piaw.blogspot.com/2010/08/tips-for-noogler-engineers.html
Piaw's Blog I'm an ex-googler and have spent the last 17 years in Silicon Valley at various startups. Comments on this blog are aggressively moderated against link-spam and rude or meaningless comments.
Tips for Noogler Engineers I'm surprised by the number of people inside Google who actually read my blog. I once did contemplate writing a "career guide for Googlers", but finally got off my ass when a Noogler asked me for advice on how to thrive at Google. Given that Google is once again on a hiring spree (something that I'll never agree with), I guess more people will want this advice than not. Obviously, you should take everything I say with a grain of salt, since things change rapidly at Google. Disclaimer: Sanjeev says (and I agree) that if you internalize all this, it will make you less likely to succeed at a startup! Being able to do well at a big company and being able to do well at a startup are completely different things! They don't lie deliberately but frequently things change very quickly, so what's true one day is not true the next. I knew someone who gave up a tech lead position because he was told his group would have no manager, and therefore he was doing all that extra work for nothing. Within a couple of quarters after he gave it up, management made the new tech lead the manager, because things had changed. Keep in mind that management wants things that are good for Google. It absolutely does not help your career one bit, even though it's absolutely critical for Google in the long term. It's not rewarded, considered during the promotion process, and it burns a lot of time. Just like interviewing, it is under-valued and not considered real work when performance reviews come up. If you succeed in rescuing that person, he did it himself. Only managers can get any credit from this, so decline any requests to help. The way to get promoted is to stay at one project for a long time, not to switch projects every 18 months, as management might sometimes tell you. Depending on your manager, it could absolutely hurt your career. triple check to make sure your manager does not take a negative view on this. I liked my 20% time, but I was well aware of the trade-off for my career I was making. Take as many of those off your plate as possible while you're ramping up. I never felt hurt by not reading misc, misc-mv, or eng-misc. Tip #3: Nothing matters as much as getting a high performance rating. Doing so nets you: * the best projects, and your choice of projects * faster promotions and more money * "secret" founder's awards (they're not very secret because people brag to me about them) * respect from your peers (comes along with the promotions) Tip #4: Pick a really good manager and/or tech lead. Internal studies have showed that your performance at Google is tied very strongly to who your first tech lead is/was. The best tech lead that I know personally at Google is Arup Mukherjee. A good way for you as an engineer to judge tech leads is to see how many of their reports get promoted. If they don't get their reports promoted, don't work for them. Arup was very good at getting his team members promoted. One manager I know forgot to check the "promotion" check-box for his team members during promotion time. You can also try to work for a politically powerful manager/tech lead, but some of them could be hard asses and tough to work for. The big picture: Google rewards hard work, but much more importantly, high profile projects.
Google does not reward the maintenance work, no matter how important it is (Exception: War-room firefighting. Google loves those, and loves heroic performances from people in war-rooms). In particular, if you're stuck doing SRE work but you're a SWE, you need to negotiate your way out of that. In any organization, there are work horses, show horses, and horses' asses. Most people have no trouble figuring out how not to be the 3rd. But it's far better to be a show horse than a work horse.
Thanks for the writeup With regards to mentorship, does having an intern fall under the same category OR do you think there might be some benefit in hosting an intern?
I got sucked into hiring at Google and couldn't get out of it once I wanted to. I wouldn't have minded the occasional interview, but 2 interviews every week, plus an hour to write feedback, was just too much.
One problem I'd like to highlight here is that mentoring / interviewing / doing things that don't directly relate to 'performance' can lead to learning and development experiences of other varieties, and the fact that they might not be directly related in your performance evaluations doesn't mean they are not valuable to you.
A question I've started asking when interviewing at companies where you get interviewed by your prospective manager is "It's a year after I've been hired and you're writing my performance review. What would I have had to do to get a "meets expectations"? Assuming they're telling me the truth, it not only tells me what they think is needed to succeed, but also what they consider the key aspects of the job to be. Now, usually at Google you won't even knew who your manager is until you start. But when you do have your first meeting with them, might be a good idea to ask them the above questions, even if they also likely won't be on your promotion committee, if for no other reason than you know what they think is important about your position.
If you want your truth sugar-coated, talk to a manager or marketing person. If I went wishy-washy, then my advice would not be very useful, and you might as well read a journalist's report.
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