4 ms·

What is it like to work at Google?

19 points by pietro 19y ago

shayan 19y ago
I just think Mr. Winer is not considering at what level you are at, meaning what kind of a position you'll be able to hold in these companies...I guess the experience will be quite different, so will the opportunities that will open up to you
MuddyMo 19y ago
Looks like Winer is pretty much in line with many in the YC community: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=75433 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=75433 Might this be the milestone we look back on and eval: (not (not (= google evil)))
- kirubakaran 19y ago
  Is Google guilty of early optimization? :)
ajkates 19y ago
One of my co-founders worked for Google this past summer. He didn't have one negative word to say about it.
mhb 19y ago
Wow. His writing style is exceedingly annoying. And, either as a result of that or not, I feel as though this is the fifth installment of something he wrote of which I haven't read the preceding parts.
- run4yourlives 19y ago
  Agreed, that's an entirely useless article with little information save his opinion.
  - breck 19y ago
    Me too. why is this article number one? we need down vote.
    - axod 19y ago
      upvote everything else - kinda works(ish)?
    - nikolaj 19y ago
      i think this rose to the top because we all want validations of our dislike for google and its overwhelming self-righteousness
- sspencer 19y ago
  What do you expect? He hangs out with John Markoff, who I consider one of the stupidest humans alive. Check out "Freedom Downtime" sometime for a good example of the light in which he paints his subjects.
- machine 19y ago
  And what's with the tiny hash symbols at the end of every paragraph. I also found the article unpleasant.
  - henning 19y ago
    Don't tell Dave Winer that to his face. He'll start rambling about OPML, outliners, and other shit only he and like 3 other people care about (i.e., way more people care about Haskell than they do about outliners from what I can tell).
cstejerean 19y ago
Well, I got a job offer at Google and decided to turn it down. Sure, the food is great and you have everything you need but I think it's counter productive to starting a startup. You need to dislike your current job enough to want to do something else. I also agree with the author that humility is a scarce resource at Google.
mynameishere 19y ago
Can someone explain why this got upmodded to #1? It reads like it was written by a 23 year old who just got turned down by google's HR department. And then: Don't get me started about the developers. They hardly do any work, they get quoted in the press all the time as if they're gods, and make millions of dollars, and I do all the work Huh? Satire? I can't tell...
- alaskamiller 19y ago
  Because it's Dave Winer.
  - apathy 19y ago
    His parents must have been clairvoyant when they passed on the family name. If the shoe fits...
brintoul 19y ago
Did I mention this..? http://s3.amazonaws.com/brintoul/tiredofgoogle.html http://s3.amazonaws.com/brintoul/tiredofgoogle.html "It reads like it was written by a 23 year old who just got turned down by google's HR department." -- this is exactly what I would expect to hear from a Fanboy.
augustus 19y ago
I don't know much about working at Google. But using Adwords and dealing with some of the folks at Google was really a pleasant experience. They really went out of their way to accommodate me. I was really surprised!!
- axod 19y ago
  If they're taking your money, they're going to be helpful ;) But agreed. Far better customer service than microsoft or yahoo.
ecuzzillo 19y ago
I recently met a very smart guy who has worked at Google for nearly a year, and he had almost nothing positive to say about it. In his whole large division, there seemed to be hardly anybody who actually got anything done. And, worse, there was no method for firing people who didn't do anything.
apathy 19y ago
I worked at Google for a while, pre-IPO. There were an awful lot of very smart, capable people (or so it seemed, out of the 200 or so that were there when I arrived), and the challenges in operations simply do not exist at any other company I have seen (you try administering 100K servers, expanding by about another 1000-2000 per week, using typical methods, and let me know how it goes, for example (%)). The hardware engineering produced numerous clever patents, the software engineers produced stuff like MapReduce, and despite the North Korean Labor Camp work ethos, people were generally pretty happy. I have no idea if it's like that anymore. A lot of my friends who stuck around after the IPO report that it changed, that there arose much friction between the perceived old guard and the newer post-IPO employees. Maybe now that there are a zillion Googlers in a dozen or so countries (Ireland, Switzerland, India, China, and teh USA were already set up by the time I left), perhaps there's less camaraderie. Maybe the SarbOx role-based access control (which I helped implement as part of my job) means that you can't poke around MOMA and the Perforce tree after work hours and gawk at the new patents. It was a great place to work, but in the end I moved on because I didn't get the position I really wanted to be promoted to, and I noticed that all of the guys doing really, really cool stuff had completed some advanced study, more often than not in CS or comp bio. Given that machine learning doesn't seem to be going out of style, I have to try and remember that $80K or so is really not a very good salary for the amount of work that an SRE drone is responsible for, and figure out 'what next' instead. I didn't have a wife or a kid when I left Google. Now I do. It's harder now to embrace the risks of starting up a company, although I made a sizable chunk of change in the meantime simply by developing and selling a hobby website. If the idea is solid and the execution solid, there's at least some chance that even the 'just for fun' projects will end up putting a roof over your head (literally, in my case). I'm still conflicted, but I like to think that the mathematical and computational skills I've picked up in the meantime (especially modern statistical methodology, and applications in comp bio and machine learning) will continue to provide me with fun stuff to work on, regardless of what happens at Google. If it weren't on the opposite side of town, though, I'd be tempted to apply for a different job at Google once I finish my thesis. Hopefully I'll have something better to do with my life than be a cog, though. (%) ps. If you've ever wondered whether it's better to automate everything up-front at your Little Start-Up: yes it is. You're not going to have any more time to deal with it if you succeed, and if your company stagnates, automation will make it easier to walk away and do something else.
deleted 19y ago
[deleted]
tryagain 19y ago
I'm sure it's fantastic to work at Google, if you're the kind of person who wants to work in a big company. As for me, I made a cool mashup with the maps API, and they offered me a job, subject to approval by HR. You could tell by the way they were talking that they thought they were offering me a glimpse of a ticket to heaven. When I asked some clarifying questions, they didn't even bother to answer them. Silence for the insolent fool! So arrogant they undoubtedly are. People inside the company find it hard to understand why anyone would not leap at the chance to work there. I was actually considering it but they shut down the conversation, and I'm glad about it now. I turned the mashup into a company and it now brings in a lot more than even Google would consider paying me.
- tocomment 19y ago
  Can I see the mashup?
tocomment 19y ago
What kind of salaries do people get working there?

19 points by pietro 19y ago

I just think Mr. Winer is not considering at what level you are at, meaning what kind of a position you'll be able to hold in these companies...I guess the experience will be quite different, so will the opportunities that will open up to you

MuddyMo 19y ago

Looks like Winer is pretty much in line with many in the YC community: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=75433 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=75433 Might this be the milestone we look back on and eval: (not (not (= google evil)))

kirubakaran 19y ago
Is Google guilty of early optimization? :)

ajkates 19y ago

One of my co-founders worked for Google this past summer. He didn't have one negative word to say about it.

mhb 19y ago

Wow. His writing style is exceedingly annoying. And, either as a result of that or not, I feel as though this is the fifth installment of something he wrote of which I haven't read the preceding parts.

run4yourlives 19y ago
Agreed, that's an entirely useless article with little information save his opinion.
- breck 19y ago
  Me too. why is this article number one? we need down vote.
  - axod 19y ago
    upvote everything else - kinda works(ish)?
  - nikolaj 19y ago
    i think this rose to the top because we all want validations of our dislike for google and its overwhelming self-righteousness
sspencer 19y ago
What do you expect? He hangs out with John Markoff, who I consider one of the stupidest humans alive. Check out "Freedom Downtime" sometime for a good example of the light in which he paints his subjects.
machine 19y ago
And what's with the tiny hash symbols at the end of every paragraph. I also found the article unpleasant.
- henning 19y ago
  Don't tell Dave Winer that to his face. He'll start rambling about OPML, outliners, and other shit only he and like 3 other people care about (i.e., way more people care about Haskell than they do about outliners from what I can tell).

cstejerean 19y ago

Well, I got a job offer at Google and decided to turn it down. Sure, the food is great and you have everything you need but I think it's counter productive to starting a startup. You need to dislike your current job enough to want to do something else. I also agree with the author that humility is a scarce resource at Google.

mynameishere 19y ago

Can someone explain why this got upmodded to #1? It reads like it was written by a 23 year old who just got turned down by google's HR department. And then: Don't get me started about the developers. They hardly do any work, they get quoted in the press all the time as if they're gods, and make millions of dollars, and I do all the work Huh? Satire? I can't tell...

alaskamiller 19y ago
Because it's Dave Winer.
- apathy 19y ago
  His parents must have been clairvoyant when they passed on the family name. If the shoe fits...

brintoul 19y ago

Did I mention this..? http://s3.amazonaws.com/brintoul/tiredofgoogle.html http://s3.amazonaws.com/brintoul/tiredofgoogle.html "It reads like it was written by a 23 year old who just got turned down by google's HR department." -- this is exactly what I would expect to hear from a Fanboy.

augustus 19y ago

I don't know much about working at Google. But using Adwords and dealing with some of the folks at Google was really a pleasant experience. They really went out of their way to accommodate me. I was really surprised!!

axod 19y ago
If they're taking your money, they're going to be helpful ;) But agreed. Far better customer service than microsoft or yahoo.

ecuzzillo 19y ago

I recently met a very smart guy who has worked at Google for nearly a year, and he had almost nothing positive to say about it. In his whole large division, there seemed to be hardly anybody who actually got anything done. And, worse, there was no method for firing people who didn't do anything.

apathy 19y ago

I worked at Google for a while, pre-IPO. There were an awful lot of very smart, capable people (or so it seemed, out of the 200 or so that were there when I arrived), and the challenges in operations simply do not exist at any other company I have seen (you try administering 100K servers, expanding by about another 1000-2000 per week, using typical methods, and let me know how it goes, for example (%)). The hardware engineering produced numerous clever patents, the software engineers produced stuff like MapReduce, and despite the North Korean Labor Camp work ethos, people were generally pretty happy. I have no idea if it's like that anymore. A lot of my friends who stuck around after the IPO report that it changed, that there arose much friction between the perceived old guard and the newer post-IPO employees. Maybe now that there are a zillion Googlers in a dozen or so countries (Ireland, Switzerland, India, China, and teh USA were already set up by the time I left), perhaps there's less camaraderie. Maybe the SarbOx role-based access control (which I helped implement as part of my job) means that you can't poke around MOMA and the Perforce tree after work hours and gawk at the new patents. It was a great place to work, but in the end I moved on because I didn't get the position I really wanted to be promoted to, and I noticed that all of the guys doing really, really cool stuff had completed some advanced study, more often than not in CS or comp bio. Given that machine learning doesn't seem to be going out of style, I have to try and remember that $80K or so is really not a very good salary for the amount of work that an SRE drone is responsible for, and figure out 'what next' instead. I didn't have a wife or a kid when I left Google. Now I do. It's harder now to embrace the risks of starting up a company, although I made a sizable chunk of change in the meantime simply by developing and selling a hobby website. If the idea is solid and the execution solid, there's at least some chance that even the 'just for fun' projects will end up putting a roof over your head (literally, in my case). I'm still conflicted, but I like to think that the mathematical and computational skills I've picked up in the meantime (especially modern statistical methodology, and applications in comp bio and machine learning) will continue to provide me with fun stuff to work on, regardless of what happens at Google. If it weren't on the opposite side of town, though, I'd be tempted to apply for a different job at Google once I finish my thesis. Hopefully I'll have something better to do with my life than be a cog, though. (%) ps. If you've ever wondered whether it's better to automate everything up-front at your Little Start-Up: yes it is. You're not going to have any more time to deal with it if you succeed, and if your company stagnates, automation will make it easier to walk away and do something else.

deleted 19y ago

[deleted]

tryagain 19y ago

I'm sure it's fantastic to work at Google, if you're the kind of person who wants to work in a big company. As for me, I made a cool mashup with the maps API, and they offered me a job, subject to approval by HR. You could tell by the way they were talking that they thought they were offering me a glimpse of a ticket to heaven. When I asked some clarifying questions, they didn't even bother to answer them. Silence for the insolent fool! So arrogant they undoubtedly are. People inside the company find it hard to understand why anyone would not leap at the chance to work there. I was actually considering it but they shut down the conversation, and I'm glad about it now. I turned the mashup into a company and it now brings in a lot more than even Google would consider paying me.

tocomment 19y ago
Can I see the mashup?

tocomment 19y ago

What kind of salaries do people get working there?