8 ms·
Jobs at Google (1999)
- kerng 8y agoBack when Google was really cool! Who got hired into some of these positions?
- devilmoon 8y agoI'm guessing they either left or are millionaires many times over by now and don't surf HN
- Bjartr 8y agoWhy wouldn't a millionaire read tech news and discussion, especially if they were previously interested in it?
- nl 8y agoWell, https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=paul https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=paul for one (although I think it may have been a year later)
- f055 8y agoWhich is funny, because actually, their business model was never "really cool", just "evil" ;)
- sambeau 8y agoGoogle were not "evil" for a long time after this. They really were a force for good in the world for a long time. I have never admired a large company so much as I did the Google of the early 2000s. Youthful, gifted, moral, crazily ambitious, constantly doing things I thought impossible… The "evil" only really crept in once they started to take over all of the world's advertising.
- scarface74 8y agoSo they were “not evil” as long as they were being funded by investors and didn’t have a self sustaining business plan...
- taneq 8y agoWhat was it, again, that we refer to as "the root of all evil"?
- scarface74 8y agoIt’s the love of money....
- fenwick67 8y agoThis is a common pattern that companies follow; make a good product now, make money later. Many products become crappy and companies go sour when they turn this corner.
- scarface74 8y agoIf a profit seeking company makes a product that isn’t profitable, how can it be considered “good”?
- elcomet 8y agoWhat if it provides positive value for whole society ?
- fenwick67 8y agoI'm speaking from a user/customer's perspective.
- scarface74 8y agoEven from a user’s perspective, if a product is not profitable, it will either disappear or the company will have to do something user-hostile to achieve profitability. I like simple business models. I give the company money and they give me stuff.
- bluedino 8y agohttps://www.businessinsider.com/first-google-employees-where-are-they-now-2016-11 https://www.businessinsider.com/first-google-employees-where...
- octorian 8y agoI remember reading stories from the era following this (maybe the late 2000's) where getting hired by Google was incredibly difficult. As in "You're already a superstar, waste 6 months of your time going through a complicated and disorganized process, and still get rejected" difficult. Made me wonder how they actually managed to hire anyone, let alone thousands of employees.
- kleiba 8y agoI almost did. My professor would become Google's director of research and when she did she encouraged me to send a CV as I was about to finish my degree in C.S. I sent it but didn't get hired. Maybe I was just not Google material (i.e.: not good enough) but the official answer I got was that they were focussing on hiring U.S. residents at that point which I wasn't.
- Sileni 8y agoIt was also harder to hire outside of the US back then, so the latter may be more likely.
- flal_ 8y ago"The only Chef job with stock options!"
- mbrumlow 8y ago> This means we base employment decisions exclusively on our current business needs and the given merit of a candidate. We encourage excellence at all levels in our organization, and are not influenced by race, color, gender, sexual orientation, age, handicap, religion, or any other factor irrelevant to doing a great job. Not anymore eh?
- jeandejean 8y agoWhat do you mean?
- pure-awesome 8y agoRather than being neutral towards minorities / ignoring those aspects, they are now explicitly aiming to increase their diversity. https://diversity.google/ https://diversity.google/ The original comment was also probably a reference to the "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber" memo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_Chamber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_Ch...
- jeandejean 8y agoFunny that I get downvoted for asking precisions... That's HN now!
- tinkerteller 8y agoWhat about political orientation :).
- learnstats2 8y agoI suggest they were incorrect in their claim not to be influenced by those things - that's why they have a diversity problem now. Edited to add: In 1998 I probably would have read this and cheered it as a place where diversity was recognised and welcomed; in 2018 I read it as "we don't feel we have to do anything about our unconscious biases, which we're satisfied with"
- mbrumlow 8y ago
- godelmachine 8y agoFor Software Engineer, the first requirement - >> Several years of industry or hobby-based experience Key takeaway is “hobby-based”
- codingdave 8y ago2nd requirement: BS or MS in Computer Science or equivalent (Ph.D. a plus) So, sure, they were fine with hobby experience. But only if backed by solid CS chops.
- godelmachine 8y agoI am quite sure Google has always picked fellas without college degrees, provided they proved solid hobby based achievements.
- inerte 8y agoRarely, but yes. Overall Google was notorious for demanding degrees from top universities.
- godelmachine 8y agoThat's informative. Thanks! I had read an article where they elaborated how getting into Google is a lot more difficult than getting into Harvard.
- FrojoS 8y agoIts not. There rejection rate is higher, though. Still, a person who gets into Harvard is more likely to also get into Google than vice versa. Google gets more applications per open position, so they also have to reject more. Lots of people think "Why not give it a shot and apply at Google." Very few think the same about Harvard. Also, I would say it takes more effort to apply to a university. They will require essays, SAT/GRE and letters of recommendations for a valid application.
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago> 8. Free snacks and drinks This seems like a good reason not to work somewhere.
- joe-user 8y ago> This seems like a good reason not to work somewhere. I'm curious; why do you feel that way?
- adrianN 8y agoA workplace that offers free snacks, drinks, ping-pong tables and relaxation pods is set up to maximize your time spent in the office and encourages a culture that excludes people who value their time off work, for example because they have a family.
- aw4y 8y agonot necessarily. I don't do extratime at work, but still I enjoy free snacks, drinks, and so on
- joe-user 8y agoI've worked at plenty of places with free snacks/drinks (some even considered enterprise), but never a place that had ping pong tables or relaxation pods, so casually introducing those to the argument is a tough sell and changes the context enough so that I don't think the rest of your point still stands. What are your thoughts on a more fitting comparison, such as snacks/drinks provided vs. BYO/vending machine/go to the store?
- sacado2 8y agoNot OP but I'd say it's the shortest path to obesity, unless you have a very strong will. I never buy anything at the automated machines at my workplace, but when my colleagues bring some food for others to share, I always take some, for instance.
- stillworks 8y agoInterestingly, Requirements for Staffing Manager -BA/BS, MS or Ph.D. degree -Intelligence to interview the brightest in the world Ph.D for Staffing Manager ? I guess that's not the case currently ?
- jankey 8y agoI guess you're right, looks like she's 'only' got an MBA: https://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/people/person.asp?personId=506234&privcapId=874249 https://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/people/person.asp?...
- HarryHirsch 8y agoIt's reminiscent of that Zen anecdote in Raise High the Roof Beam: http://www-users.math.umn.edu/~brubaker/3592H/dukemu-salinger.pdf http://www-users.math.umn.edu/~brubaker/3592H/dukemu-salinge...
- nielsole 8y agoThat is a good story. I guess though they had their "A players hire B players hire C players" in mind.
- person_of_color 8y agoAh, the source of generational wealth
- dafrankenstein2 8y ago"The only Chef job with stock options!" wow who was that chef?
- redlorryyellow 8y agoCharlie Ayers I believe. Ended up with $26 million in stock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Ayers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Ayers
- mahmoudhossam 8y agoThat would be Charlie Ayers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Ayers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Ayers
- rocgf 8y agoFor the lazy - he's earned $26 million out of the stocks from Google.
- ddurkin 8y agoHe was super nice too. Would be serving food with a smile, greeting everyone. That was after he was a millionaire too.
- nerdnumerouno 8y agoReally? He smiled after he became a millionaire? Tell me more!
- godelmachine 8y agoDid he serve you? Was the food he prepared delicious? Did he ever say anything about his hiring process?
- HugoDaniel 8y ago"We encourage excellence at all levels in our organization, and are not influenced by race, color, gender, sexual orientation, age, handicap, religion, or any other factor irrelevant to doing a great job." Somewhere somehow things took a different turn... https://www.google.com/search?q=google+salary+discrimination https://www.google.com/search?q=google+salary+discrimination https://www.google.com/search?q=google+race+discrimination https://www.google.com/search?q=google+race+discrimination https://www.google.com/search?q=google+age+discrimination https://www.google.com/search?q=google+age+discrimination https://www.google.com/search?q=google+religion+discrimination https://www.google.com/search?q=google+religion+discriminati...
- myth_buster 8y ago> 10. Millions of people will use and appreciate your software What an understatement.
- Klathmon 8y agoIt's mind boggling the number of users that google products have. I couldn't imagine my code impacting 2 billion users, but the chrome team has to every goddamn day.
- santix 8y agoI like how you could send your resume as a text file but it better be ASCII.
- berbec 8y agoEBCDIC-ists!
- DonHopkins 8y agoAnd please don't email code samples through BITNET because each IBM SYSOP has their own different home brew set of EBCDIC<=>ASCII translation tables. (That's why C has trigraphs!)
- sicnus 8y agoMy wife interviewed then... She was an Admin Assistant for a CEO of a fairly large pharmaceutical company in the bay area. They asked her what she wanted to do and she responded she would and could perform quite well as an admin asst. They they said, "no, what do you want to do?" I think they were asking about pottery or saving whales or whatever. My wife didn't get it; nor the job. If only she could have said "Chase Rainbows". sigh (edit: words)
- ronilan 8y agoIt is from October 13 1999 not 1998. That’s after the 25M funding....
- chubot 8y agoSenior Operations Analyst -- Knowledge of scripting languages (Korn Shell, Perl and/or Python) Korn shell surprises me! I thought that Google was always a Linux shop, and never used any other Unix. Was Korn shell ever popular on Linux, as opposed to bash? I didn't use shell back in 1999, but I thought that bash was already popular back then. bash was apparently the first program that Linus Torvalds got running on Linux, back in the early 90's. I saw a bit of early Perl at Google when I worked there, but it was mostly all Python. I never saw any Korn shell, although I guess bash is compatible with Korn shell, so maybe that's what they meant. Or it was written by a recruiter who copied from other common job postings at the time.
- danmg 8y agopdksh was a thing. Using ksh meant they could use the odd solairs machine without having to maintain third party tools on them. There's a lot of overlap between bash and ksh scripting, but it's not 1:1.
- chintan 8y ago"The only Chef job with stock options!"