Google is the car with all the sexy features but very little of what really matters
After I had been working, I found out that I was lucky that one of the members of my team hadn’t interviewed me
Some will make a purchasing decision on what really matters; safety, performance, serviceability. Some will make a purchase based on “how many cup holders the car has”. The amenities,extra-curricular(s) and conversastion peice of “working for Google” is what keeps most working at Google.
Another, has bluetooth for your mobile phone, 10 cup holders, sexy looking instrument panel, premium sound system, DVD player and seat warmer but has poor gas mileage, poor performance, bad safety rating, expensive maintenance, etc
My bitterness is almost entirely because of my manager. He was in my orientation group in Mt. View and seemed like a good egg at the time. Just as Google can be a great place for the software engineer to do great work unencumbered, it’s also possible for a manger to be a complete jerk unencumbered. Tho the other members of the group (that didn’t leave sooner) thought that they could put up with anything to work at Google they did notice my manager’s particular irrationality when dealing with me. There were only two days of my six months there that I didn’t dread going to work. My manager made sure that no other manager would talk to me and as soon as the head of the office left town he tried to put me on a PIP. Life is too short to deal with jerks so I felt I had no choice but to leave. I do believe that I could have really enjoyed myself at the home office or with a different manager, etc. but I wasn’t given the choice of what to work on nor who to work for.
I started working at Google a while ago as an engineer when there was only the Mountain View office. (If I recall correctly, the NY sales office opened later that month.) Google certainly seemed like an ideal place to work at the time, and if I wanted to be an engineer, I’d probably still want to work there. But there were certainly issues, even back then, and I believe they’ve mostly gotten worse as the company has grown.
The hiring process: Google’s hiring process tends to have a lot of false negatives. If I had submitted my resume myself, rather Liverpool sugar daddy websites than getting recommended by an employee, I don’t know if I would have gotten in. My GPA was a 3.7, and the cutoff (at least at one point in Google’s history) was 3.8 (I went to a tough school, the 6th 4.0 GPA in its history just graduated this year). I honestly don’t know if this cap is still there (I suspect not) but this is just one way Google arbitrarily cut down on the number of people interviewed.
My C++ skills weren’t really all that great, since I hadn’t used C++ in a couple of years, and I would have totally failed if he had interviewed me. He told me that he would have been wrong to do so, since I actually ended up replacing him on the team and automating most of what he had been doing by hand, so I hope that my example helped make at least one interviewer a little more reasonable. But the old-timers certainly felt like they had to have tough interviews, and in many cases “tough” equated to things like trivia questions or brain teasers, neither of which are completely relevant to what people were being interviewed for.
