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New York, 4:22 PM
Tue Dec 1
55 posts in the last 24 hours
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11/18/09
This is not to say that bad execs and good execs have no effect on engineers, because they do -- particularly the bad ones, who can very easily spoil a development environment. But the factors that determine a "good" or "bad" exec from an engineer's point of view are frequently not the same as the factors that cause the business press to draw conclusions about their quality.
So what did GoogNYCers really think of Armstrong or your other gossip targets? It's astonishing that in a company that employees thousands of engineers, you can't find a single decent tipster. They are out there, I am sure.
11/18/09
- Relentless, robotic corporate culture
- How braindead said culture made her feel
- Higher management pressure to party and be seen with other Googlers
- The fact that so many other Googlers can't understand why a normal person would want to have non-work friends
- Politics and office drama associated with zombie corporate culture and rampant social incest
- How fucking boring it was
11/18/09
Money aside (and it's not an inconsiderable aside), the couple times I've visited friends there (hey, free lunch), it seemed an atrocious place to work. Gave me the creeps.
11/18/09
His supervisor flipped out and questioned his loyalty (?!!?) and then started screwing with him, changing deadlines, etc until my friend quit.
11/18/09
I don't work at Google and I don't make a lot of money. But I have worked at other places like that, where I could have made a lot of money if I had just agreed to play their little games and given up any semblance of my own life as part of the deal. I chose to leave instead too.
11/18/09
11/18/09
11/18/09
(please never show that photo again of the razor scooter racks at google--eyes already bled out from the first time you did it)
11/18/09
11/18/09
10/30/09
That being said, people who score 1's, or at least, the 99% who do, many of them wouldn't be able to hack it. If you don't have the social skills you need to have the technical skills. If you don't have either, makes sense that you'd get bounced.
Also, word on the street is that Google is pretty widely hiring right now--not laying off.
10/30/09
10/30/09
10/30/09
10/29/09
I've got 20 years on the little snot-nosed recent PhD interviewing me and he starts throwing these lame-ass puzzles at me. He speaks, throughout, in the most condescending imaginable tones. Some of them are trivial as in "why are you wasting my time with this, I've already offered to send you code samples and some of my algorithm work". Some of them are so poorly phrased as to have no good answer. A final one was an old saw of a problem - one I'd seen decades ago, once knew the "trick", but that would take more more than 1m to remember the trick. It wasn't even a very practical problem or trick to know for any utilitarian purpose - just one of those old puzzles that geeks trade around as useless toys. Since it was taking me more than about a minute to reconstruct the answer he grew impatient and started talking to me like I was a three year old. The interviewer said several other idiotic things in the course of discussion (not rude, I mean -- technically stupid (although he was also rude)). Our mutual disrespect was mutually clear, I think, by the end of the interview.
A serious problem with Google's culture, I learned that day, is that their declaration of owning "the world's best engineers" has the very bad side effect of giving every loser hired into engineering there the unsubstantiated belief that they are a member of that species.
What I've learned, over the years, is that you have to pretty much (not absolutely, but close) *never* trust an engineer who regards himself as anything other than an average plodder, prone to mistakes, who might be *slightly* better than most at this or that specialty. Those are the only honest engineers you'll find, for the most part. They are the only ones who are appropriately skeptical of their own brilliance. And they do the best work.
The founders of Google set a really bogus tone, from the outset.
10/29/09
10/29/09
10/29/09
First, they come up with a battery of ridiculous questions, then they look at the people that do the worst at answering them and then hire one of those people they just REALLY LIKED.
Wow. That makes a lot of sense. #google
10/29/09
I remember there was an article about a Google (?) HR person (?) who had ridiculously strict ideas of who would make a good employee.
10/07/09