Comment by plinkplonk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by plinkplonk | Hacker News Reader

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"Google's one of the few places where you can say "I have an idea that has a 5% chance of success, will take a year to investigate, but will radically change the world if it succeeds" and get buy-in from both management and your peers."

Is this really true for the average Googler? Honest question.

From what I hear from friends working there, superstars like Peter Norvig or Sebastian Thrun may get a year(EDIT or more! see comment below) to work on self driving cars or massive neural networks doing computer vision etc, but a lot of developers just fix production bugs on Gmail or Google Plus or whatever, and implement incremental features decided by their managers and don't really have the option to work on the cutting edge projects, especially if you aren't working in the Mountain View office.

(Not to challenge the rest of your points, they also tell me Google is a good place to work, but Sebastian Thrun might be able to pull off working on self driving cars even at Facebook.)

Fwiw, if I had to select between FB and Google, I'd go with Google (I have some superficial reasons not to work for FB, mainly because I don't want to do 'social networking'), but once in I'd do everything I could to change teams to one of these world changing groups ;).

Yeah I think this is an issue for many people at Google in that everyone that I know that has worked for them recently (5 past co-workers... not exactly a fair survey) has overall been positive but negative on feeling overqualified for the work they end up doing. Its probably a symptom of Google being able to load up on so many highly qualified people with a limited amount of high-end, brainy work.

I think it's true for the average Googler as in "wasn't a brand name superstar when they joined". You do usually need at least one solid win (= launched feature that's reasonably successful with users) working on somebody else's team before you get the autonomy to propose and pursue your own stuff - Google wants to make back their investment in you before you go off and pursue some crazy idea, and you usually need that sort of experience with the production infrastructure and internal data sources to have any chance of success. But 20% time exists even for Nooglers, and is a good way to get experience in parts of the company you wouldn't otherwise see, develop skills you wouldn't otherwise have, or prepare for a transfer if you don't like your initial team.

I've got pretty much complete freedom to work on what I want as long as it's related to Search and will benefit the company if it succeeds. I came into Google with some minor name recognition in the startup & Haskell communities (I wrote a top Haskell tutorial and a blog about my experiences founding a failed startup) but no world-changing accomplishments, and between then and getting my current project I contributed to 4 major "wins" in search (Search Options, moving the individual property searches to www.google.com, the visual redesign of 2010, and the Authorship program), plus some pinch-hitting on the Google+ and Doodle teams.

I think this type of freedom does differ among departments. G+, Docs, and Android are very command-and-control, with somebody at the top deciding exactly which features everyone will be working on and relatively little individual discretion for engineers. Research is the complete opposite end of the spectrum - usually researchers are brought into Research, and then they keep doing their specialty but with more data available. Search, Chrome, YouTube, GMail, and Maps all give engineers a large amount of discretion in proposing projects from the ground up and then working on them.

Sebastian has a whole team and much more than a year!

But an average Googler gets their 20% time, plus a real chance to pitch for more resources. The (relatively flat) management chain is very open to great ideas regardless of where they come from, and willing to invest in them if they're sufficiently good. Mind you that bar isn't met all that often, but it does happen with some regularity.

I wouldn't go to Google for the sole purpose of pursuing your own idea there, but you should feel confident that if you have a great one, you'll be given a chance to make a case for it.

This is from the perspective of a Seattle Google employee, so I don't think location is an issue.

Seconded. 20% time is still real, if you ask/push for it. If your idea fits somewhere under the broad umbrella of your group's mandate, so much the better.

I have to disagree a little with one of the earlier points, though. Through start-up acquisitions, Google is getting a lot more groups with the developer/hacker mindset. Those groups tend to keep to themselves and rail against Google's slow pace, and often eventually quit. Google could learn from that mentality, but equally those developers could learn from Google's methodical approach. In my (limited) experience Google could do much better at integrating newly acquired start-up teams into the overall corporate culture and development philosophy.

One could always do better, I suppose. But Google has a better post-acquisition retention rate than any other company I know.

(Disclaimer: I've been acquired, and so far, retained!)

"Sebastian has a whole team and much more than a year!"

of course. sorry that was sloppy writing on my part. Edited.

"This is from the perspective of a Seattle Google employee, so I don't think location is an issue."

Oh I was thinking more Bangalore or Buenos Aires, not Seattle vs Mountain View (though I keep hearing that the really cool projects are run out of MV, with the occasional exception like the V8 work)

The real key to doing such work might be "become a superstar and do cutting edge work" ;-) . Then the fact that you work at Google is just a detail.

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