skylark

Because Google has a magic fountain that shoots out a cubic foot of liquid gold per second (ads), it can work on things which only tangentially benefit the business.

Most Google products are operating at a loss.

Facebook and Google pay 200+ total yearly compensation to most engineers with over 2 years of experience.

For what it's worth, I thought their SWE interview was very fair. It was far more practical than my interviews at Google, Facebook, and Amazon.

I ended up accepting an offer from another company, but I'd say the entire experience was pleasant. I liked the engineers I talked to (of whom over half were women) and it seemed like they genuinely enjoyed what they did.

I guess all isn't as it seems.

Interesting, I was considering negotiating with my employer for part time where I'd take every Friday off - have you found 6 hour days to be better? I feel like if I took a 20% pay cut I'd want to avoid commuting for that extra day off, but I can see how shortening the workday might be more pleasant.

While we're considering things that won't happen - how about working less?

I love my job in software, but I think I'd have a better QoL with a 32 hour work week. I feel like my productivity wouldn't go down by 20% (but it's hard to tell without trying it for an extended period.)

Significant whitespace is great for technical interviews - you don't need to worry about matching brackets and whatnot. No brackets also means you have some more vertical space to work with on the whiteboard.

Beyond that, if your interviewer is fluent in python, list comprehensions can greatly shorten the amount of boilerplate you have to write.

Curious: Why would you trust a cloud service operating outside the US more than one operating within?

If you use Google, your data is basically guaranteed to be secure - the biggest vulnerability is search warrants from the US government.

If you use some provider in another country, the attack vector has to be way larger, right?

This is an honest question - people always talk about using their own servers or non-mainstream providers, but I don't see how they necessarily reduce your risk.

How will it be a major detriment? You can't just say something like that and expect people to understand what you mean.

Curious why you think it was a waste of time. You can still make perfectly functional products using Angular 1, and most jobs (at least in the bay area) won't look down on you if you're not fluent in their framework of choice - they'll expect you to learn it on the job.

I feel like the tighter your developers are with each other, the higher the impact of turnover. I personally know from experience that when my high performing friends move onto bigger and better things, they constantly encourage me to go with them or find something new myself. Entire teams can end up leaving through a sort of snowball effect.

The top answers are giving good advice, but I don't think they answer the real question: "How do you write a resume when you have no professional work experience or CS degree?"

DO

Talk about your projects - they should have a short description stating what it was, the technologies used, and any cool things you implemented (say, some special algorithm to do XYZ thing.) It should have bullet points in the same way you'd treat a past job you had. I've seen one page resumes that were 80% projects and 20% everything else.

Use your graphic design background to help you. The easiest way into a development position would probably be to find a place that will let you implement your designs in HTML/CSS. Then you can sneak your way onto the development team.

All you need is a foot in the door.

DON'T

Go into too much detail about anything unrelated to the job you're trying to get. Generally speaking every single line of your resume should scream "hire me" - anything that's lukewarm should be cut.

MAYBE

If you can get into a top coding bootcamp, you might be able to accelerate your career by a few years. It's really difficult to get your first job, and chances are you won't be paid that much for the privilege. If you're paid 15-20k more per year from the start, that alone pays for the cost of an expensive bootcamp.

Two different animals. Apple Pay lets consumers purchase goods from a merchant. Google's offering in that space is Android Pay. Google Wallet is more similar to Venmo in that it's only for peer to peer transactions.

Fair point. Thanks for your input.

Great point. While articles would have you believe that programmer skill is bimodally distributed (good vs. bad), it actually follows a normal curve like most other things. We all make some good decisions and some bad decisions everyday.

I'm sure we can all find a piece of code we wrote a year or two ago that makes us cringe a little bit.

Why should you be satisfied with using tools? If the feature is compelling enough, it should be included in the standard library.

If your goal is to do something fun and easy, then jQuery or even vanilla JS is fine.

If, however, your goal is to make a full fledged single page application, you'll find yourself running into a lot of solved problems.

You'll definitely want to modularize your code by putting it into different files. Soon, you'll find that you're spending a lot of time figuring out what order to load your scripts in your main JavaScript file. That's what Browserify, CommonJS, etc. are for.

You'll get sick of recompiling your files and refreshing the page. Or maybe you want to write ES6 code but have it used in browsers that only support ES5. Or you might want to do something simple like concat your files when deploying. That's where the Grunt/Gulp/WebPack build tools come into play.

And so on. These tools are massively popular because they solve real pain points for developers working on large scale front end applications.

My experience doesn't line up with your preconceived notions of the Bay Area at all. I've worked at three different jobs in San Francisco, and all of them were standard 9-5 jobs. I've worked weekends under 5 times. Most of my friends are in the same situation.

Sure if you want to work at an early stage startup, you can grind yourself into a paste. But there are plenty of jobs here where that's not the case.

For a new grad, your pedigree is the biggest factor in getting your foot through the front door. If you don't have an impressive resume, you might not even get past the first screen.

Lacking that, you can try to get a warm open if you know someone working at the company who can vouch for you.

After that, it's all about your interview chops. Pretty much all SF unicorn startups have the same Google style interview.

The long term goal might have been to get businesses onboard and charge them to accept money.

I'd argue that the UX for up/downvoting is already correct. Vote up if you agree, down if you disagree. It's intuitive and how most people use those buttons.

You can attack this problem from a different angle: Factor the number of reports/flags into the karma calculation and unweight downvoting itself. The report button on Reddit is essentially a "this content is inappropriate" button - why not use it as a part of the scoring system?

No need to bite at the person you're responding to. That's a direct quote from the article.

Unless you have a consistent history of job hopping, I don't think leaving one job early is an issue. If another offer is compelling, you should take it.

Salary + bonus + equity

165k is the standard offer for a fresh graduate at Google.

My mom grew up in a time before computers and never really acclimated to technology. The things that frustrate her the least are her Amazon Echo and Chromebook.

The echo is used as a glorified speaker: I set it up with their Prime account and it plays all the music she could ever want through voice commands. For some reason she finds it hard to use Siri on her phone, but something about the blue light on the Echo makes it really obvious what's going on. Also, the small things make her happy like asking about the weather or the news.

The Chromebook is nice because it's super hard to mess up - you just install an adblocker and you're good to go. For someone who only uses the computer to surf the web, it's perfect. The best part is I don't have to play tech support anymore :)

I don't think I'd get either of those things for myself, but I'd definitely recommend them for your non-technical family members.

I'm making a little over 200k right now. It doesn't feel much different from making 115k.

At 115k I had enough money to buy whatever I wanted and save 2-3k/month. Now the numbers in my Vanguard account rise a bit faster than before, but my overall lifestyle is exactly the same.

A 200k salary is comfortable, but it's by no means "fuck you" money. I still worry about the things everybody else worries about: Finding fulfillment, love, a place to call home, and planning out my future retirement.

I've gotten this too. Google iCloud calendar spam. I'm guessing your Gmail calendar is linked to your Apple calendar and it's being updated that way.

I'm guessing most of their money comes from businesses who purchase licenses for their developers. I've personally been responsible for four license purchases (my own + 3 companies bought a license for my work computer).

It depends on what you mean by "access to your analytics data." Anonymized, aggregated data is being used to inform product decisions, but engineers don't have direct access to the production database to query whatever they want. There are almost no cases where you'll be granted approval to look at real user data, and if you are granted access, 100% of your activity is monitored.

As a side note, this has been the case at every big company I've worked at, not just Google.

Where are you having troubles with the interview process?

Getting past the initial resume screen? Passing the technical phone screen? Passing the onsite?

Where are you located? Where do you want to work?