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Google Tops 100 Best Places To Work
inetsee writes "Fortune Magazine's annual '100 Best Companies to Work For' list is out, and Google topped the list in their debut appearance. Some highlights of the benefits of working for Google that caught my eye were the free gourmet meals and the massages. The chance to spend 20% of your time working on your own personal projects also sounds very appealing. Of course, with resumes rolling in at the rate of thousands a day, the competition is fierce."
How come we never hear about that?
I haven't met any Google folk, only heard of those who've been interviewed but I have met some Apple folk: They remind me a lot about what I hated from a large company.
:P
I'm sure it's a great place but the fanboys would never say anything negative. They can't. The brainwashing starts early
I've worked for a Fortune 40 company and a small business.
If you are looking for benefits specifically, most starups and small companies can not afford top-tier health insurance and dental insurance, and usually you have to kick in a whole lot for your percentage.
Google appears to be somewhere in the 91st to last range in terms of pay.
Those free lunches must really keep their employees happy..
try doing that as a vegan/veggie and you'll see that having a vegan/veggie-friendly cafeteria onsite would be great.
In my opinion the only big minuses with working for google are that
#1 it's in the valley (plenty of nicer places to live in the US/Canada, of course if you live to work this doesn't really matter)
#2 everybody and their dog is applying to work there, which means that the odds of the company culture deteriorating are not insignificant (not to mention that the bigger the company the more likely that it will become a series of fiefdoms and so on)
#3 given #2 the interview process is way way way way too convoluted and drawn out, but that's just to be expected with the sheer volume of resumes they receive: the downside is that it will turn away a lot of really qualified folks, since in general people at a certain level of competency/employability won't feel like putting up with that (since on average they'll have plenty of other companies vying for their services and honestly, you wouldn't want to hire somebody that's just going through the motions for a few months at their current job just waiting for your call, would you? that wouldn't be exactly the type of ethics you ought to go for IMHO).
-- the cake is a lie
Agreed. I've been working mostly for big corporations over the past decade, and I was ready to slit my own throat, so hard did it suck. Now I work at a 35 person music exporter, I'm actually TRUSTED to do my job without supervision, KPIs, etc. It's flexible, everyone knows everyone, we drink together, work together, play together. The pay's about 20% more than a big company would ever pay me, and I haven't worn shoes to work once this summer. Google sounds awesome, but frankly, I like being the nerd at work. I don't need to be surrounded by them.
Are you certain of that? I havent been near the Microsoft campus in over a year, but my friend who currently works there insists that they still have them.
Personally I can see the logic behind free food more easily than I can see the logic behind free drinks. I wont stay at work an extra hour for a coke, but I will stay if I can get a free meal by doing so.
Good location?
Apple is located in Cupertino, CA, in the middle of Silicon Valley. It is not a "good location". Silicon Valley is endless, boring, ugly suburban sprawl. You'd hope that it would at least be cheap to live in such a crappy place, but it's not, cost of living is very high. I know because that's where I am living right now, and I'm moving as soon as my lease is up. I don't know if you've ever lived here or not, but I think lots of people just think that it must be cool to live in California where you're near the ocean and it never snows...
Who owns the IP for the work produced during this 20% side project time?
I worked at Google and no one around me was doing the 20% thing. People was busy and stressed enough working long hours as to add another project on top. The 20% open source project is just a myth.
1) Industry leader
It's nice working for companies that are arguably industry leaders. That's why you'll always have a ton of people interviewing for Microsoft, Apple, Dell, Intel, Amazon, etc. Those big names, regardless of how you perceive the companies themselves, still look awfully good on resumes. And chances are, they have pretty darn good pay as well. There's also a good chance that the projects you will work on, have a pretty large scope. For many, it's great to say you worked on "Product X", even though your actual contribution may be rather small. It's still better than saying you worked on "Product Y" that no one has even heard of, or ever will.
2) Interesting projects
Before Google was at the top, and before it could offer all those really great benefits, you still had a bunch of upstart software engineers wanting to work there, because the projects were really interesting. Even if the benefits weren't there, and Google wasn't quite at the top yet, you'd still have engineers very interested in that space. Sure, not as many, but the people you would get could arguably be the best, since they're actually excited about the work.
In contrast, you've got a ton of smaller companies that could offer fantastic benefits, but if you're missing out on the above two things
-- jchenx
Here is a link to the WWW site of the book
The Company mode seems to have changed somewhat since the early pre-IPO days, but if I was able to replay my life I'd certainly try very hard to get on the Google payroll. "The Google Way" seems to have replaced the old "HP Way".
my basement
Have you ever lived anywhere else?
Silicon Valley is not paradise, but it's damn nice. The absolute worst thing about this area is the absurd housing costs.
Yeah, it's suburban sprawl-y, but the mountains and palm trees and beautiful weather more than make up for it. As you well know, it will be over 60 and sunny again tomorrow. At the beginning of January, for god's sake. There is a reason people want to live here and are willing to put up with the housing costs and taxes. It's fucking beautiful all the time. Mountains all over the place for hiking and biking, plus you can always head up to the Sierra for skiing. Tahoe could be a (long) day trip. And you know what? Firms down here pay enough to make it worth your while at least to rent, if not buy.
Where else would you live? The places that are cheap to live suck ass. I'm sorry, I won't dig my car out of the snow 3 months out of the year.
I moved here from Seattle and would fucking NEVER move back. The housing is almost as absurd but without matching salaries, traffic is an order of magnitude worse, and the weather just sucks ass. Seriously. The rain is novel for a few weeks, but after a winter you realize you never want to go months without seeing the sun again. Sure you can do outdoor activities, but I find the valley to be a lot more conducive to it, just because you can never find a dry day in the Northwest, and if you ever try to plan an activity for one of those days, it will rain anyway.
I can only imagine living on the West Coast, and between San Diego, Santa Barbara, the bay, Portland and Seattle, I'll take the bay area hands down...
The interview process is not very fun at all. After being selected for a phone interview they make you fill out a self evaluation form. You better not fill out a 10 in any area unless you wrote the book (because they have the guys that wrote the book - and they will call you). I ended up doing 3 phone interviews before I was sent an email saying that the position I was applying for had already been filled (I got in the process a little late). Depending on the position you are going for there may be quite a few more phone interviews followed by a very tough in-house interview (over 10 interviews in 2 days).
If you are in a field where you can work for google, I would try to get an interview with them. If you get it, great! If not, it will make most any other interview you have feel easy.
/* Insert some overused slashdot quote here */
> The interview process is not very fun at all.
Oh No! You actually get asked interesting questions by people who you might end up working alongside! How terrible that must be for you. Far better to waste a day being interviewed by a panel of five or six clueless managers who haven't the faintest idea what your job would actually entail if you can lie most convincingly.
I can see just how dreadful that must be, to have a rigorous test of your competence.
BTW, we tend not to have more than five in-person interviews these days.
I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, which as far as suburbs go, are better than those of the valley. Why? Because they surround Chicago, which is a real city. Instead of masses of people driving in essentially random directions to work every day, a truly significant portion of the rush-hour traffic is relieved by commuter rail going downtown. Why does that matter? Because it means you don't have fucking 8-lane surface streets every half mile or so. The only roads that actually go anywhere in the valley are wide, busy streets with narrow sidewalks. It's a very hard place to find decent running routes, and as a runner, that's really important to me. Running through the snow beats the hell out of standing waiting for a light at the San Tomas Expressway. But it's more than just running; in the valley you just don't see people out walking, just people inside cars. It's really disturbing, distancing, anti-social.
The bay area offers many fine areas to take weekend trips. Day-to-day I'd really rather live in a real city.
At any rate, if the tech industry in the valley started to seriously decline there wouldn't be much left in the valley (think Flint, MI after the GM plant closing; the valley is not tied to one company but it depends on one industry). Just a bunch of expensive houses that nobody could afford. Chicago has seen the rise and fall of many industries within its borders and yet every time an industry has fallen the city has not declined. New York, also, though I've never really been there... I don't know so much about the cities on the west coast, though I'd probably find lots of them much more appealing than the valley (including San Francisco, which is not really tied to the valley in the way that many cities are meaningfully tied to their surrounding areas... how many people live in Sunnyvale and work in San Francisco?).
Apple is located in Cupertino, CA, in the middle of Silicon Valley. It is not a "good location". Silicon Valley is endless, boring, ugly suburban sprawl.
Cupertino is an urban oasis compared to the gargantuan office parks of South San Francisco, where Genentech is located. It took half of my lunch break just to walk from my office building across the parking lot to the office building with the sandwich shop that is similar to a concession you might find in an airport. There are tens of thousands of people working in this area and none of the usual amenities you would find in an area with tens of thousands of people. The company where I work has a break room with video games. Very cool, eh? It's a small concession to the fact that this is in fact a very uncool location. There is *nothing* in this area but huge, soulless office buildings and parking lots.
Just a rebuttal based on my experience...
When I graduated college, three places were chomping at the bit to hire me: Company X (a fortune 50 company), LLNL and one-of-those-UCs. To make a long story short, I took a moderate pay cut and went with the UC, expecting an atmosphere similar to LLNL (my previous internship, and managed by UC) only slightly more relaxed. It was a mistake.
Having only a bachelor's degree, I was the least educated person on staff. Despite being the only person on staff who had ever taken a product through to release, and despite being hired to bring a web product to public release, my opinion was worth practically nothing. When we were 9 months from release and I said "we need a management plan right now or we're never going hit that target, and we need to start defining what features will be at release" I was told by the PI that my comment was "inappropriate and premature." Seriously, I walk in 9 months from product release and they hadn't even defined requirements. We clashed over many other things. For the first time in my life I started having stress-related health problems - working at a University!
6 weeks into my UC employ, both Company X and LLNL made poaching offers. Both of them offered nearly 50% over what the UC was paying me. For purely financial reasons I went with Company X (too expensive to live near LLNL). Not a day goes by that I regret my choice (to leave UC, I still miss LLNL a little). The comment that got me censured at UC was actively encouraged at X. Focus on delivery dates that caused stress at UC, gets me recognition and bonuses at X. X is not perfect, there's still some bureaucratic nonsense, and I understand the area I'm in has a glass ceiling and I will have to transfer elsewhere in the company or stagnate at my current pay level. But all that is insignificant compared to "we want you to deliver this product in 9 months; and we're not really sure what the product will do!"
So my experience with the university was: The pay was not competitive, the stress was unreasonably high, my first project was a sinking ship with no bilge pump, and I could not make it to anything resembling "director" unless I had at least a masters degree (which is going to happen anyway, but still).
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)