This is a nice article giving an insight into how it is working for one of the most successful engineering companies of our time.
However, the OP comes from a strong academic background and Google is quite hand-in-glove with premier universities and research institutes. Hence he already has credibility inside of Google.
I however am told that it is quite an uphill task to join Google without an already established credibility and get to work with their core set of products. It'll be nice if someone could shed more light on this. I have always been very curious about how it is working at Google. I mean except a few, using Google products are such an everyday (everyhour?) thing for the average software engineer.
What counts as already established credibility? I've worked in Search since joining 4 years ago; my experience is fairly similar to Matt's, certainly more like his than certain rather vocal personalities on Hacker News. I don't have a management role at all though I've occasionally served as a tech lead, and tend to prefer engineering or product-design roles.
I was about 3 years out of college when I joined Google. I'd spent 2 years as an employee at a financial software startup and a year founding my own company (which failed, but the postmortem is now the #1 Google result for [failed startup]). I'd also done some moderately impressive open-source/volunteer work: I'd worked on a website in college that grew to 100,000 registered users, I wrote one of the top Haskell tutorials on the web, and I ported Arc to Javascript. Nothing with a huge userbase, nothing terribly famous, but enough to demonstrate that I had solid technical chops.
>However, the OP comes from a strong academic background and Google is quite hand-in-glove with premier universities and research institutes. Hence he already has credibility inside of Google.
I don't think it really works that way. Being associated with a top school helps a lot in getting an interview, but past that I don't think it helps with anything at all (if I'm wrong, please let me know, I am missing out :) ).
> I however am told that it is quite an uphill task to join Google without an already established credibility and get to work with their core set of products.
I joined Google a little under three years ago. I dropped out of college, worked at a startup for a few years, then worked at EA for eight years. So, from Google's perspective I had essentially no cred when I started.
My current project (working on Dart) is basically my dream job and I work with a fantastic set of people. I've never once gotten the impression that my lack of education or relevant job experience was being held against me. Once I got in, I was a Googler. At that point, everyone just assumed I knew what I was doing or I wouldn't be here.
Aside from occasional bouts of imposter syndrome, it seems to work out pretty well.
However, the OP comes from a strong academic background and Google is quite hand-in-glove with premier universities and research institutes. Hence he already has credibility inside of Google.
His academic background helped him. CS graduates and PhDs are a dime a dozen and neither is enough to make you a Real Googler, but the fact that he had 8+ years of research experience definitely gave him an inside track to the best projects.
I would guess he was hired at Senior SWE (which is respectable; unlike the title-inflated startups out there, it actually is fairly senior) or Staff SWE. The Real Googler Line is somewhere within those two tiers. It's not just about title, but location and project play a role. Most Staff are Real Googlers, some Senior are, SWE 2-3 are not unless they're hired as proteges (which is rare).
What's Google like? Well, if you're above the RGL, it's an excellent place to work. Even now, I'd recommend it. Being a Real Googler gives you free rein to transfer about the company. SWE 2-3 are considered a burden so transfer to a good project is very uncommon-- the first thing you'll be asked is why you didn't wait for Senior before transferring as you're "supposed to", but some projects make promotion impossible because there isn't enough visibility-- while Senior are considered about neutral (will add as much as he takes away in on-ramp time) and Staff are slightly favored.
At Sr. Staff and beyond, it actually gets rougher, if only because you can't fully participate in the Real Googler freedoms if you want to keep going. At Staff you should have full freedom of the castle (open allocation) unless you're in a terrible location; above it, you have less freedom if you want to keep getting promoted, because having taken on an important-but-undesirable (2nd Quadrant; see: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/01/01/fourth-quadra... ) project is expected in the promotion packet.
I however am told that it is quite an uphill task to join Google without an already established credibility and get to work with their core set of products.
It depends. It's easier to get on Search at Google than to get on the top trading desk at a bank, but I actually hated that about Google. See, banks and trading desks are conservative and risk-averse and slow to promote, but they're fair about it. At Google, front doors have stopped working, but you'll still see a 26-year-old now and then who manages to politick his way into getting a real project. A Facebook offer helps with that. So it creates the impression that everyone is getting this back-channel advancement, but very few actually are. In fact, I think the only way to get fired at Google (advanced rank culture) is for your boss to catch wind that you're looking for transfer or back-channel mobility.
I used to admire Google, and I hate what the recent (post-2008, if it didn't start earlier) crop of terrible managers has done to it, but even now I'd say it's worth it to try the place out. There are good managers at Google and it's a pretty neat place if you get a good one. You can get on a good project as a SWE 3. It's rare, but it does happen. It helps if you're in Mt. View, if you have other offers, and if you have a good manager.
> It no longer comes down to making three grumpy program committee members happy with the font spacing in your paper submissions.
As anyone who has submitted a paper written in Word to a technical conference knows: bad kerning over two columns will set your paper back at least one letter grade. Must use Latex instead. (I'm sure he is just joking, but it comes up...)
Honestly, every time I see a job market paper[1] written in Word I can't help but think, "this person must have never worked on anything (mathematically) hard, or needed to automate table generation, or..."
[1] on the off chance that the term is not widely known on HN, job applicants for academic positions (in Economics, at least) send a draft of an (almost always) unpublished paper as the main component of their job application.
Most importantly, my team's success is no longer defined through an arbitrary and often broken peer review process, which applies to pretty much everything that matters in the academic world.
Oh boy. Don't even get me started on broken processes. When managers can use secret calibration scores to blacklist reports and keep them captive for 5+ years on undesirable projects, what else should it be called exactly?
Matt Welsh was hired above the Real Googler Line, so he has a rosy-eyed view. He's also comparing it against the nightmare of post-PhD academic politics. He also seems, from his account, like a decent guy. He hasn't seen yet what Google turns into for young engineers who don't have external credibility yet, and who end up with managers who aren't decent people... It'd be interesting to read his opinion after he sees that.
If you're above the RGL (~10%) you have the credibility to represent your contribution to the company independently. Peer review gets you promotions, managers are a higher-ranking peer and can help you a little more, but you have enough independent credibility above the RGL that you can't be extorted. If you're below RGL, you have the extortive manager-as-SPOF nonsense of typical rank cultures, and you get none of the upsides of working at Google.
Also, I think the TLM concept is broken. The whole reason closed allocation is a fistful of fail is that, rather than resolving the conflict of interest between project leadership and people management (the best thing for a person might be to change projects) it tends to double down on that.
The only part of people management (aside from HR, at the company's interface) that has any value for 120+ IQers doing convex work is the mentoring aspect... which ought to be project-independent.
I often wonder how someone who was only at Google for 5 months, and never went through the semiyearly review or transfer process could spout so much inaccurate BS about it.
If you are performing well and get poor calibration scores (which aren't secret), then that's something to bring up with HR and your manager's manager. The sad truth is that your poor calibration scores were an accurate reflection of your poor performance (I'll spare you the embarrassment of posting evidence of this). Your inability to transfer teams was a combination of that and the fact that it's almost impossible to transfer teams before you've spent at least 1.5 years on that team.
The real story with big tech workplaces is that everyone wants to be in charge, everyone wants to establish credibility, no one wants to do the coding. I see this all the time. "I'm a part time coder" to me gets categorized with non-coder.
The fact is that from day one it's mental and political combat. Everyone is telling everyone else they are a "lead" or building a team, or whatever. Titles are meaningless as anyone can get their title changed to Sr tech lead or some acronym. If you are a software engineer and want to call yourself a lead manager all you have to do is blog about it and hope someone believes you. All that matters is what you know, what you can do, and can you manipulate perceptions enough to get credit for your own work. Having "influence" just means you've found some people that don't understand these thing yet or you got some dirt.
> "everyone wants to be in charge, everyone wants to establish credibility, no one wants to do the coding"
Have you worked at Google? My observation has been that most people here do want to do the coding. Which is not to say that they don't want to be in charge and establish credibility as well, but the culture is much more biased towards engineering than at many other companies.
This seems largely in contradiction with the original post, unless you're saying Matt isn't being truthful. He says he spends 50% time coding, which seems like a huge chunk of his time considering his "unofficial" title, definitely not a non-coder amount of time.
What you're describing sounds pretty terrible, is that based on personal experience with Google?
Seriously? When I was at Microsoft, it was like "hot potato" to have to give up a coveted dev role and take on dev lead responsibilities. In particular, being a first-level manager was treated as a sort of curse with all of the worst bits --- not enough time to still work on big things (e.g. as a manager, I too owned logging for a while), but not high enough in the org to justify being full-time on hiring, coordinating teams, and fighting for 0.9 offices / headcount instead of 0.75.
Which sounds dumb until you're on a team with 0.9 offices / headcount and you see the productivity soar, for reasons I never bothered to quantify (if free fruit on Friday => productivity, just buy the fruit; don't ask).
The real story with big tech workplaces is that everyone wants to be in charge, everyone wants to establish credibility, no one wants to do the coding. I see this all the time. "I'm a part time coder" to me gets categorized with non-coder.
Insightful and mostly correct, but this is a false dichotomy.
There are a lot of people who want to write code and do the real work, but end up in the nonsense you described-- they spend 50+ percent of their time extorting their weaker peers (for credit and image enhancement) and slugging their equals-- because, as you said, they need to win on the credibility market before the company will trust them with real work.
Corporate software engineers are a defeated tribe who work for managers. The nightmare of being seriously underpaid while writing boring software with a boss who thinks he can do your job in half the time, even though he hasn't written a line of code in 10 years (or ever) and has forgotten (or never knew) how hard it is... well, that's the norm for most software engineers.
You're talking about the MacLeod Sociopaths (people who hack credibility markets and rape the system) and possibly the Clueless (middle-managers in the classic depiction; but most startups are Clueless even down to the bottom, because Losers get culled in tough cultures). But there are also the Technocrats (socially positive subset of the so-called, and misnamed, Sociopaths) who bludgeon the credibility market because they have to, but have a genuine desire to do the hard work-- writing code, clarifying ideas, creating. We're not all prima donnas.
Yeah, I see this all the time. The best people leaves, leaving only the politicians to fight amongst themselves. Then the company implodes, or becomes a Zombie like Microsoft.
[+] [-] ultimoo|13 years ago|reply
However, the OP comes from a strong academic background and Google is quite hand-in-glove with premier universities and research institutes. Hence he already has credibility inside of Google.
I however am told that it is quite an uphill task to join Google without an already established credibility and get to work with their core set of products. It'll be nice if someone could shed more light on this. I have always been very curious about how it is working at Google. I mean except a few, using Google products are such an everyday (everyhour?) thing for the average software engineer.
[+] [-] nostrademons|13 years ago|reply
I was about 3 years out of college when I joined Google. I'd spent 2 years as an employee at a financial software startup and a year founding my own company (which failed, but the postmortem is now the #1 Google result for [failed startup]). I'd also done some moderately impressive open-source/volunteer work: I'd worked on a website in college that grew to 100,000 registered users, I wrote one of the top Haskell tutorials on the web, and I ported Arc to Javascript. Nothing with a huge userbase, nothing terribly famous, but enough to demonstrate that I had solid technical chops.
[+] [-] endtime|13 years ago|reply
I don't think it really works that way. Being associated with a top school helps a lot in getting an interview, but past that I don't think it helps with anything at all (if I'm wrong, please let me know, I am missing out :) ).
[+] [-] munificent|13 years ago|reply
I joined Google a little under three years ago. I dropped out of college, worked at a startup for a few years, then worked at EA for eight years. So, from Google's perspective I had essentially no cred when I started.
My current project (working on Dart) is basically my dream job and I work with a fantastic set of people. I've never once gotten the impression that my lack of education or relevant job experience was being held against me. Once I got in, I was a Googler. At that point, everyone just assumed I knew what I was doing or I wouldn't be here.
Aside from occasional bouts of imposter syndrome, it seems to work out pretty well.
[+] [-] michaelochurch|13 years ago|reply
His academic background helped him. CS graduates and PhDs are a dime a dozen and neither is enough to make you a Real Googler, but the fact that he had 8+ years of research experience definitely gave him an inside track to the best projects.
I would guess he was hired at Senior SWE (which is respectable; unlike the title-inflated startups out there, it actually is fairly senior) or Staff SWE. The Real Googler Line is somewhere within those two tiers. It's not just about title, but location and project play a role. Most Staff are Real Googlers, some Senior are, SWE 2-3 are not unless they're hired as proteges (which is rare).
What's Google like? Well, if you're above the RGL, it's an excellent place to work. Even now, I'd recommend it. Being a Real Googler gives you free rein to transfer about the company. SWE 2-3 are considered a burden so transfer to a good project is very uncommon-- the first thing you'll be asked is why you didn't wait for Senior before transferring as you're "supposed to", but some projects make promotion impossible because there isn't enough visibility-- while Senior are considered about neutral (will add as much as he takes away in on-ramp time) and Staff are slightly favored.
At Sr. Staff and beyond, it actually gets rougher, if only because you can't fully participate in the Real Googler freedoms if you want to keep going. At Staff you should have full freedom of the castle (open allocation) unless you're in a terrible location; above it, you have less freedom if you want to keep getting promoted, because having taken on an important-but-undesirable (2nd Quadrant; see: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/01/01/fourth-quadra... ) project is expected in the promotion packet.
I however am told that it is quite an uphill task to join Google without an already established credibility and get to work with their core set of products.
It depends. It's easier to get on Search at Google than to get on the top trading desk at a bank, but I actually hated that about Google. See, banks and trading desks are conservative and risk-averse and slow to promote, but they're fair about it. At Google, front doors have stopped working, but you'll still see a 26-year-old now and then who manages to politick his way into getting a real project. A Facebook offer helps with that. So it creates the impression that everyone is getting this back-channel advancement, but very few actually are. In fact, I think the only way to get fired at Google (advanced rank culture) is for your boss to catch wind that you're looking for transfer or back-channel mobility.
I used to admire Google, and I hate what the recent (post-2008, if it didn't start earlier) crop of terrible managers has done to it, but even now I'd say it's worth it to try the place out. There are good managers at Google and it's a pretty neat place if you get a good one. You can get on a good project as a SWE 3. It's rare, but it does happen. It helps if you're in Mt. View, if you have other offers, and if you have a good manager.
[+] [-] seanmcdirmid|13 years ago|reply
As anyone who has submitted a paper written in Word to a technical conference knows: bad kerning over two columns will set your paper back at least one letter grade. Must use Latex instead. (I'm sure he is just joking, but it comes up...)
[+] [-] pseut|13 years ago|reply
[1] on the off chance that the term is not widely known on HN, job applicants for academic positions (in Economics, at least) send a draft of an (almost always) unpublished paper as the main component of their job application.
[+] [-] michaelochurch|13 years ago|reply
Oh boy. Don't even get me started on broken processes. When managers can use secret calibration scores to blacklist reports and keep them captive for 5+ years on undesirable projects, what else should it be called exactly?
Matt Welsh was hired above the Real Googler Line, so he has a rosy-eyed view. He's also comparing it against the nightmare of post-PhD academic politics. He also seems, from his account, like a decent guy. He hasn't seen yet what Google turns into for young engineers who don't have external credibility yet, and who end up with managers who aren't decent people... It'd be interesting to read his opinion after he sees that.
If you're above the RGL (~10%) you have the credibility to represent your contribution to the company independently. Peer review gets you promotions, managers are a higher-ranking peer and can help you a little more, but you have enough independent credibility above the RGL that you can't be extorted. If you're below RGL, you have the extortive manager-as-SPOF nonsense of typical rank cultures, and you get none of the upsides of working at Google.
Also, I think the TLM concept is broken. The whole reason closed allocation is a fistful of fail is that, rather than resolving the conflict of interest between project leadership and people management (the best thing for a person might be to change projects) it tends to double down on that.
The only part of people management (aside from HR, at the company's interface) that has any value for 120+ IQers doing convex work is the mentoring aspect... which ought to be project-independent.
[+] [-] Googler123|13 years ago|reply
If you are performing well and get poor calibration scores (which aren't secret), then that's something to bring up with HR and your manager's manager. The sad truth is that your poor calibration scores were an accurate reflection of your poor performance (I'll spare you the embarrassment of posting evidence of this). Your inability to transfer teams was a combination of that and the fact that it's almost impossible to transfer teams before you've spent at least 1.5 years on that team.
[+] [-] sheri|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] codeonfire|13 years ago|reply
The fact is that from day one it's mental and political combat. Everyone is telling everyone else they are a "lead" or building a team, or whatever. Titles are meaningless as anyone can get their title changed to Sr tech lead or some acronym. If you are a software engineer and want to call yourself a lead manager all you have to do is blog about it and hope someone believes you. All that matters is what you know, what you can do, and can you manipulate perceptions enough to get credit for your own work. Having "influence" just means you've found some people that don't understand these thing yet or you got some dirt.
[+] [-] archangel_one|13 years ago|reply
Have you worked at Google? My observation has been that most people here do want to do the coding. Which is not to say that they don't want to be in charge and establish credibility as well, but the culture is much more biased towards engineering than at many other companies.
[+] [-] napoleoncomplex|13 years ago|reply
What you're describing sounds pretty terrible, is that based on personal experience with Google?
[+] [-] larsberg|13 years ago|reply
Seriously? When I was at Microsoft, it was like "hot potato" to have to give up a coveted dev role and take on dev lead responsibilities. In particular, being a first-level manager was treated as a sort of curse with all of the worst bits --- not enough time to still work on big things (e.g. as a manager, I too owned logging for a while), but not high enough in the org to justify being full-time on hiring, coordinating teams, and fighting for 0.9 offices / headcount instead of 0.75.
Which sounds dumb until you're on a team with 0.9 offices / headcount and you see the productivity soar, for reasons I never bothered to quantify (if free fruit on Friday => productivity, just buy the fruit; don't ask).
[+] [-] acchow|13 years ago|reply
In engineering-centric companies, coding is necessary for credibility.
[+] [-] michaelochurch|13 years ago|reply
Insightful and mostly correct, but this is a false dichotomy.
There are a lot of people who want to write code and do the real work, but end up in the nonsense you described-- they spend 50+ percent of their time extorting their weaker peers (for credit and image enhancement) and slugging their equals-- because, as you said, they need to win on the credibility market before the company will trust them with real work.
Corporate software engineers are a defeated tribe who work for managers. The nightmare of being seriously underpaid while writing boring software with a boss who thinks he can do your job in half the time, even though he hasn't written a line of code in 10 years (or ever) and has forgotten (or never knew) how hard it is... well, that's the norm for most software engineers.
You're talking about the MacLeod Sociopaths (people who hack credibility markets and rape the system) and possibly the Clueless (middle-managers in the classic depiction; but most startups are Clueless even down to the bottom, because Losers get culled in tough cultures). But there are also the Technocrats (socially positive subset of the so-called, and misnamed, Sociopaths) who bludgeon the credibility market because they have to, but have a genuine desire to do the hard work-- writing code, clarifying ideas, creating. We're not all prima donnas.
[+] [-] ttrreeww|13 years ago|reply