Those are the top ten salaries. Getting a job at Google probably isn't for one of those jobs. It would have been nice to see data on salaries that entry level engineers get etc.
New college graduate engineers get about $100k base pay (it was in the NYT around January).
Out of college I was hired as an Associate (not currently in the role) and making about $50k base, plus a 3k signing bonus and roughly 3.5k in stock grants per year.
Having a "contractor" role there is going to throw off salary. If this is a typical contractor role then it is likely to be much higher. Does anyone have an idea how many contractors Google employ?
As a Google interviewer (and not-so-long-ago interviewee), I can assure you that the graphic's examples of interview questions are indeed 100% bullshit.
A few of those are from the 2003 book "How Would You Move Mount Fuji?" which is about Microsoft interviews. They are part of Silicon Valley/Seattle lore, but likely no longer used.
The size of Google makes me very skeptical about working there, despite getting called by recruiters fairly regularly. I feel drawn to a more informal startup or academic atmosphere. My experience with large companies is that the number of meetings and cover-your-ass behavior that goes on increases greatly as the company size grows.
Can anyone who has seen Google grow comment on culture shift over the years?
I had a summer internship with Microsoft in 2009, then worked on a startup, and recently joined Google NY. So I can't talk about Google changing over time, but I do have some baselines to which to compare it. IMO it's somewhere between the two, but feels more like a startup than like Microsoft (which I liked, fwiw). I have a lot of the freedom in my work that I'd have at a startup. I have a broadly defined problem and can decide how best to try and solve it. I do happen to be on a relatively new and small team, which could be a factor. I took a couple days this week to add a feature to a popular internal app, because I wanted the feature to exist...didn't ask anyone (other than the guy who owns the app), just did it.
I don't think I've been at Google long enough to evaluate how much politicking there is, but I don't seem to have many meetings and as far as I can tell people are happy with me just for being productive.
If I were you, I'd interview at Google and, if you get an offer, request to be on a team which is more academic in nature...e.g. ask to be on an AI/ML/NLP team rather than an infrastructure team.
The Google that was everyone's darling from the early part of the past decade is gone. If you want to learn how big companies work from the inside, or discover the true meaning of "the one that's deprecated and the one that doesn't work yet", go for it. If you'd rather deal with the acquisition and management of disk and RAM quotas instead of coding, apply now!
When one of the questions to "ask the eng elders" is "how do I become an elder", and when the only real answer is "go start your own company", the sweetheart days are gone. If you weren't there in the beginning, you missed the train.
It's unfortunate, too, since there's a lot of good infrastructure left over from those classic times which is all tied up inside. It's treated as Secret Sauce and will never see the light of day. Various escapees have started re-implementing bits and pieces on the outside, however, so this will eventually take care of itself.
At least at Microsoft, my recruiters told me that a huge portion of the resumes submitted were from people who submitted either every day or multiple times a day. There's a "zeroth" reviewer that is a computer that determines and processes duplicates. I'd assume Google has the same problem and a similar solution (or else they hire a lot of recruiters).
I don't think this graphic's "25% increase" number accounts for attrition. I would expect Google's total attrition number (bad+good) to swing between 5-10% year to year.
Would people please stop quoting salary numbers as if that's the major portion of compensation at these kinds of companies? The reason it's hard to leave places like MSFT/Google/Amazon isn't the salary; you can get that anywhere. It's the N-year vesting stock grants. Once you've been there for N years, you have a full set rolling and vesting each year, with the number increasing every year. As you pass N years, you typically go from 100% of your salary in additional stock-grant income to some moderate integer multiple. Not counting bonuses. It's getting people to leave behind many hundred thousand dollars of pending grants that's tough, not matching the salaries.
BTW, the most recent figure I heard (from a reliable source) is that Google actually gets two million resumes per year. I don't know how many are dupes.
There are some traits that can be easily observed on Googlers and Xooglers. Particularly, if you meet at least two of the requirements below then they are definitely going to screen your resume more carefully:
1. Holds a BS/MSc/PhD from a famous US university (Stanford, Yale, Berkeley, etc) or a PhD in a known university.
2. Has publications or is a well renowned CS researcher/professor/veteran (including famous progr. lang. gurus)
3. Is/was the committer of a famous open source software
4. Has invented algorithms or data structures or programming language
5. Has worked on a major company like Microsoft, Oracle, or Intel;
6. Has been the finalist of programming competitions like ACM, TopCoder, etc.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 59.1 ms ] threadOut of college I was hired as an Associate (not currently in the role) and making about $50k base, plus a 3k signing bonus and roughly 3.5k in stock grants per year.
And displaying top salaries as a pie chart is confusingly meaningless.
Can anyone who has seen Google grow comment on culture shift over the years?
I don't think I've been at Google long enough to evaluate how much politicking there is, but I don't seem to have many meetings and as far as I can tell people are happy with me just for being productive.
If I were you, I'd interview at Google and, if you get an offer, request to be on a team which is more academic in nature...e.g. ask to be on an AI/ML/NLP team rather than an infrastructure team.
When one of the questions to "ask the eng elders" is "how do I become an elder", and when the only real answer is "go start your own company", the sweetheart days are gone. If you weren't there in the beginning, you missed the train.
It's unfortunate, too, since there's a lot of good infrastructure left over from those classic times which is all tied up inside. It's treated as Secret Sauce and will never see the light of day. Various escapees have started re-implementing bits and pieces on the outside, however, so this will eventually take care of itself.
At least at Microsoft, my recruiters told me that a huge portion of the resumes submitted were from people who submitted either every day or multiple times a day. There's a "zeroth" reviewer that is a computer that determines and processes duplicates. I'd assume Google has the same problem and a similar solution (or else they hire a lot of recruiters).
I don't think this graphic's "25% increase" number accounts for attrition. I would expect Google's total attrition number (bad+good) to swing between 5-10% year to year.
Would people please stop quoting salary numbers as if that's the major portion of compensation at these kinds of companies? The reason it's hard to leave places like MSFT/Google/Amazon isn't the salary; you can get that anywhere. It's the N-year vesting stock grants. Once you've been there for N years, you have a full set rolling and vesting each year, with the number increasing every year. As you pass N years, you typically go from 100% of your salary in additional stock-grant income to some moderate integer multiple. Not counting bonuses. It's getting people to leave behind many hundred thousand dollars of pending grants that's tough, not matching the salaries.
1. Holds a BS/MSc/PhD from a famous US university (Stanford, Yale, Berkeley, etc) or a PhD in a known university.
2. Has publications or is a well renowned CS researcher/professor/veteran (including famous progr. lang. gurus)
3. Is/was the committer of a famous open source software
4. Has invented algorithms or data structures or programming language
5. Has worked on a major company like Microsoft, Oracle, or Intel;
6. Has been the finalist of programming competitions like ACM, TopCoder, etc.