It seems to me that if you're a dev that wants to work at Google, sending them a cover letter and resume is a waste of time. Google can afford to pick almost anybody. You've got to stand out. I'd imagine that it's probably best to become an active contributor to an OSS project that has a lot of impact or create a startup that could potentially target Google's market and hope to be acquired. Obviously the startup route is much riskier, but more rewarding. Regardless, it seems that if you want to work at Google, you've got to make a name for yourself.
Google's hiring process is notoriously bureaucratic, and one of the things that they ask you when you make it into compensation committee is "Do you know any Google employees?" It feels great to say "Well, when I worked on chromium, I interacted with [name], [name], and [name]."
You should also know that they're super cool about letting you get into the AUTHORS file, you just have to write good code that they can use, and they'll insist that you add yourself as part of the patch.
Talk about a Hacker News bubble. Are you really suggesting that if you want to work at Google you should start your own start-up? This seems ridiculous to me (I agree with the rest of the post though)
No, I must of misrepresented my thoughts. I stated that that was one way, not the way. It seems that with the size of Google today, and their notoriously strict hiring guidelines; based upon my observations, Google hires high-profile developers or they are acquired through a startup.
> based upon my observations, Google hires high-profile developers or they are acquired through a startup
Sorry but I dont think that's even close to being accurate. Google makes thousands of hires each year, a vast majority of them will be through normal hiring processes (from their competitors or college) and definitely not acquisitions or high profile. You only hear about the acquisitions and high profile hires because normal non-high profile devs hires do not make good news/blog articles. Creating a startup in hope of getting bought out by Google is like wishing to win the lottery.
Sorry, didn't mean to imply that you thought that, you did not misrepresent your thoughts: it was my post that was confusing. Nonetheless you do present starting a start-up as a serious option to consider for people who want to work at Google.
This is a classic example of observation bias. We literally only observe the prominent cases, but forget that the vast majority of Google hires (and there are thousands of them) are NOT "high-profile" developers or startup founders.
They've emailed me twice now asking me to interview. A guy named Dan McCarthy. I said no at first (back in 2007) but I said yes this time (just a few weeks ago). I made it by the first phone screening. They asked really simple questions. I'll have a more formal engineering interview next week.
I think they'd get more high-quality folks if they let people work from home. I'd rather not move to Pittsburgh or NYC, but would like to work on Google stuff. It really interests me.
Edit: I never sent them a resume or initiated the conversation (they called me both times). Also, I don't do start-ups and am not a big open source contributor. I do write and publish code that I find interesting, but that's it. I write code because it's fun (it's a hobby), not because I want to be rich or famous.
What does that mean, really? Look at the product and share your insights. Do you have smart suggestions on how to improve the product? If not, you may have picked the wrong dream job.
I believe PageRank isn't as important as it was 10 years ago. Besides, you don't need explicit links to create links. Off the top of my head, the following could be used to link resumes: keywords, references, educational institutions, co-authors on papers, and former employers. All these can be extracted fairly well from a document as structured as a resume, and then you can go wild with link analysis.
At the very least, it would allow you to filter the chaff, and enough care could be given to a dataset as small as 75,000 documents to take care of preprocessing, some manual curation, etc. and yield some decent results. If you wanted to, you could even compute PageRank scores in R on your laptop for a dataset that small (and that would probably be the only computationally intensive part of it, after POS tagging and ML model fitting).
As a bonus, the effort would go a long way to help your recruiting in the future.
PageRank hasn't been their main algorithm for years. PageRank remains prominent because Google was so open to talk about their ranking algorithm in the early years (to be fair, Messrs Brin and Page were PhD students at the time). They won't make that mistake again.
That's an interesting idea actually. Assuming that the people you work with represent a graph (say something like Linkedin) and everybody's resumes were online, a traversal of that graph might yield other good employees.
Funny and I see your point. However, the catch is that treating them as merely documents rather than human beings and also thinking you could whip up a codable algorithm to rank them would be exactly the sort of mistake I'd most expect Google to make.
To give just the easiest and most recent example of how that approach breaks: the increasing deluge of content farms and SEO spam in Google results. Many folks consider that non-optimal but Google defends it because their data "tells them" it's optimal. Now picture that approach with people. Rank things by some measurement and only things that measure well by that metric will rank high, shutting you out of great opportunities. The false negative, etc. Related anti-pattern is the concept of Local Maxima.
> but Google defends it because their data "tells them" it's optimal.
C'mon, I'm not one to usually come rushing to Google's aid, but from Matt Cutts' comments on HN and recent blog posts on the official blog is seems to me that they are working hard on this problem, which would imply they don't think the status quo is optimal.
I understand. However, I've seen public comment by Google folks that basically conveyed the idea that it was optimal -- by certain standards. Granted, they have many people and opinions can differ and vary over time.
Secondly, it should be possible to do something as simple as filter out obvious content farm sites in under a week tops. Or give all users a quick and easy to do it. Perhaps have a default blacklist of known content farmers, and then give users the option to remove things from the blacklist when doing their own searches. You might be dealing with a huge company if something as simple as this takes 20k employees more than a week, tops, to put into production. And I'm being generous with the week estimate, because it could be done even faster than that under more agile conditions. And a 'default blacklist of known content farmers' is not even the only solution which could be implemented quickly, you could also do something like add another variable to the PageRank algorithm which has a down weighing effect on any page under a domain known to be a content farmer/spammer. Supposedly, they are already doing this (IIRC) but again, the basic idea could be implemented and put into production quickly, if it hasn't already.
Someone said to me once that a small number of people want to build a great company. A larger number of people want to work at great companies. I'd wager that (more and more) Google is less attractive to the former and more attractive to the latter.
I think you're thinking of Zawinski's Netscape resignation:
"you can divide our industry into two kinds of people: those who want to go work for a company to make it successful, and those who want to go work for a successful company."
Google is a great company. It's also a big company ($200B market cap, 20,000+ employees). Given their size, it's a tautology that they'll appeal to the larger number of people who want to work at a great company rather than the people who want to build a great company.
People who want to work at a great company are (likely) unwilling to make radical changes to improve things. People who want to build a great company would be willing to automate their jobs away, sure that they will find more work to do. The trained employee, that performs a specific task with direct supervision will resist new technology that diminishes their importance.
my brother poster points out it's a false dichotomy, but it's fair to say we all fall in some percentage in one category and the rest in the other. No one would be comfortable showing up to work tomorrow obsolete. No one would be happy never growing in their work.
People who want to work at a great company are (likely) unwilling to make radical changes to improve things.
IBM hired Ted Codd, AT&T Ken Thomson, while Google is currently Rob Pike's employer. Clearly you would not expect all employees to do basic research (not even at the Institute for Advanced Study!), but I think we ain't seen nothing yet in terms of Google's research legacy. (The kind of which you won't find in a start up.)
Would Ted Codd tell his boss to cut the database division? It turned out to be a win for IBM, but if the writing was on the wall, would he seriously cut his own division and go work on something else? There are thousands of second best-second brightest that think they're amazing. They might make something cool someday, they might not. Do you expect them to give up their budget in a bad year?
I'm really impressed. This is especially interesting given all the TechCrunch type talk of Google falling being Facebook in terms of talent. I'm sure there are a lot of defections (people do seek pre-IPO options after all) but clearly Google still has a strong pull for talent.
I think this shows they truly are doing things right w.r.t treating employees right and creating a great environment to work.
It's funny. The main reason I'd want to work at Google is to have access to their scale of infrastructure.
OTOH, they'd have to be insane to just give random new hires free access to their infrastructure.
So, if you've got some computing problems that would benefit from scale or data, maybe the best route is to get a proof-of-concept working on EC2, and then try to collaborate with Googlers.
This is distinct from the startup->Gacquisitionoogle route, since I'm more interested in projects than companies (except my on co.)
Random new hires have free access to their infrastructure, except for private user data. (For some reason, this always surprises people in interviews - I know I was surprised when my interviewer said "Oh, it's no big deal if you want to grab 2000 machines or so and run a MapReduce" - but it's not exactly confidential, most interviewers will tell you if you ask, and we basically think nothing of it.)
There are safeguards in place to make sure experimental jobs don't stomp on production critical ones.
In Europe at least, they seem to also actively look for people too. A recruiter contacted me via LinkedIn and suggested I apply. I got rejected after 3 telephone screens, the suggested working somewhere else for a year and to reapply. I can't see any particular reason I would have stood out and they didn't mention one.
Wow. I wonder if a recommendation from a Googler counts for even more than it used to under these conditions. If any of you Googlers have a sense of this, I'd be curious to hear what you think.
It typically does, particularly if they can speak directly to your work. To get an interview it's typically more important that you could be a really good fit for the exact job, too.
Wonder if it's related to all the recent news about Google paying millions to keep engineers on staff from defecting to Facebook. I would be tempted to work there if there was a million dollar RSU payout involved.
I also wonder why Google would announce such a thing. My take away from this is that it's pointless to apply, since there are too many applications. Do they want people to stop applying?
Those who got those counters were top contributers who had often been neglected by Google's compensational and promotional structure. Most Googlers are not good enough to work for Facebook.
The vast, vast majority of these applicants have no shot of working for Google, much less of being then poached by Facebook.
I think they want more (better applicants) to apply. They came to my campus giving out free t-shirts not 2 months ago, and we're not a top-10 or anything.
If working for/with Google is the goal, I feel like it would be much more worthwhile and possibly significantly increase the chances of working for/with them to create a startup in an area you know Google is looking. Much easier said than done, but something tells me this approach would be much more likely to get their attention... plus, you'd probably get a hefty chunk of change should you join forces.
I always figured this would be the path I'd take - found a successful startup and get bought by Google. Instead, the startup floundered and I got hired by Google anyway.
Regardless of how tough it is to get into Google, founding a successful startup is still tougher. Plus, if you're only looking to get bought by Google, you'll be overlooking many other options, and will decrease your negotiating leverage accordingly. If you want to work at Google, apply to work at Google, and if you want to found a startup, found a startup. But don't confuse your motivations for the two of them, because you'll be doing a disservice both to your startup and to your chances of working at Google.
All very true. I actually meant to mention something along those lines but it's been a long day... I should have mentioned that being successful with your own startup is overall more important because you are definitely not guaranteed an exit/acquisition. But keeping exits/acquisitions in mind while creating your infrastructure will greatly increase your ease and your chances of expansion and/or acquisition.
