to perform they are a coach. When it's time to celebrate the victory they're an athlete.
    - groby_b 13y ago
      Please do expound on that. What do you think is it that a coder needs to do every single day, and what do they gain from it? Yes, there is some value to practice. But it's perfectly possible to code and manage, and still be a good coder. Once you have passed a certain threshold, you will find that most of the knowledge you need is ephemeral - no need to memorize yet another piece of info, just how to find it. So it's not knowledge per se. The idea that you forget the basics of software engineering if you don't code every day is hopefully not what you're referring to, either - after a decade or two, those should be settled. It can't be "typing speed" or "editor efficiency" either, because both of them only matter marginally. Most of your work as a software eng. is with your brain, not with your fingers.
seanmcdirmid 14y ago
> It no longer comes down to making three grumpy program committee members happy with the font spacing in your paper submissions. As anyone who has submitted a paper written in Word to a technical conference knows: bad kerning over two columns will set your paper back at least one letter grade. Must use Latex instead. (I'm sure he is just joking, but it comes up...)
- pseut 14y ago
  Honestly, every time I see a job market paper[1] written in Word I can't help but think, "this person must have never worked on anything (mathematically) hard, or needed to automate table generation, or..." [1] on the off chance that the term is not widely known on HN, job applicants for academic positions (in Economics, at least) send a draft of an (almost always) unpublished paper as the main component of their job application.
  - binarycrusader 14y ago
    Anecdotally, I think you're wrong; I spent three years dealing with PhD people in Economics. All of them used Microsoft Word; none used Latex. Many of them were absolutely brilliant at maths. Many of them were doing table generation using STATA and some scripting in MS Office. I don't think it's a stretch to believe that people could be brilliant in maths, but not so great with computers.
    - pseut 14y ago
      What generation were they? I'm thinking of recent PhDs and I know only one or two people working in technically difficult areas that don't use LaTeX. It's possible that Word's equation editor has improved a lot since I last used it, but typing up a proof is painful enough that it's going to force most people to LaTeX (or Scientific Word or Lyx, or some other frontend) pretty quickly, regardless of their computer literacy. But I know that (for example) Hal White used a lot of Word and he's definitely brilliant at math. I appreciate your anecdote and will rethink my biases. (I do read these papers, though, and nothing's made me change my mind yet...)
michaelochurch 14y ago
Most importantly, my team's success is no longer defined through an arbitrary and often broken peer review process, which applies to pretty much everything that matters in the academic world. Oh boy. Don't even get me started on broken processes. When managers can use secret calibration scores to blacklist reports and keep them captive for 5+ years on undesirable projects, what else should it be called exactly? Matt Welsh was hired above the Real Googler Line, so he has a rosy-eyed view. He's also comparing it against the nightmare of post-PhD academic politics. He also seems, from his account, like a decent guy. He hasn't seen yet what Google turns into for young engineers who don't have external credibility yet, and who end up with managers who aren't decent people... It'd be interesting to read his opinion after he sees that. If you're above the RGL (~10%) you have the credibility to represent your contribution to the company independently. Peer review gets you promotions, managers are a higher-ranking peer and can help you a little more, but you have enough independent credibility above the RGL that you can't be extorted. If you're below RGL, you have the extortive manager-as-SPOF nonsense of typical rank cultures, and you get none of the upsides of working at Google. Also, I think the TLM concept is broken. The whole reason closed allocation is a fistful of fail is that, rather than resolving the conflict of interest between project leadership and people management (the best thing for a person might be to change projects) it tends to double down on that. The only part of people management (aside from HR, at the company's interface) that has any value for 120+ IQers doing convex work is the mentoring aspect... which ought to be project-independent.
- sheri 14y ago
  What is the Real Googlers Line? This is the first I'm hearing of it. I don't work at Google though, so maybe this is well known.
  - sgift 14y ago
    > I would guess he was hired at Senior SWE (which is respectable; unlike the title-inflated startups out there, it actually is fairly senior) or Staff SWE. The Real Googler Line is somewhere within those two tiers. It's not just about title, but location and project play a role. Most Staff are Real Googlers, some Senior are, SWE 2-3 are not unless they're hired as proteges (which is rare). I didn't know the term either but he answered it in a post below.

149 points by phenylene 14y ago

This is a nice article giving an insight into how it is working for one of the most successful engineering companies of our time. However, the OP comes from a strong academic background and Google is quite hand-in-glove with premier universities and research institutes. Hence he already has credibility inside of Google. I however am told that it is quite an uphill task to join Google without an already established credibility and get to work with their core set of products. It'll be nice if someone could shed more light on this. I have always been very curious about how it is working at Google. I mean except a few, using Google products are such an everyday (everyhour?) thing for the average software engineer.

nostrademons 14y ago
What counts as already established credibility? I've worked in Search since joining 4 years ago; my experience is fairly similar to Matt's, certainly more like his than certain rather vocal personalities on Hacker News. I don't have a management role at all though I've occasionally served as a tech lead, and tend to prefer engineering or product-design roles. I was about 3 years out of college when I joined Google. I'd spent 2 years as an employee at a financial software startup and a year founding my own company (which failed, but the postmortem is now the #1 Google result for [failed startup]). I'd also done some moderately impressive open-source/volunteer work: I'd worked on a website in college that grew to 100,000 registered users, I wrote one of the top Haskell tutorials on the web, and I ported Arc to Javascript. Nothing with a huge userbase, nothing terribly famous, but enough to demonstrate that I had solid technical chops.
- kamaal 14y ago
  >>I wrote one of the top Haskell tutorials on the web Can you provide links to your tutorial?
  - ivanjovanovic 14y ago
    I guess it is "Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours". I went through it and can tell that it is really a nice introduction to basic and some of the more advanced Haskell concepts. https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_Hours https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_...
- ultimoo 14y ago
  Thanks for sharing your story. That's established credibility right there. You already had stellar open-source contributions which are probably more credible than an ivy league degree. I am currently in (a non-ivy) graduate school and should start focussing more on open-source involvement. Thanks! :-)
  - cdibona 14y ago
    I think that tactic will help quite a bit no matter where you might apply, not just Google (though I can confirm it almost always helps to be an active open source developer. It's consistently help us decide positively on a number of candidates.)
endtime 14y ago
>However, the OP comes from a strong academic background and Google is quite hand-in-glove with premier universities and research institutes. Hence he already has credibility inside of Google. I don't think it really works that way. Being associated with a top school helps a lot in getting an interview, but past that I don't think it helps with anything at all (if I'm wrong, please let me know, I am missing out :) ).
- acchow 14y ago
  From my brief view on the inside, it certainly didn't feel like anyone cares what school you went to.
- ultimoo 14y ago
  I would think it would also help in forging the right affiliations with influential alumni, especially in a large corporation. I'm only second guessing though, I didn't go to a top notch school and neither do I work in a large corporation like Google.
- sheri 14y ago
  It does help getting an interview, but can also help tilt the balance in tight interview decisions. I presume it would be easier to make the case for folks with degrees from elite schools.
  - Nitramp 14y ago
    Is that your actual experience on a Google hiring committee, or are you guessing (can't tell from your comment)?
- pseut 14y ago
  The OP taught at a top school which is a much bigger deal than graduating from one.
- Nitramp 14y ago
  Seconded, I have no idea where my colleagues went to University, and I don't really care either. The only things that gets you credibility within Google in my experience is delivering good stuff and being helpful/knowledgeable in conversations with your peers.
michaelochurch 14y ago
However, the OP comes from a strong academic background and Google is quite hand-in-glove with premier universities and research institutes. Hence he already has credibility inside of Google. His academic background helped him. CS graduates and PhDs are a dime a dozen and neither is enough to make you a Real Googler, but the fact that he had 8+ years of research experience definitely gave him an inside track to the best projects. I would guess he was hired at Senior SWE (which is respectable; unlike the title-inflated startups out there, it actually is fairly senior) or Staff SWE. The Real Googler Line is somewhere within those two tiers. It's not just about title, but location and project play a role. Most Staff are Real Googlers, some Senior are, SWE 2-3 are not unless they're hired as proteges (which is rare). What's Google like? Well, if you're above the RGL, it's an excellent place to work. Even now, I'd recommend it. Being a Real Googler gives you free rein to transfer about the company. SWE 2-3 are considered a burden so transfer to a good project is very uncommon-- the first thing you'll be asked is why you didn't wait for Senior before transferring as you're "supposed to", but some projects make promotion impossible because there isn't enough visibility-- while Senior are considered about neutral (will add as much as he takes away in on-ramp time) and Staff are slightly favored. At Sr. Staff and beyond, it actually gets rougher, if only because you can't fully participate in the Real Googler freedoms if you want to keep going. At Staff you should have full freedom of the castle (open allocation) unless you're in a terrible location; above it, you have less freedom if you want to keep getting promoted, because having taken on an important-but-undesirable (2nd Quadrant; see: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/01/01/fourth-quadrant-work/ http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/01/01/fourth-quadra... ) project is expected in the promotion packet. I however am told that it is quite an uphill task to join Google without an already established credibility and get to work with their core set of products. It depends. It's easier to get on Search at Google than to get on the top trading desk at a bank, but I actually hated that about Google. See, banks and trading desks are conservative and risk-averse and slow to promote, but they're fair about it. At Google, front doors have stopped working, but you'll still see a 26-year-old now and then who manages to politick his way into getting a real project. A Facebook offer helps with that. So it creates the impression that everyone is getting this back-channel advancement, but very few actually are. In fact, I think the only way to get fired at Google (advanced rank culture) is for your boss to catch wind that you're looking for transfer or back-channel mobility. I used to admire Google, and I hate what the recent (post-2008, if it didn't start earlier) crop of terrible managers has done to it, but even now I'd say it's worth it to try the place out. There are good managers at Google and it's a pretty neat place if you get a good one. You can get on a good project as a SWE 3. It's rare, but it does happen. It helps if you're in Mt. View, if you have other offers, and if you have a good manager.
munificent 14y ago
> I however am told that it is quite an uphill task to join Google without an already established credibility and get to work with their core set of products. I joined Google a little under three years ago. I dropped out of college, worked at a startup for a few years, then worked at EA for eight years. So, from Google's perspective I had essentially no cred when I started. My current project (working on Dart) is basically my dream job and I work with a fantastic set of people. I've never once gotten the impression that my lack of education or relevant job experience was being held against me. Once I got in, I was a Googler. At that point, everyone just assumed I knew what I was doing or I wouldn't be here. Aside from occasional bouts of imposter syndrome, it seems to work out pretty well.

codeonfire 14y ago

The real story with big tech workplaces is that everyone wants to be in charge, everyone wants to establish credibility, no one wants to do the coding. I see this all the time. "I'm a part time coder" to me gets categorized with non-coder. The fact is that from day one it's mental and political combat. Everyone is telling everyone else they are a "lead" or building a team, or whatever. Titles are meaningless as anyone can get their title changed to Sr tech lead or some acronym. If you are a software engineer and want to call yourself a lead manager all you have to do is blog about it and hope someone believes you. All that matters is what you know, what you can do, and can you manipulate perceptions enough to get credit for your own work. Having "influence" just means you've found some people that don't understand these thing yet or you got some dirt.

napoleoncomplex 14y ago
This seems largely in contradiction with the original post, unless you're saying Matt isn't being truthful. He says he spends 50% time coding, which seems like a huge chunk of his time considering his "unofficial" title, definitely not a non-coder amount of time. What you're describing sounds pretty terrible, is that based on personal experience with Google?
- codeonfire 14y ago
  The idea that you can be competitive developer with only a couple days of practice per week is not feasible. It's like being a pro athlete that only trains one day a week while telling the everyone you're a coach. They have the outward appearance of being a credible athlete while trying to gain the powers of a coach. When it's time to perform they are a coach. When it's time to celebrate the victory they're an athlete.
  - groby_b 13y ago
    Please do expound on that. What do you think is it that a coder needs to do every single day, and what do they gain from it? Yes, there is some value to practice. But it's perfectly possible to code and manage, and still be a good coder. Once you have passed a certain threshold, you will find that most of the knowledge you need is ephemeral - no need to memorize yet another piece of info, just how to find it. So it's not knowledge per se. The idea that you forget the basics of software engineering if you don't code every day is hopefully not what you're referring to, either - after a decade or two, those should be settled. It can't be "typing speed" or "editor efficiency" either, because both of them only matter marginally. Most of your work as a software eng. is with your brain, not with your fingers.

seanmcdirmid 14y ago

> It no longer comes down to making three grumpy program committee members happy with the font spacing in your paper submissions. As anyone who has submitted a paper written in Word to a technical conference knows: bad kerning over two columns will set your paper back at least one letter grade. Must use Latex instead. (I'm sure he is just joking, but it comes up...)

pseut 14y ago
Honestly, every time I see a job market paper[1] written in Word I can't help but think, "this person must have never worked on anything (mathematically) hard, or needed to automate table generation, or..." [1] on the off chance that the term is not widely known on HN, job applicants for academic positions (in Economics, at least) send a draft of an (almost always) unpublished paper as the main component of their job application.
- binarycrusader 14y ago
  Anecdotally, I think you're wrong; I spent three years dealing with PhD people in Economics. All of them used Microsoft Word; none used Latex. Many of them were absolutely brilliant at maths. Many of them were doing table generation using STATA and some scripting in MS Office. I don't think it's a stretch to believe that people could be brilliant in maths, but not so great with computers.
  - pseut 14y ago
    What generation were they? I'm thinking of recent PhDs and I know only one or two people working in technically difficult areas that don't use LaTeX. It's possible that Word's equation editor has improved a lot since I last used it, but typing up a proof is painful enough that it's going to force most people to LaTeX (or Scientific Word or Lyx, or some other frontend) pretty quickly, regardless of their computer literacy. But I know that (for example) Hal White used a lot of Word and he's definitely brilliant at math. I appreciate your anecdote and will rethink my biases. (I do read these papers, though, and nothing's made me change my mind yet...)

michaelochurch 14y ago

Most importantly, my team's success is no longer defined through an arbitrary and often broken peer review process, which applies to pretty much everything that matters in the academic world. Oh boy. Don't even get me started on broken processes. When managers can use secret calibration scores to blacklist reports and keep them captive for 5+ years on undesirable projects, what else should it be called exactly? Matt Welsh was hired above the Real Googler Line, so he has a rosy-eyed view. He's also comparing it against the nightmare of post-PhD academic politics. He also seems, from his account, like a decent guy. He hasn't seen yet what Google turns into for young engineers who don't have external credibility yet, and who end up with managers who aren't decent people... It'd be interesting to read his opinion after he sees that. If you're above the RGL (~10%) you have the credibility to represent your contribution to the company independently. Peer review gets you promotions, managers are a higher-ranking peer and can help you a little more, but you have enough independent credibility above the RGL that you can't be extorted. If you're below RGL, you have the extortive manager-as-SPOF nonsense of typical rank cultures, and you get none of the upsides of working at Google. Also, I think the TLM concept is broken. The whole reason closed allocation is a fistful of fail is that, rather than resolving the conflict of interest between project leadership and people management (the best thing for a person might be to change projects) it tends to double down on that. The only part of people management (aside from HR, at the company's interface) that has any value for 120+ IQers doing convex work is the mentoring aspect... which ought to be project-independent.

sheri 14y ago
What is the Real Googlers Line? This is the first I'm hearing of it. I don't work at Google though, so maybe this is well known.
- sgift 14y ago
  > I would guess he was hired at Senior SWE (which is respectable; unlike the title-inflated startups out there, it actually is fairly senior) or Staff SWE. The Real Googler Line is somewhere within those two tiers. It's not just about title, but location and project play a role. Most Staff are Real Googlers, some Senior are, SWE 2-3 are not unless they're hired as proteges (which is rare). I didn't know the term either but he answered it in a post below.