6 ms·

Hi, downvoters who aren't commenting. What exactly is your objection to this post?

PhantomGremlin 10y ago
I didn't downvote, but I'll take a shot at answering. Your post had a touch of condescension, sort of: "well I work at Google and you don't, so I obviously know better than you ...". Kind of reminds me of this HN comment and rejoinder: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079 Did you win the Putnam? Yes, I did. You generally don't know the history of the people you're interacting with here on HN, so it's not always appropriate to act so smug about where you work.
- mwpmaybe 10y ago
  That thread is amazing. My favorite part is the inventors of Tarsnap and Dropbox basically saying to each other, "oh hey, I'm working on the same thing as you!"
  - cperciva 10y ago
    That's a bit of a mischaracterization. Drew said that he was working on the same thing as me; I didn't respond, because my response would have been "no, you're not; I'm building a secure backup tool" and I didn't want to antagonize people any further.
ocdtrekkie 10y ago
Basically "just take my word for it, I'm at Google".
- asuffield 10y ago
  Would you prefer that I not participate at all?
  - closed 10y ago
    Downvoting is a form of feedback. If you are participating, then hopefully you are open to the idea that people could give you negative feedback. You can still participate, but if you keep participating in the same way, then I'm guessing you'll continue to get downvoted. (I didn't downvote you)
  - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
    No, but you need to be aware when you are defending your employer that you are obviously a biased participant in the conversation, and people will generally look at you as such. (Not disclosing where you work isn't a good idea either, it's blatantly obvious and easy to identify biased discussion members.) And you therefore need to focus on things you can clearly demonstrate and/or prove. Which is good advice for all discussion, really, but especially when people are going to be evaluating your commentary with more skepticism. If you know someone is wrong due to confidential data, there's a couple ways of tackling that. Saying you know they're wrong because of info they can't see is generally not a productive way to correct someone, because nobody can really be sure you're being honest, or see what you mean. You will change no opinions with that approach. However, you may be able to use public data to at least demonstrate that someone is probably wrong. Quality of candidates and success of hiring practices tends to be pretty subjective, mind you, and it's going to be hard to provide hard evidence of it. Long term success of a company would probably be the best metric. (Of course, which Google has in spades.) Though the counter to that would be many of their more recent stumbles that show that trend may be coming to an end. As an additional question, apart from the rest of my comment: You've said you're an SRE. Do you have a hand in hiring at Google, perhaps for a team under your management?
    - Noseshine 10y ago
      > Of course, which Google has in spades. Or do they? The vast majority of their income still is from the search business alone. http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/020515/business-google.asp http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/020515/busine...
      - 10y ago
throwaway36912 10y ago
I am also a googler, and the attitude you had definitely felt weird to me. Since you asked for a proof before from another googler / xgoogler, here is mine: echo "Your Manager Name Here" > file; shasum file b8de53741d9e64711d4f47dd3a409230fc242fac I made 30+ interviews before i got bored, for the reasons explained by ludable@. That's a personal choice, but i didn't buy much into asking useless and weird data structure questions. The attitude interviewers had wrt the "false negative" was also really artificial, and also felt elitist. You could really feel that when interviewers were thinking of/discussing new questions, and you could feel how "proud" they were when they found something not even remotely relevant to their day to day job. I have been at google more than you have, that might be a factor in my thoughts, too.

I didn't downvote, but I'll take a shot at answering. Your post had a touch of condescension, sort of: "well I work at Google and you don't, so I obviously know better than you ...". Kind of reminds me of this HN comment and rejoinder: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079 Did you win the Putnam? Yes, I did. You generally don't know the history of the people you're interacting with here on HN, so it's not always appropriate to act so smug about where you work.

mwpmaybe 10y ago
That thread is amazing. My favorite part is the inventors of Tarsnap and Dropbox basically saying to each other, "oh hey, I'm working on the same thing as you!"
- cperciva 10y ago
  That's a bit of a mischaracterization. Drew said that he was working on the same thing as me; I didn't respond, because my response would have been "no, you're not; I'm building a secure backup tool" and I didn't want to antagonize people any further.

ocdtrekkie 10y ago

Basically "just take my word for it, I'm at Google".

asuffield 10y ago
Would you prefer that I not participate at all?
- closed 10y ago
  Downvoting is a form of feedback. If you are participating, then hopefully you are open to the idea that people could give you negative feedback. You can still participate, but if you keep participating in the same way, then I'm guessing you'll continue to get downvoted. (I didn't downvote you)
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  No, but you need to be aware when you are defending your employer that you are obviously a biased participant in the conversation, and people will generally look at you as such. (Not disclosing where you work isn't a good idea either, it's blatantly obvious and easy to identify biased discussion members.) And you therefore need to focus on things you can clearly demonstrate and/or prove. Which is good advice for all discussion, really, but especially when people are going to be evaluating your commentary with more skepticism. If you know someone is wrong due to confidential data, there's a couple ways of tackling that. Saying you know they're wrong because of info they can't see is generally not a productive way to correct someone, because nobody can really be sure you're being honest, or see what you mean. You will change no opinions with that approach. However, you may be able to use public data to at least demonstrate that someone is probably wrong. Quality of candidates and success of hiring practices tends to be pretty subjective, mind you, and it's going to be hard to provide hard evidence of it. Long term success of a company would probably be the best metric. (Of course, which Google has in spades.) Though the counter to that would be many of their more recent stumbles that show that trend may be coming to an end. As an additional question, apart from the rest of my comment: You've said you're an SRE. Do you have a hand in hiring at Google, perhaps for a team under your management?
  - Noseshine 10y ago
    > Of course, which Google has in spades. Or do they? The vast majority of their income still is from the search business alone. http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/020515/business-google.asp http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/020515/busine...
    - 10y ago

throwaway36912 10y ago

I am also a googler, and the attitude you had definitely felt weird to me. Since you asked for a proof before from another googler / xgoogler, here is mine: echo "Your Manager Name Here" > file; shasum file b8de53741d9e64711d4f47dd3a409230fc242fac I made 30+ interviews before i got bored, for the reasons explained by ludable@. That's a personal choice, but i didn't buy much into asking useless and weird data structure questions. The attitude interviewers had wrt the "false negative" was also really artificial, and also felt elitist. You could really feel that when interviewers were thinking of/discussing new questions, and you could feel how "proud" they were when they found something not even remotely relevant to their day to day job. I have been at google more than you have, that might be a factor in my thoughts, too.