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challenging work and brilliant colleagues Word on the street is that there's some fun work to do but there's a lot of vanilla corporate grinding on the Adwords

by iigs 17y ago

challenging work and brilliant colleagues Word on the street is that there's some fun work to do but there's a lot of vanilla corporate grinding on the Adwords interface and reporting infrastructure, and that Google hires a lot of people into those roles before they can branch out into other jobs. Also everyone I've personally spoken to about job interviews (i.e. not read about on the internet) was pained by the pomposity/egos of the people that were doing the interviews. In my opinion there's a lot more to be said for someone that is humble and gets their work done with the occasional intellectual surprise than someone who can school you any day on the One True I/O Monad and takes every opportunity to do so. Of course, it's also possible that it's absolutely perfect and the people that I talked to had sour grapes because they never got offers. I don't know. :)

wheels 17y ago
Well, I suspect they're also "overhiring" a lot of the time -- bringing in people that are on the high end of the intelligence spectrum (if not experience) ... and then putting them in boring jobs. That's a sure-fire way to see a significant chunk of your work force churn every few years. And they may even be accounting for that -- this may only be half-way to prevent employee loss, but just as much on managing and understanding it.
nostrademons 17y ago
I'm sorta halfway between Search UI and Universal Search, and in my experience so far, it really is a lot of fun. There're some crazy algorithms involved in search, and the infrastructure just makes my jaw drop in awe. We launched a new feature last Tuesday as well - that was fun. :-) But I can kinda see how it might suck if you end up on the wrong team. One of my Noogler friends is working on an internal webapp, and I would cry (or quit) if I had to work with his codebase. Somebody's gotta do the grunt work, and it can't all be exciting. As for the interviews - I didn't have any complaints about mine (well, except for the interviewer who didn't show up). My interviewers were friendly & competent - I just had lunch with one of them last week, 6 months after the interview. I did get the sense that they get exasperated by the number of candidates who get through the phone screen and then really don't know what they're talking about in the interview, which just wastes everyone's time. It's possible that if you're one of those people, that exasperation would seem like pomposity - but then, if you really do have that much to learn, why not learn it instead of complain about the egos of the people interviewing you? Again though, this is biased by the "all's well that ends well" effect. It's possible that I'd have a very different opinion had I been turned down. Then again, I still have a high opinion of FriendFeed's interview process even though I completely botched it.

by iigs 17y ago

wheels 17y ago

Well, I suspect they're also "overhiring" a lot of the time -- bringing in people that are on the high end of the intelligence spectrum (if not experience) ... and then putting them in boring jobs. That's a sure-fire way to see a significant chunk of your work force churn every few years. And they may even be accounting for that -- this may only be half-way to prevent employee loss, but just as much on managing and understanding it.

nostrademons 17y ago

I'm sorta halfway between Search UI and Universal Search, and in my experience so far, it really is a lot of fun. There're some crazy algorithms involved in search, and the infrastructure just makes my jaw drop in awe. We launched a new feature last Tuesday as well - that was fun. :-) But I can kinda see how it might suck if you end up on the wrong team. One of my Noogler friends is working on an internal webapp, and I would cry (or quit) if I had to work with his codebase. Somebody's gotta do the grunt work, and it can't all be exciting. As for the interviews - I didn't have any complaints about mine (well, except for the interviewer who didn't show up). My interviewers were friendly & competent - I just had lunch with one of them last week, 6 months after the interview. I did get the sense that they get exasperated by the number of candidates who get through the phone screen and then really don't know what they're talking about in the interview, which just wastes everyone's time. It's possible that if you're one of those people, that exasperation would seem like pomposity - but then, if you really do have that much to learn, why not learn it instead of complain about the egos of the people interviewing you? Again though, this is biased by the "all's well that ends well" effect. It's possible that I'd have a very different opinion had I been turned down. Then again, I still have a high opinion of FriendFeed's interview process even though I completely botched it.