awaythrow101's comments

FWIW I don't think they have Big N clients yet, though they do have e.g. Twitter and Lyft on there. Google is still remarkably old school with interviews: Google Doc for screens, whiteboard for onsites. (Although I've heard that's recently changing and they're allowing laptops for onsites, and are doing more onsite loops remotely through Hangouts.)

And technically speaking you can use it for unlimited practice once you get in, but you have to schedule way further in advance once you're past their guaranteed interviews, and there are fewer available time slots.

Echoed. I got into their system and was able to get some real interviews through the platform as well.

When you get in, they give you three "guaranteed" interviews that you can schedule essentially any hour of the day with at least 24 hours notice. I suspect that they pay their interviewers for these interviews (hence the guaranteed nature of them), but don't quote me on that. After those three interviews, your available interview slots drop off dramatically; currently there is a two week wait period. If you do well enough (appears to be top 10%), they will start acting as a recruiter; you can have real tech screens through their platform anonymously, and "unmask" and go onsite if the screen goes well.

I'm not sure what the filter is for letting people in but I suspect it's fairly manual right now, especially if they're paying interviewers for the three guaranteed slots people get. Keep in mind that Gainlo charges $100+ per interview for the same service. I actually got better feedback from interviewers on interviewing.io than the one interview I did from Gainlo (YMMV of course).

Google remote onsite on Friday!

But wouldn't it require you to find how the target image's particular watermark was warped? None of the other watermarks will have precisely the same warping parameters as that image's watermark. You could attempt to de-warp the watermark in place on the image, but that would seem to be likely to warp the image as well, no?

To be clear, I'm completely fine with a commute. I thought that was obvious when I said suburbs. Hell, my current commute is ~35 minutes. How is it that Berkeley is apparently so cheap while being that close?

She manages an after school drop-in center in a rural area, part time. I want her to be happy, working or not; I think at the moment she likes staying at home with our daughter, at least for now. I'm not sure how transferable it is. This sort of thing tends to pay absolute bottom dollar unless you have a Masters in Social Work or Masters in Education which she does not.

My wife doesn't have much in the way of skills, and I fully acknowledge that childcare would consume most / all of her income if she was working (that was in my post originally but I had to cut it down to get under the 2K character limit).

The weather does sound really nice, and we own our two Priuses outright. It's sounding really unaffordable though.

I would love a remote gig, assuming it was as an FTE with benefits (healthcare being important for family and all). My wife's company cannot afford to provide any benefits whatsoever.

It just seems like recently, the move is toward in-office employment with little to no work from home. I've talked to a handful of companies I'd love to work with, but I'd be willing to bet that they would all balk at remote employment.

I've been leaning toward that perspective recently.

I actually had a remote job in the pipeline but they ended up not being able to pay a commensurate salary or benefits (i.e. it was a significant pay cut from what I'm making now).

At least this process has got me back to studying data structures and algorithms again, so perhaps I can interview at Google Pittsburgh again and try for a better outcome this time. Any tips for finding a good remote position?

From my understanding, the recruiter has the option of outright rejecting you after your interview without passing it on to the hiring committee. Generally if your feedback is even vaguely positive, they'll pass it on though, so if you get rejected by the recruiter, it's usually pretty cut and dry.

This may vary depending on the office involved.

Search for Google Foobar if you're interested in an alternative way to get in contact with a Google recruiter. I was essentially blackholed until I went through Foobar (understandably so since I lack a CS degree; note that this means they may be interested without one). Be aware that they may take upwards of a year to contact you though.

Non-technical direct management.

This tends to include many of the things listed by others here, like not having estimates accepted at face value (because they don't understand development), lack of communication of business goals (because they believe developers just implement, they don't understand "product"), lack of consideration of developers' ideas (see last), deadlines without input from development (because developers will inflate their estimates)... But for some reason, developers can't just learn management, they have to find someone "skilled" from the outside, technical understanding be damned.

Thanks for the feedback. We are a software company (web and mobile), but we work in the broadcast industry where things can be a little more old-fashioned.

Ultimately I want to run my own company eventually, and I feel like management experience would be a beneficial and necessary thing to have in that case. I worry that remaining a developer (even with an inflated title) will make it look like I'm standing still in my career.

I think I just need to bite the bullet and have the conversation, at least once this project is finished.

You and me both.

How does an individual contributor (specifically in a startup) get promoted to engineering management?

My company is specifically looking to hire a PMP certified manager (externally) to oversee the five person dev team, and there's no way I could get that certification because it requires five years of management experience. Is it worth having a conversation to see if this requirement can be overcome?