Everyone else who came to Google was in the exact same position as you are, modulo a handful of famous people with beards that put Gandalf's to shame, but they're a very tiny minority. Everyone who applied had the same reasons for not applying as you do. And everyone here says: "GOSH, I SURE AM HAPPY I CAME HERE!" So just apply already.
And here, my friends, we have a wonderful example of something which statisticians call a "biased sample". Of course the people who (a) were offered a job by Google, (b) accepted said offer from Google, and (c) haven't quit, are happy about having interviewed at Google.
If Steve Yegge had (a) gone to Facebook and interviewed ex-googlers, (b) phoned people who were offered jobs but decided not to accept them (yes, we do exist), or (c) talked to people who flew across the country to interview at Google but weren't offered jobs, he would probably hear a rather more complicated story.
Several reasons, in no particular order: 1. The interview process was completely and utterly broken; among other things, Google changed their mind about which position I was applying for 3 times without consulting me. 2. The job offer (for a position which would have required that I move from Canada to the US) arrived shortly after the US Senate voted away the right of Habeas Corpus. 3. I was interested in developing a system for online encrypted backups, and I was talking to someone who told me that his boss would be interested in licensing some of my work (the licensing didn't end up happening -- a draft MOU ended up arriving two months late which was completely different to what had been discussed in person -- but I decided to go ahead with my work anyway). 4. While I was told that my suggested choice of research projects "would be ok" (I was offered a research position), there was a clear lack of enthusiasm for it; and similarly I had no enthusiasm for the fields of research Google's director of research mentioned.
In short, they screwed up the recruiting process; the job location wasn't ideal; I had another interesting option; and our interests didn't fit very well.
Someone at Google needs to use their 20% time to create an app addressing the problem “recruit and organize 100,000 people to do useful things, efficiently”. They could license the technology for a fortune.
Edit: Seriously. It’s a classic and universal problem. It’s hard to solve, and interesting. Most organizations attack it using an ad hoc grouping of traditional measures and panic.
Meh, Y combinator has already helped to solve that.
The problem is Google is wasting investor money trying to be a big company, recruiting thousands of employees and trying to expand rapidly. Why not just stay small and efficient with respect to their core search and advertising services, and just buy startups if they want to expand in other areas?
He interviewed me, or I interviewed him, depending on your perspective; but after Google made their offer (obviously, before I decided against accepting it) rather than during the main interview phase. This was largely a response to the recruiter screwing up and not scheduling any interviews for me with anyone in Google Research.
No, every job interview should also be a chance for you to evaluate the company that you might be working for. The interviewer is the best proxy you have access to before you are actually hired.
He meant, "I found out that I am better than the Peter Norvig".
No, that's not what I meant. I don't think I'm better than Peter Norvig; nor do I think Peter Norvig is better than me. Our interests are too dissimilar for any fair comparison to be made.
By "... or I interviewed him" I meant in the sense of a journalist or researcher interviewing someone in order to gain information -- in order for me to decide whether I wanted to accept Google's offer, I needed more information about what working at Google Research would mean, and Peter Norvig was the obvious person to provide such information.
""shortly after the US Senate voted away the right of Habeas Corpus""
I am foreign living in USA, and this troubles me a lot. I basically have no right, and can wisked away at will from any american agency, and have absolutely no right to do anything about it if I was labeled a terrorist.
I come from a allay country of USA, but still the lack of abilities to appeal in court, is very frightening, almost fascistic.
I guess you would have blamed Google if it had rained that day too.
I don't blame Google for the US Senate's lack of backbone, either. However, the legal situation, my dislike for what I saw of Silicon Valley weather (I like humidity), and the urban sprawl were all factors in my deciding that it wasn't an environment I would enjoy.
Someone asked why I didn't accept a job at Google; I answered.
I don't come here to debate politics, but I don't think politics are automatically off-topic here -- particularly when they influence questions like "should I move to Silicon Valley?" or "should I launch a startup company?".
The problem is that, as you can easily see from the results, what was a fascinating look at one person's experience with Google has degraded into a relatively uninteresting tit-for-tat session, which does not reflect well on anyone.
I'm not sure what to say really... you answered honestly and certainly weren't concentrating on that aspect of it. Perhaps the best thing is if people have the fortitude to not respond to politically themed things even if they strongly disagree.
It wasn't the politics I challenged. It was the business logic. You aren't going to conduct business with an entity in a given country because another entity in that country did something you disagree with? Then it looks like you'll never be doing any business with anyone ever.
This is a place where we hackers get together to encourage each other to leverage our technological (and other) skills to build great businesses. When someone posts a remark like that, it needs to be challenged. Left unchallenged, it stands as "accepted".
(Funny, OP won't go to google because of the actions of the U.S. Senate, but still chooses to conduct that argument in a forum which is based in the U.S. Logic, please?)
Could you come up with a more obvious straw man? What he said was that it made him not want to move to the US. He didn't say why. Since habeas corpus was hardly "voted away" for Canadian researcher emigrés who work at Google, it must have been on principled (or ostensibly principled) grounds. I could understand why someone might object to that, but if you're going to take issue with it, at least respond to what he said.
The problem is that the third party you refer to has the legal authority to affect what happens to you. It is a different matter entirely, in that case.
The job offer (for a position which would have required that I move from Canada to the US) arrived shortly after the US Senate voted away the right of Habeas Corpus.
Well, that you would blame this on google suggests a very strong inability on your part to think coherently. That you think the Senate has "voted away the right of Habeas Corpus" suggests a very, very basic ignorance of legal matters.
He didn't blame it on Google, which suggests a very strong inability on your part to read. And the fact that you ignore the squeeze on basic freedoms in the U.S. over the last eight years suggests either woeful ignorance on your part, or typical Republican jingoism.
Not cool.
Unfortunately, Google seems to be going the way of America: descent into mediocrity, if not lower.
Google is the subject matter. If he hates the United States for whatever reason, then there's no reason to bring it up as a reason to not work at google per se. Just the typical airing out of grievances that he's been brainwashed into. I wouldn't particularily care for living in...oh, I don't know, Canada...but it wouldn't keep me from taking a job offer that I otherwise wanted. Jesus, there are people moving to UAE for jobs. UAE!
you ignore the squeeze on basic freedoms in the U.S. over the last eight years
Strawman. He said "the US Senate voted away the right of Habeas Corpus". This is false. I pointed out that it was false. I did not say that there has been no "squeeze" on basic freedoms blah blah blah.
And there are people like me, who get pinged via some channel (linkedin, email, phone, etc) by google recruiters ad nauseam. And every time, tell them no thank you. In the beginning you'll be polite, after three years you'll ask them politely to go pound sand.
Why? I have many friends that work there. I have many friends that work there only because they hope it'll get better once they make it into the "inner circle". These are not people who work on podunk projects, think indexing, crawling, gmail.
Further, these same friends are hyper paranoid that they'll let something slip in good ol technical banter that we used to do; because google is soo damn secretive and the penalties range from simple hazing to termination if their slip of the lip was known (and I'm not talking about it showing up on techcrunch or vallywag or even a personal blog).
And there are people like me, who get pinged via some channel (linkedin, email, phone, etc) by google recruiters ad nauseam. And every time, tell them no thank you.
A year after I turned down Google's offer, I started getting poked repeatedly by Google recruiters (I'm guessing that after a year, the new employee referral bonus is up for grabs again). I complained to a friend of mine who works at Google, and he had someone put "DO NOT CONTACT" on my file -- and I haven't had a single email from their recruiters since. I don't know if you can get the same thing added to your file, but it might be worth asking.
but you know, google's mission is to "organize all of the world's information". I assume this includes HR info as well. With all of that data and all of the high-end machine learning talent that works there, you'd figure that they would be able to learn when someone has no interest working there.
I think you vastly overestimate the organizational abilities of Google recruiters. I have friends who, while working at Google, had recruiters contact them to ask if they were interested in working for Google.
I'd say listening to what someone is saying and assessing whether they might be more interested six months later requires far more sophisticated thought processes than looking up whether someone already works at Google before trying to recruit them -- so making sure that you're very explicit about what you want them to do (mark your file as 'do not contact') is probably a good idea.
Google is now a great place to go if you have a communications or marketing degree from a 2nd tier school. Every other woman I meet in the Bay Area is a Google account PM with a master's in marketing from some place like Maryland State university. I would say if you aren't an engineer google is AWESOME: free food, gym, haircuts, massage, shuttle buses, personal laptop, off-site retreats to disneyland every other month, etc. The other employment options for people in those positions usually resemble "the office." If you are an engineer you will be working 3 people to a cube on maintenance tools that maintain the tools for maintaining another tool.
I also turned down Google's offer. And as others have mentioned, various Google recruiters still send me email at least three times a month.
Who cares about a gig there? You think in 95 the founders there were reading "Get that Job At Microsoft"? I think Yegge has written some decent stuff in the past (in -v mode, of course) but I doubt most of HN is interested in joining the cult. Anybody that says "GOSH, I SURE AM HAPPY" while reporting to a cube has something wrong with them.
Not to mention that if you think that no one is able to produce interesting work in a company like Google, than I'd say that you'd need to get out of the HN groupthink.
The general geshtalt of the site is all about starting startups. I wouldn't necessarily say that's groupthink. At least I wouldn't say that to loud here. ;)
To be a bit contrarian, there are some kinds of 'new things' where you're better off trying to build them at a BigCo like Google. Think of all the data and processing power they have.
Google's weird, though. I'm both deeply impressed, and somewhat intimidated by them.
Generally, you're better off communicating about yourself in terms of opinions "it would drive me crazy to work in a cube", rather than "working in a cube is for crazy people". The second is guaranteed to offend, the first, not much.
However, he's clearly suggesting that classic, relatively timeless material on data structures and algorithms along with a little bit of theory of computation is at the heart of computer science, which is important if you want to do software development, and you'll get no argument from me there.
Everything else I've mentioned you should know cold [...]
You have a lot of warming up to do. Real-world work makes you rusty.
Those quotes make it sound like Google's interview process is biased toward people who know a lot of basic-CS trivia. If real-world work makes you rusty, doesn't that imply that the interview is favoring people who have studied up on certain things such that they know them better than they actually need to? I would agree that a good candidate should have been familiar with the details of everything Yegge mentions at some point. But is there really much value in knowing these things "cold", rather than merely knowing them "warm"?
I blew an interview recently because of this. Of course, I can't be 100% sure this is why, because I interviewed for six hours, but it was the only part where I felt like I wasn't doing well. I really fumbled at the whiteboard on some tree walking algorithms . If I had reviewed my data structures and algorithms book, I would have rocked these questions. What could have come off as a strong point instead came off as weak and rusty.
I do think that the company lost out on a good hire because of this. The job requires some specialized math, as well as domain knowledge and programming ability. I don't think there are many people will this skillset.
But next time, I will most definitely review this material prior to the interview, because it really cost me.
yea I don't really see the point of memorizing CS trivia when
A) I can google it if I ever need to know
B) Most languages today have support for graphs, trees, and sorts, and other cs trivia things built in or via stable libraries
It seems like a potential employee's ability to 'get things done' would be more important
It isn't trivia. You can "get things done" a lot faster when you don't have to A) google all week for the answer or B) try out multiple half-baked implementations.
I don't have an issue with Gooogle's requirement to know what you are doing, but unfortunately I think the interesting jobs at Google are becoming few and far between.
I feel like there is a focus on what I would call trivial details built into the assumption that a good candidate should be able to explain how all of these things work in an interview. There's a huge difference between not knowing why you might want to keep a binary tree balanced and not knowing how red/black trees work off the top of your head. If you've heard of them and know what they're good for, you can look them up in a few seconds when you need them.
Of course, a talented hacker will know the details of some data structures and algorithms. I'd be far more impressed with a candidate who could tell me in detail about recent uses of a couple more unusual data structures and algorithms than with a candidate who knew all the classics in detail but nothing unusual.
If you really wanna work at Google, why not build something cool and possibly get bought out by Google instead? Better than trying to join through this (broken?) interview process.
Personally, I'd rather not have 10 different bosses above me... but that's just me.
Anything that puts me that low on an organizational chart is incredibly unappealing to me. The conventional corporate path of becoming a director after working really hard seems crazy to me. And forget about becoming an executive.
Working really hard to become a couple steps down on an org chart is much less appealing to me than working really hard and having a self-sustaining or acquired business.
Once you get hired by Google your expectations might not be met... There were stories a while back of Ph.D's hired by Google expecting to work on cool infrastructure/system architecture who find themselves instead working on writing Javascript.
I never ever get past the first phone interview with them. I usually stumble because I forgot some command-line switch or something. The last time they called I said I didn't want to interview since the interviewers often are kind of mean. :`(
A couple months ago, he wrote an article about how he thinks that the ideal blog length is something that takes between 10 and 50 minutes to read, because then more of it gets stored in your long-term memory. Not surprisingly, that article is also quite lengthy:
I've heard that Google has really mixed, often shitty interviewing and this just confirms the hearsay.
My experience doesn't match that. I decided against accepting Google's offer, but I can't find any fault with my interviewers; while there were a few instances of "I know this is a lame question, but I'm supposed to ask it", most of the questions I was asked were quite interesting -- and my interviewers were clearly ready and eager to learn when I presented them with solutions which were better than the "official" solutions they expected.
That would be the positive half of the "mixed." I thought my interview process was not so hot, personally. Not horrible, but not at all as good as yours.
My experience confirms that. I didn't get the job, which could be an argument that I'm bitter or something, but I told the first, second, and third recruiter I talked to that I probably wasn't interested in the position offered.
Anyway beyond the "I'm not interested/come in anyway" the interview process was pretty broken. The first two interviewers somehow were given the resume of someone who had the same name as me but wasn't me (or something, it was never clear how they ended up with the wrong resume).
What the fuck is with you people? 60 responses and most of theme seem to be arguing about Steve's content instead of his average blog length. After all, it's Yegge we're talking about folks!
And here, my friends, we have a wonderful example of something which statisticians call a "biased sample". Of course the people who (a) were offered a job by Google, (b) accepted said offer from Google, and (c) haven't quit, are happy about having interviewed at Google.
If Steve Yegge had (a) gone to Facebook and interviewed ex-googlers, (b) phoned people who were offered jobs but decided not to accept them (yes, we do exist), or (c) talked to people who flew across the country to interview at Google but weren't offered jobs, he would probably hear a rather more complicated story.