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PhD student here. A legitimate, but seemingly snarky question: is your job at Google something exciting, challenging, or is it more or less standard engineering

PhD student here. A legitimate, but seemingly snarky question: is your job at Google something exciting, challenging, or is it more or less standard engineering? (From your reply I assume that you're a recent hire at Google with not much prior work experience; I can easily imagine people with several years of expertise can do exciting stuff at Google.) Being in my first year on my PhD, I have friends that have been recently accepted to companies such as Google or Microsoft. Unfortunately, their work there does not sound exciting to a person that has fun working on an intellectual challenge (which I believe many PhDs do, but not only PhDs -- for instance, people loving programming contests do so too). To give a few examples: * I've heard of a guy that was one of the smartest when it came to the programming contests; he ended up working for Google on the frontend of their site, I think. * One of my friends got hired by Microsoft; his work is mostly developing code for Skype text servers. Soon he and his group will be given the task of porting it from C++ (a non-MS technology) into C#/Azure. That also doesn't sound very exciting. * Another of my friends got hired by Google into a Site Reliability Engineer position. That might be challenging (and very stressful), but I expect more time-critical fixes than intellectual challanges. --- That's pretty much my reason for doing a PhD -- low pay, but challenging.

Chronic29 12y ago
This. Bluntly put, web and mobile application development are easy problems with solutions all over the Internet. People differentiate themselves by applying it to different domains (apps) - that's it. This also extends to classic back end MySQL and even Hadoop deployments now a days. Solving these problems does generate money, but they're not that interesting.
zo1 12y ago
" One of my friends got hired by Microsoft; his work is mostly developing code for Skype text servers. Soon he and his group will be given the task of porting it from C++ (a non-MS technology) into C#/Azure. That also doesn't sound very exciting." "That's pretty much my reason for doing a PhD -- low pay, but challenging.*" Be prepared to have your bubble burst, badly. Industry is hardly ever like what you'd find "exciting", and even when it is, the odds aren't likely that it'll be given to a "PHD" student, but rather the company favorite. i.e. The person that plays politics better than you.
- NotOscarWilde 12y ago
  Surely you realize you more or less agree with me! I also think that most industry jobs are not "exciting", and so people that desire stimulating intellectual work have better options inside academia, even if for just a limited time (if they do not go further after the PhD).
- stephencanon 12y ago
  Wow, really? I left a PhD program to go into industry. I get to work on way more fascinating things in industry than I ever would have in academia. I also get to work on lots of different interesting things, rather than focusing entirely in one narrow field. Generally, my advice to PhD students considering working in industry is “if you’ve identified one specific problem that you want to devote years to, then academia may be for you. If you want to have a constant flow of challenging problems and don’t particularly care about sticking to one narrow field, industry may be a better fit for you.” My experience is that the incentives in industry are aligned so that it’s nearly impossible to succeed without having broad interests that allow you to have impact on multiple projects. Incentives in academia are aligned so that it’s nearly impossible to succeed without being able to focus almost single-mindedly on one specific area and churn out the publications; there isn’t much time for exploration until you get tenure, at least. Maybe I’ve just been lucky, though?
endtime 12y ago
Everything below is my own personal opinion and doesn't represent Google, etc. I've been at Google for 2.5 years and am the tech lead of a small team. My prior work experience was internships and a startup (which I sold after about a year on it in grad school and another year on it full time). I've done a combination of boring plumbing stuff, moderately interesting plumbing stuff, very interesting mathy stuff (figuring out how to make place ratings better), applied ML stuff (for local review spam and quality), and crowdsourcing optimization stuff (making the humans who do manual things to maps data more efficient). I'd say the interestingness of my projects has probably been above average, but not exceptionally so.
mcv 12y ago
If you're willing to accept low pay, then I think that definitely helps to find a job that meets your demands. I've also regularly chosen the lowest pay out of a number of job offers I received, because that job was more attractive for other reasons.

Chronic29 12y ago

This. Bluntly put, web and mobile application development are easy problems with solutions all over the Internet. People differentiate themselves by applying it to different domains (apps) - that's it. This also extends to classic back end MySQL and even Hadoop deployments now a days. Solving these problems does generate money, but they're not that interesting.

zo1 12y ago

" One of my friends got hired by Microsoft; his work is mostly developing code for Skype text servers. Soon he and his group will be given the task of porting it from C++ (a non-MS technology) into C#/Azure. That also doesn't sound very exciting." "That's pretty much my reason for doing a PhD -- low pay, but challenging.*" Be prepared to have your bubble burst, badly. Industry is hardly ever like what you'd find "exciting", and even when it is, the odds aren't likely that it'll be given to a "PHD" student, but rather the company favorite. i.e. The person that plays politics better than you.

NotOscarWilde 12y ago
Surely you realize you more or less agree with me! I also think that most industry jobs are not "exciting", and so people that desire stimulating intellectual work have better options inside academia, even if for just a limited time (if they do not go further after the PhD).
stephencanon 12y ago
Wow, really? I left a PhD program to go into industry. I get to work on way more fascinating things in industry than I ever would have in academia. I also get to work on lots of different interesting things, rather than focusing entirely in one narrow field. Generally, my advice to PhD students considering working in industry is “if you’ve identified one specific problem that you want to devote years to, then academia may be for you. If you want to have a constant flow of challenging problems and don’t particularly care about sticking to one narrow field, industry may be a better fit for you.” My experience is that the incentives in industry are aligned so that it’s nearly impossible to succeed without having broad interests that allow you to have impact on multiple projects. Incentives in academia are aligned so that it’s nearly impossible to succeed without being able to focus almost single-mindedly on one specific area and churn out the publications; there isn’t much time for exploration until you get tenure, at least. Maybe I’ve just been lucky, though?

endtime 12y ago

Everything below is my own personal opinion and doesn't represent Google, etc. I've been at Google for 2.5 years and am the tech lead of a small team. My prior work experience was internships and a startup (which I sold after about a year on it in grad school and another year on it full time). I've done a combination of boring plumbing stuff, moderately interesting plumbing stuff, very interesting mathy stuff (figuring out how to make place ratings better), applied ML stuff (for local review spam and quality), and crowdsourcing optimization stuff (making the humans who do manual things to maps data more efficient). I'd say the interestingness of my projects has probably been above average, but not exceptionally so.

mcv 12y ago

If you're willing to accept low pay, then I think that definitely helps to find a job that meets your demands. I've also regularly chosen the lowest pay out of a number of job offers I received, because that job was more attractive for other reasons.