The One App You Need On Your Resume If You Want a Job At Google

HughPickens.com writes Jim Edwards writes at Business Insider that Google is so large and has such a massive need for talent that if you have the right skills, Google is really enthusiastic to hear from you — especially if you know how to use MatLab, a fourth-generation programming language that allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation of algorithms, creation of user interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other languages, including C, C++, Java, Fortran and Python. The key is that data is produced visually or graphically, rather than in a spreadsheet. According to Jonathan Rosenberg , Google's former senior vice president for product management, being a master of statistics is probably your best way into Google right now and if you want to work at Google, make sure you can use MatLab. Big data — how to create it, manipulate it, and put it to good use — is one of those areas in which Google is really enthusiastic about. The sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. When every business has free and ubiquitous data, the ability to understand it and extract value from it becomes the complimentary scarce factor. It leads to intelligence, and the intelligent business is the successful business, regardless of its size. Rosenberg says that "my quote about statistics that I didn't use but often do is, 'Data is the sword of the 21st century, those who wield it the samurai.'"

Comments

Statistics

[William Robinson]

Doesn't Jonathan Rosenberg know that 99% of the statistics is wrong, including this one?

Re:Statistics

[Sun]

Your comment is definitely part of the 82% rule.

It says that 75.3% of statistics people quote are made up on the spot.

Shachar

Shash-job-vertisement

[toQDuj]

Ugh, this reads like a job ad.

When I moved from Matlab to Python three years ago, I saw a massive speed increase of my methods. Also I no longer have to decide whether or not to shell out more cash for the statistics package, it's all there!

Looking back at my old Matlab code also makes me cringe a bit about the syntax of that language.

Re:Shash-job-vertisement

[solidraven]

I settled on a combination between Python and Perl (depending on if a lot of parsing is necessary or not). But when a lot of data is involved I go for the old fashioned choice of Fortran. It might not be pretty, and it sure as hell isn't the easiest language; but it beats the crap out of everything else when it comes to speed and convenience for parallelisation. People often forget that this is what Fortran was supposed to be good at, and it really is if you take the time to learn how to use it. Throw in Intel's Fortran compiler and a small cluster and you can chew through gigabytes of data at amazing speeds. The only thing it misses is visualisation tools, but you have a few good opensource dataset viewers, and you can always use Matlab or Python when necessary.

Re:Shash-job-vertisement

[StripedCow]

Looking back at my old Matlab code also makes me cringe a bit about the syntax of that language.

Then you haven't seen the "R" programming language yet.

Re:Shash-job-vertisement

[Theovon]

R syntax is a lot better. In Matlab, the dimensions of a 3D array are Y,X,Z. That's just one of the many papercuts that makes Matlab difficult and unintuitive to use. R makes a hell of a lot more sense to me.

That being said, R is also very slow. For one project, I used R and ended up having to use a supercomputer (I only needed a few hundred Opertons out of the 4096 available) to get all the work done in time. For a followup project, I rewrote it in C++ and reran all the same stuff in the same period on a Core 2 Duo. R is really that slow.

But then, R is an interpreted language, so that's not a surprise. And I was able to rewrite my code in C++ because we didn't need any special libraries; if we had, I wouldn't have had the expertise to reimplement it. R is really convenient to use for many things, and it's also faster than Matlab for everything I've tried in both. Matlab is a dog, and the Mac version crashes at the drop of a hat too. I can't believe people pay money for that crap, except that it's pushed on universities, so people get used to it.

Re:Shash-job-vertisement

[swillden]

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, not as a statistician, but I do have an interest in statistics, subscribe to internal stats discussion mailing lists, and occasionally talk to Google statisticians.)

R syntax is a lot better. In Matlab, the dimensions of a 3D array are Y,X,Z. That's just one of the many papercuts that makes Matlab difficult and unintuitive to use. R makes a hell of a lot more sense to me.

From what I can see R is a lot more heavily used in Google than Matlab. The article's focus on Matlab is odd. Personally, I mostly use Mathematica. That's less because it's ideal (I haven't learned R so I can't compare, really) than because I already know it.

That said, Google definitely is interested in people who can extract knowledge from data, using whatever tools.

Re:Shash-job-vertisement

[Baloroth]

Ugh, this reads like a job ad.

When I moved from Matlab to Python three years ago, I saw a massive speed increase of my methods. Also I no longer have to decide whether or not to shell out more cash for the statistics package, it's all there!

Looking back at my old Matlab code also makes me cringe a bit about the syntax of that language.

Reads more like an ad for Matlab (with 2 links to Mathworks and 1 to the Wikipedia Matlab page in TFA) than a job ad. Though I suspect what actually happened was the reporter heard Jonathan Rosenberg mention Matlab (which the reporter hadn't heard of before) and got all excited over his "discovery" when anyone who's likely to get any kind of data analysis/statistics job for, well, anyone, already knows what Matlab is.

Re:Shash-job-vertisement

[Anonymous Coward]

If they were actually advertising a job opening it wouldn't be so bad. This is actually much more sinister and underhanded. They are issuing a demand that you go train yourself, at your own cost, in a specific skill, under the premise that it will get you a job, but there is nothing binding about their side of the "deal".

matlab is not new

[rabun_bike]

I used Matlab extensively in upper level mathematics courses as an undergrad from 1993 to 1995. I was surprised people don't know much about it or that Wolfram Alpha comes from the same company and even accepts Matlab syntax.

Re: matlab is not new

[rabun_bike]

Whoops. Self correction. The developers of Wolfram Alpha developed Mathematica and not MATLAB. That's what I get for relying on my aging memory.

Re: matlab is not new

[egladil]

Actually, Matlab is produced by Mathworks while Wolfram Alpha is made by Wolfram, the company which makes Mathematica. However, I think Mathematica accepts Matlab syntax in addition to its own symbol based language.

Re:matlab is not new

[Austerity Empowers]

What is lost in the article is that a Mathematics PhD or at least information science as part of a CS or EE course, is probably the ACTUAL skill that google would like. You can pick up Matlab if you have been using other tools to do the function, but it's a shitload harder to pick up the math and relevant algorithms, research and hive knowledge.

Analogy

[Charliemopps]

Data is the sword of the 21st century, those who wield it well, the Samurai.

So, data is a weapon used against us?
And those that wield it are our new feudal lords?

At least we know how Googles Senior management really feels about things.

Re:Analogy

[nu1x]

"Visual representation" is a red flag, it always contains less information and detail than good old text (text in the eyes of a proficient reader mind you).

And, well, one property of graphical representation is that it is (more easily) accessible to idiots, aka, "The Management".

So there you have it.

Re:Analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

Encryption is the poisoned dart of the 21st century, those who wield it well, the Ninja.

Re: Analogy

[Ukab the Great]

If analytics samurai draw a lot of false conclusions from bad data, will they commit ritual suicide?

MatLab is not really a good programming language

[orzetto]

MatLab is an old, crufty, feature-creeped script engine that I try to hold myself away from as much as I can. As a researcher and academic (got up to post-doc), Matlab is indeed ubiquitous in academia, but it's mostly due to entrenched positions. I see fewer and fewer people using Matlab these days, and that's a good thing.

Matlab is by all means not a fourth-generation programming language: it is procedural just like Fortran, which it supplanted in academia, but it does not have type-checking as C, it does not have OO support as C++, it does not do away with semicolons as end-of-line markers like Python; true, it has some advance features like OO and some functional programming, but (almost) nobody uses them, and most Matlab code is a horrible cruft made by self-not-so-well-taught academics. There is nothing in Matlab you cannot do better in Python with scipy, numpy, matplotlib and pandas. Or with declarative PLs like Modelica.

Matlab is also known for outrageous prices, leveraging on the fact their customer base are universities with big pockets and small administrative brains, and large corporations: they split their code base in many small chunks, and for each you need to pay more and more: as the saying goes, In Matlab you cannot do shit unless you buy a licence for the Toilet Paper toolbox.

Long story short: Matlab is the Perl of academia.

Matlab is not an app

[damn_registrars]

Really, calling it an app is like calling a Ferrari Enzo a bicycle. Matlab is a tool that is used for data analysis; when it is described as an "app" in the modern sense it is being classified with angry birds and other such smartphone rubbish.

Re:Matlab is not an app

[war4peace]

I used the word "app" long before it was corrupted by Angry Birds and the like.

Re:Matlab is not an app

[MightyYar]

Or a gigantic application, like Photoshop or MATLAB, that sits in your "Applications" folder. Have you guys never heard of the term "killer app"??? Am I that old?

Python

[PvtVoid]

Python has obsolesced Matlab. There are even Matlab to Python cross-compilers and packages that allow Matlab to work like a Python library.

Re:Python

[tomhath]

Yes. That's one of the beauties of high level languages, libraries are available that do what you want so you don't need to write it yourself. Do you consider that a problem?

Re:MatLab is not really a good programming languag

[StripedCow]

Agree. I use Python with open source packages like scipy, numpy, matplotlib and others, to achieve almost the same thing as Matlab.
Also the language (Python) is much cleaner.

Really?

[redmid17]

Google is so large and has such a massive need for talent that if you have the right skills, Google is really enthusiastic to hear from you

Well color me shocked. Is the army looking for people who can accurately fire rifles and follow orders? What about the FAA and air traffic controllers?

Whoever wrote that and whichever (copy) editor let it through need to reevaluate their life choices.

Re:Really?

[asylumx]

Is the army looking for people who can accurately fire rifles and follow orders

No, they can and will drill both of those things into your head. What they are looking for is healthy people who are willing to die for whatever it is our military asks them to do.

Far too expensive

[cerberusss]

I work at a scientific institute and the license costs of Matlab quickly explode if you need something beyond basic functionality. Since we work on the public's money, we haven't bought into Matlab.

Almost by itself, all scientists and engineers standardized on Python and NumPy/SciPy/Matplotlib. There's a couple of people using Octave, the open source Matlab alternative, but that's very limited right now.

Re:Far too expensive

[MightyYar]

I feel the need to plug the Pandas module for Python. It does a lot of R-like operations on huge datasets. It takes care of time-series alignment and has many other nicey-nices. Basically almost everything you think you need to invent to manipulate your dataset is probably already implemented in Pandas.

Who wants to work for Google nowadays?

[gweihir]

I know several really capable people that left Google, because of bureaucracy, corporate greed, incompetence, and general lack of vision. Google has become an ordinary large enterprise. And they do not even pay that well.

Re:Who wants to work for Google nowadays?

[Bing Tsher E]

The term for it is 'Publicly Traded' and it has to do with a certain kind of person who scurries into an organization once it becomes a certain sort of organization. Happens to every company, always.

Re:Who wants to work for Google nowadays?

[Shados]

Its no longer "THE" place to work, for sure, but they do have all the nice perks and benefits and all the on-site stuff, interesting problems, and interesting culture. You also don't have to worry TOO much about them hiring a few retards that never get fired (at least not on the engineering side).

There's a lot of companies that provide the above, but not that many are well established with as many benefits (usually they'll be "profitable startups"). So while its not the "OMG OMG OMG OMG I NEED TO WORK AT GOOGLE" scenario anymore, its still on the list of places to consider.

Of course, then you have their "1 size fit all, basically random depending on who does the interview" interview process to go through, so it may not be worth the trouble, unless you're feeling lucky.

Re:Who wants to work for Google nowadays?

[swillden]

You also don't have to worry TOO much about them hiring a few retards that never get fired (at least not on the engineering side).

This is the reason I like working for Google. I've worked with dozens, perhaps even low hundreds, of engineers over my four years with the company and in that time I only ran into one idiot.

I also have to disagree somewhat with the GP's characterization of Google. I spent 20 years working in ordinary large enterprises (as a consultant I saw many), and Google is dramatically different. Oh, there is some amount of bureaucracy creeping in. I think that's unavoidable in a company with tens of thousands of employees. But the company fights it really hard, and with a fair amount of success. It's not perfect, but it's the best place I've been, large or small.

Regarding pay, seems pretty good to me, particularly when you include bonuses and stock grants. I don't hear a lot of complaints from my colleagues, either.

Re:Who wants to work for Google nowadays?

[Shados]

All companies have slightly different promotion processes, but its a small world, and everyone ends up working everywhere, knowing each other, and trading notes. Google's promotion process is nothing uncommon. You just didn't happen to work somewhere that had a similar one, thats all. I only worked for 3~ Big Bank (tm), 2 of which had a very very similar process, the other did not. Maybe my sample just isn't representative. There are thousands of companies out there after all :) About about a 1/4th of other companies where Ive been had a very similar process. Thats just what I'm basing myself on. Your millage may vary.

Once you're talking 130-180k/year, no one moves jobs for the pay. The difference between making 140k or making 180k isn't going to change your quality of life enough to leave a job that wouldn't be as good. Thats why you'll never see someone switch away from Google for money.

For the rest, it depends what you compare to. If you're comparing to other companies that are similar, of course the pay will be similar. I live a block away from the Google office in Cambridge, so 75% of people I know work there or have worked there, half of which have moved between the Silicon Valley office and here. Quite a few are downright geniuses that could move anywhere and ask for a fortune, yet they're T4-T6, often making a lot less money than me, even though I couldn't dream of doing their job.

Octave

[Anonymous Coward]

Octave is a hugely better option. I once used 128 instances of Octave on a cluster to run something that the computer center only had 5 matlab licenses for. Running matlab on a cluster is just stupid.

Oh, and if you care, Octave is as compatible with matlab as matlab is with itself. Every time you upgrade matlab you have to deal with broken things. Octave is not bug-for-bug compatible with matlab; it's better. Hugely better.

Here is why you never chase what's "hot" in IT

[walterbyrd]

1) By the time you learn it, it won't be hot anymore.

2) It's all about experience. Don't take my word for it, look at the job ads. Learn something all you want, if you don't have five years experience in it, your knowledge is useless.

3) These articles about what's "hot" are just standard corporate propaganda. IT employers always want people chasing their tails, studying everything, just so they have a larger labor pool.

4) Don't get constantly distracted trying to learn what is supposedly "hot" at the moment, just learn anything useful, and be very good at it. Being very good at anything useful is far more valuable than a superficial knowledge of the latest fad.

5) These articles don't tell you anything more than they tell everybody else in the world. Learning whatever is not going to give you any competitive advantage.

All JMHO, of course.

Disclosure: I worked in IT for over 30 years. I have held several jobs, at several companies. I have been through the hiring process a lot.

Cheeky

[mlkj]

The One App You Need On Your Resume If You Want a Job At Google

Publishing this just while we have a poll on favorite clickbaits, how appropriate!

Ugh

[Aboroth]

"Data is the sword of the 21st century, those who wield it the samurai."

That's the douchiest way of saying "knowledge is power" that I have ever heard.

Re:Ugh

[StripedCow]

However, your note is taken. This won't look good on your Google "behind-the-curtains" resume.

Obligatory Posting of Informative Blog

[BorisSkratchunkov]

See: http://abandonmatlab.wordpress.com/

Re:MatLab is not really a good programming languag

[deodiaus2]

My favorite for this is an oldie but goodie. Macsyma or now Maxima. Best of all, it is free.
Moreover, it should be the algorithms and techniques which are and should be important. Most of us can cobble together a program with a GUI. I spent a lot of time studying things like Kalman Filters, and have concluded that there is no such thing as one size fits all or that it is possible or even desirable to parametrize additional features and forecast enhancements. There are a lot of formulations which lead to implementation differences which spill all over the code.
Recently, I was reading Mandelbrot's work on chaos. It seems that the biggest critiques of new formations for modeling chaos are that it is not easy to standardize the representations of the models.
Boo-hoo, mommy, my math and philosophical formulations break down and reality is really strange.

Re:Sexy job

[TapeCutter]

Statistics and Logistics were a major part of my CS degree way back in the late 80's, more so than writing programs. If you think the only place statistics are used in tech companies is in marketing material then I have to conclude you have never worked as a corporate plumber and have no idea what they do. The core reason developers have always attracted good salaries at large corporations is that they can sift through mountains of data and tell the managers something about their business that they didn't know.

I'm not that far from retirement but that job will disappear in the near future, the technology in IBM's Watson will "democratise" data analysis in the same way the PC has "democratised" programming. Experts will have a "conversation" with the computer in which man and machine will both "learn" something, Google style search engines will look as quaint as a "ready reckoner" book of maths tables. And yes, Watson relies heavily on statistics, it doesn't actually give you an "answer" it gives a range of answers with an associated probability. Sounds kinda flakey but the fact that it can beat the world's top trivia buffs in an open ended problem domain is old news.

When it won the Jeopardy championship a few years ago it needed 2 tons of air-conditioning alone and was an exclusive toy for IBM devs. Today it fits on a "pizza box" server and IBM have recently opened the API to the public.

Disclaimer: Worked for IBM in the 90's, not shilling, just my personal opinion that "cognitive computing" may turn out to be more significant to human history than anything else that's happened since WW2.

Please god no.

[aidian]

I've used Matlab academically for about half a year now, and that most anybody (but for scientists and mathematicians operating solely on huge numeric matrices, maybe) uses it is rather shocking to me. The only good thing I can really say about Matlab is that it's made me a better programmer in _other_ languages. Sometimes when you're forced to do something so horribly wrong, the right way of doing it leaps out at you. It's like being forced to ride a unicycle, and suddenly realizing why the motorcycle was invented. Not to say that it doesn't have some very advanced features; it's not a simple beast by any means and -can- do some amazing stuff, but it seems to do them so.. weirdly, and often ridiculously slowly, that it's got that crufty feeling of legacy software with stuff just stapled on all over it.

I'm hopeful about http://www.julialang.org/ the Julia language project and think it's worth at least keeping an eye on in the future.

Matlab? Ugh!

[tgv]

I've worked in Matlab (doing DSP), but it's one butt ugly language. It's like FORTRAN with braces, and "global" only works sort of half. And its symbolic manipulation feels like an afterthought. Even Javascript is a better language. And for statistics, why not use R?

Pro tip: if you want to try your hand at Matlab: it's horribly expensive, but there are free clones available: Octave (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Octave) and Scilab (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scilab). I prefer the latter, but be sure to check the list of differences with Matlab.

Matlab spaghetti vs. software engineering

[zougloub]

The Matlab language has evolved in a questionable way, software licenses are problematic and harming portability, but the biggest deal after having seen it used at various places, is that Matlab code becomes unmaintainable very fast (this is even more true with Simulink, but I won't digress).

Matlab is 100% good for one thing: accessing already existing Matlab code; which happens when dealing with research papers because students have been fed with free Matlab licenses since a young age.
Matlab is also good for early prototyping, because of the toolbox and the interactivity (it's like the Excel of R&D).
But for that, today you get the same with other platforms/languages; Octave and Scilab are good, but have the same "engineering" issues ; Python for example (could be true about R/Julia/...) will get you "further" in no time.

My advice to anybody: keep the number of Matlab SLOC low, rewrite Matlab code to something else (with appropriate docs) whenever you have figured out your algorithm!

Samurai Were Actually Embarrassed of Their Swords

[Chris Shannon]

The quote 'Data is the sword of the 21st century, those who wield it the samurai.' is a bad metaphor. I'll let the cracked authors explain why.

http://www.cracked.com/article...

Samurai Were Actually Embarrassed of Their Swords
Oh, come on. This, at least, just has to be bullshit. A quick Google image search of "samurai" returns a gazillion results, 99 percent of which depict the famed warriors with sword in hand. There are drawings about them using swords. There are photos. Hell, pajamas, katanas, and weird hairstyles were their whole thing: Samurai damn well lived by the sword. What else did they have?

Actually ...

Yes, the samurai did have an ancient tradition centered around a weapon. However, it sure as shit wasn't the sword. In fact, ignore every movie and video game about samurai, because they only carried swords as awkward last resort weapons.

Kyuba no michi, "the way of the horse and bow," was there centuries before any semblance of Bushido. It's exactly what it says on the tin: Samurai were all about flinging arrows at peasants from horseback. It makes sense, really -- they were professional soldiers, and in that line of business you quickly learn that only idiots fight the enemy at stabbing distance. Bows were revered over swords to the extent that many Japanese nobles actually downplayed their swordsmanship. After all, pointing out how great your sword skills were was basically announcing that you're a terrible archer. And saying "I'm a terrible archer" was more or less like saying "I'm neither a man nor a warrior."

The introduction of firearms in the 16th century finally killed the samurai supremacy as mounted archers. As they left the battlefield and settled for a new life as bureaucrats and officials, their formerly reviled swords started taking on actual importance as elaborate status symbols. And because bows weren't really an option anymore, the sword became the go-to weapon of the honorable, sword-wielding, bushido following and completely fictional samurai they retroactively invented to feel better about their crummy desk jobs.

Maybe it's an unintentionally good metaphor. Big data is the new useless but symbolic catchphrase that you use to make your company look modern.