Why I loved working at Google

Why I loved working at Google(jng.squarespace.com)

49 points by asdfprou 12 years ago | 51 comments

greenyoda 12 years ago |

Note that this was written by someone who spent three months at Google as an intern, so it's probably not very representative of what it's really like to work there. After three months you can't really understand much about a complex corporate culture or become familiar with more than a tiny corner of a huge company. And interns aren't involved in corporate politics, performance reviews, etc.

dewitt 12 years ago | |

I found it fairly accurate, and I've worked there seven years.

For most engineers most of the time, the job isn't politics or performance reviews. It's writing interesting software with talented teammates.

(Counterexamples of course exist, and a handful of vocal ones certainly like to chime in on threads like this. But if it weren't still mostly good for engineers at Google, Google wouldn't still employ the great engineers it does. But it does have great engineers to this day, so something is still going mostly right.)

varelse 12 years ago | | |

As one of the vocal ones(tm), even I would say Google is fantastic if you get allocated onto the right team. This obviously occurs most of the time or the place would be out of business.

What led to me becoming one of the vocal ones is what happens when allocation fails and there's really no resort other than trying to fit in doing something completely uninteresting or leaving. Google seemingly does not acknowledge that the allocation process is in any way flawed.

My mistake was I should have insisted on an allocation upfront as a condition of accepting the offer made to me. After acing the interview, all the power was in my hands and I failed to make use of it.

asdfprou 12 years ago | | |

Thanks Dewitt! I had a feeling that my lack of tenure was going to be a point of contention, so having someone with as much experience as you backing the story certainly helps!

asdfprou 12 years ago | |

Hey Greenyoda,

Certainly correct, although I have worked at a number of other companies (an investment bank, Microsoft, a startup, and in management consulting) so I was using those as benchmarks.

Thanks for reading!

guyzero 12 years ago | |

Yes, you certainly can't form an opinion in three months.

Sorry OP, your opinion is almost certainly wrong.

asdfprou 12 years ago | | |

You formed an opinion about my post and my experience in around 5 minutes.

Does this mean your opinion about my opinion is almost certainly wrong as well?

Snide comments aside, thanks for reading!

Cookingboy 12 years ago |

Holy mother of generalization! There are literally tens of thousands of Googlers and the author made it seem like they are all the same.

Disclaimer: I currently work for Google and I like a lot of the things here. The company culture that you see every day really is refreshing and encouraging, but deep down, we are individual human beings with different motivations and drives and want different things. There are many people who join and leave Google every day, an considering the size of the company, I can guarantee that not everyone works on those "moonshot" problems every day either.

Google is a fantastic company, but using a 3 months experience to generalize the entire workforce and culture of a company this size is a bit ambitious.

cromwellian 12 years ago |

Even though he's an intern, it's a fairly accurate impression, although there are gray areas.

The two biggest points I think are fairly true:

1) Google engineers are very passionate about transparency, and collaboration.

There are way way less engineering prima-donna hot-heads at Google than other companies. The kind of Linus Torvald-style rants and flame wars are extremely rare internally, and many people are happy to help and mentor. I've worked at IBM and Oracle and there were plenty of shouting matches between alpha-male hackers battling egos.

Secondly, secrecy pisses people off. To give you an example, there was a high-profile flop that started life as a secret project until it was almost ready for release, and it drove a lot of internal disharmony. In fact, one of the reasons listed in the post-mortem for the product flopping was the fact that it was developed in secret. Googlers don't like secrecy.

2) The engineers are world class, period. Jeff Dean. Rob Pike. Etc. 'Nuff Said. It's possible in a smaller company to be a big fish in a small pond. It's part of what drives the big, hot-headed egos of engineering prima donnas. They're the shit, because they might have 10 other junior engineers around them who are far less knowledgeable. You can't really get away with those kinds of attitudes at Google, and that may be part of the reason for the more relaxed, cooperative humility ('googliness'), because many of your peers are just as good, if not better, than you.

The grey areas are this. As Google becomes larger, the probability of a shitty employee being immature and leaking to the press goes up. As a result, Google is not as wide-open internally as it used to be. Some of the bad employees have spoiled it for the majority. Moreover, to my dismay, many of Google's attempts at federated, open protocols have failed in the marketplace. Open doesn't always win, or, takes a long time, and the success of closed silos of competitors I think has taught some Google product teams the wrong lesson, and forced it to compete on the same grounds of its competitors. Hopefully, eventually when things reach saturation and commodification, they'll be a return to setting standards, but I'm cynical. Apple has the whole industry thinking open specifications are bad because you can't make arbitrary changes to them to vertically integrate and suit your needs. And Google's years of supporting XMPP federation did nothing to get AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, et al on board. You can't say Google didn't try, they ran GTalk for years, but none of the big players with 10s or 100s of millions of users played along.

pocketstar 12 years ago |

"Google is the home to world-class engineers working on the world’s hardest problems". World-class engineers: true. World's hardest problems: false. Unless google has a secret space program, cold-fusion reactor, cure for cancer, desalination, etc... Perhaps I am naive but monetizing searches, email and other things doesn't count as any of the world's hardest problems.

cpprototypes 12 years ago |

Most of the articles and blog posts about Google are about Mountain View. Does anyone know if the satellite offices are good? I think I've read some good things about New York, but haven't heard much about any others.

scrabble 12 years ago |

I know people who work for Google in Kitchener, Ontario and I've been through their offices here myself. I don't have work experience there though.

What struck me the most going through the office is that the office setup and benefits seem to excel at getting out of your way. If you need something, it's there. You have privacy, you have food, you have people around, you have quiet. Whatever you need is already there.

It seems like in an environment like that it would be easy to get work done because distraction would be at a minimum and context switching would not occur as often.

I'd love to work in an office like that one day.

dcre 12 years ago |

So... now I've heard of someone who actually watched The Internship.

asdfprou 12 years ago | |

For the record I thought it was a terrible movie and ripe with inconsistency compared to the real thing, but I can only assume the director and writers took to creative license in an attempt to appeal to a larger audience.