Google Employees Explain What It’s Like Working at Google

There’s an interesting thread today over at Reddit, where Google employees are asked to describe their experiences working for the Internet giant.

The replies are anonymous, and should thus be taken with a grain of salt. But some seem genuine, revealing some fascinating tidbits about Google’s corporate culture, strategy, and day-to-day life of a Google employee. The experiences are vastly positive, but some of them describe the downsides of being a Googler, too.

Here are some interesting quotes from the thread:

CinoBoo: I’ve been there for about 5 years. You can read about the good parts anywhere, so I’ll try to offer a counterpoint based on having worked at other software companies.

A common problem is that it’s easy to become spoiled by all the perks. Several offices have developed distinct cultures of entitlement, and people whine about the quality of the fudge on the free brownies. It’s embarrassing to be around people who’ve become like spoiled children.

An engineering-specific problem there is that there’s a lot of support for operations — that is, lots of people whose job it is to keep the systems running. Engineers don’t habitually carry pagers and are on-call relatively infrequently. The plus side is that they can focus on development, get adequate sleep, and be more productive. The downside is that they can easily lose touch with what’s really going on in the data centers and sometimes even their customers. It’s a trade-off. Google is at least aware of it and uses incentive programs to entice engineers to spend time in ops roles.

Last, the company is big into “generating luck”, which means trying a whole bunch of stuff in the hopes that a few efforts will pay off.

GoogleEmployee22k: Google is a great place to work. These are the things I like about my job:

1) Everyone is super smart
2) 18 different cafes
3) Free Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner
4) The food is gourmet quality (e.g. omelet bar, chefs that make custom sandwiches for you, sashimi, free drinks 24/7, free snacks of all sorts 24/7.
5) The 7 person conference bicycles
6) Every Friday, Larry, Sergei, or Eric takes questions from us (in person), and we get free beer (e.g. Downtown Brown)

solyanik: Management institute is awful. A typical manager has 50-100 employees, so even if they meet with their reports once a month for 30 minutes, that’s about 2 weeks worth of almost constant 1:1s per month (allowing just a bit of time for stretching in between ). That’s not a lot of time for interaction. As a result, managers aren’t empwered to participate in technical decision, they don’t have very much vote in performance reviews (these are done by committee), and not even hiring (which is also done by committee). I’ve asked older Googlers what the managers did there, and they universally said “I don’t know”. Almost all managerial decisions that I witnessed at Google (mostly around resourcing the new projects) were not great, and the only way I could explain them was by some sort of internal political struggles between different players in the management game. The good thing was that, as I said above, they don’t have very much role in day to day operations of the company. But if you LIKE being a technical manager, if that’s how you see your career, Google is definitely not for you.

[via Google Blogoscoped]

DSLR Rain Case May Also Pose a Choking Hazard [Concepts]

Encouraging people to hold a plastic bag over their mouths and noses is perhaps not the best idea, but that's just one glaring design flaw exhibited by the concept DSLR Camera Bag. More »

Apple's Redesigned Apple TV Might Be a TV? [Apple TV]

The NYT corroborates Engadget's previous Apple TV leak, saying that Apple is working on re-designing the product with some kind of iOS operating system instead of what it uses currently. However, the NYT hints at something more: an actual TV. More »

U.S. Troops Face New Threat: Afghanistan’s Toxic Sand

U.S. Troops Face New Threat: Afghanistan’s Toxic Sand: "

U.S. troops already face plenty of threats in Afghanistan: AK-47–wielding insurgents, improvised bombs, an intransigent and incompetent government. Now add a less familiar challenge to that list of woes: Afghanistan’s toxic sand.

The pulverized turf, it turns out, contains high levels of manganese, silicon, iron, magnesium, aluminum, chromium and other metals that act as neurotoxic agents when ingested. Combine the country’s frequent sandstorms and the kicked-up dust that results from helicopter travel with troops’ nostrils, mouths and pores, and you’ve got an unexpected example of how inhospitable the terrain is for the soon-to-be 98,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines fighting the war.

That’s all according to new research presented this month to a neurotoxicology conference in Oregon by a senior scientist with the Navy Environmental Health Effects Laboratory. That scientist, Palur G. Gunasekar, tells Politics Daily’s Sheila Kaplan that “[a]s the sand extract dose increases at the higher concentration you see cell death.” As the late Ronnie James Dio told us time and again, metal is evil.

A Navy spokesman tells Kaplan that more research is necessary to determine whether a connection exists between Afghan sand and neurotoxicology, as the service has yet to receive complaints from troops about “cognitive difficulties that are unrelated to traumatic brain injuries.” Those injuries have become the signature trauma of nine years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan as a result of roadside bombs and other improvised explosive devices, with nearly 64,000 cases diagnosed between 2003 and 2009.

According to ProPublica, Congress has dedicated an estimated $1.7 billion over the last few years to help troops recover from traumatic brain injuries, even standing up six new “Defense Centers of Excellence” in 2007 to provide research support as well as medical care.

But now it looks like there’s a new, tragic and expensive unintended health consequence of the war. And if the Defense Department’s late start in combating traumatic brain injuries is instructive, it’s going to take a lot more than research and the glacial pace of the defense health bureaucracy to deal with neurotoxic sand.

A September 2009 Defense Department overview of its anti-TBI efforts (.PDF) to date found that grappling with the scope of such a multifaceted health problem required “collaborative efforts” with “state-of-the-art science, technology and knowledge-based outcomes.” And the Department still isn’t there yet, years later.

Until something like that kicks into gear for toxic sand, troops are going to be left on their own to mitigate their exposure, so that may mean enterprising commanders ordering their troops to wear black sunglasses and face masks this summer in the Afghan desert. If there’s any upside to a covered face in baking heat, at least it’ll look pretty metal.

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Pepsi’s new extra-carbonated “Strong Shot” asks you to wait 15 seconds before opening

Warning! The beverage you are about to drink is HIGHLY CARBONATED. Please allow 15 seconds before opening this drink.

Why oh why don’t we get these awesome Japanese drink variants here in the U.S.? Video over at Gigazine. By the way, in Japanese it’s the SUTORONGUSHOTTO.

[via Inventor Spot and The Awesomer]

iTunes 9.2 For Windows Fixes 40 Security Holes

40 security vulnerabilities in older versions are fixed in iTunes 9.2, just released by Apple.












The advisory gives the impression that the vulnerabilities are only in the Windows version of iTunes, but this seems unlikely, especially in as much as many were recently listed as being patched in Safari on OS X. The advisory does list a download file for the OS X version of iTunes 9.2. For the moment, the advisory has yet to be published on Apple's security updates page.
The vast majority of the vulnerabilities are in the WebKit HTML engine, the basis for Safari and other browsers and which is incorporated into iTunes. Many of these and two other vulnerabilities are critical bugs which could result in remote code execution.

iTunes 9.2 also contains new features. Quoting Apple:

• Sync with iPhone 4 to enjoy your favorite music, movies, TV shows, books and more on-the-go
• Sync and read books with iPhone or iPod touch with iOS 4 and iBooks 1.1
• Organize and sync PDF documents as books. Read PDFs with iBooks 1.1 on iPad and any iPhone or iPod touch with iOS 4
• Organize your apps on your iOS 4 home screens into folders using iTunes
• Faster back-ups while syncing an iPhone or iPod touch with iOS 4
• Performance improvements make scrolling much faster

Skype Offers Free Calls To Various Countries For A Month

Looks like the folks over at Skype have caught the World Cup bug too, as the VoIP company has announced a new promotion to keep football fans around the world connected via Skype. The deal offers free landline calls in multiple countries, with users getting 60 minutes, 120 minutes, or unlimited free minutes of calling to said country. If you're in the US, the deal is even better, as we get unlimited free calls to landlines and mobiles. This deal lasts a month, obviously to coincide with the World Cup, and we're quite happy to take it.

Shaadi.com Matrimonial

Fedex tracking website clogged by new iPhone 4 owners?

Fedex tracking website clogged by new iPhone 4 owners?: "

I’ve been constantly refreshing the Fedex tracking page for my iPhone 4 shipment all morning. The status has been the same since 7pm last night when my package left the Indianapolis facility. I’ve been a bit nervous that I won’t receive my phone today since the status hasn’t shown any updates. I just found out that Fedex is having some issues with their tracking page. I guess me and everyone else that is waiting for their new iPhone 4’s are causing problems. … [visit site to read more]

Filed in categories: News

Tagged: Fedex, iPhone 4

Fedex tracking website clogged by new iPhone 4 owners? originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on June 23, 2010 at 1:26 pm.

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Dell confirms talks with Google about Chrome OS

When Google listed which companies were diving head first into the Chrome OS pool, Dell was surprising spotted standing around without its floaties on. Of course, that didn't stop the company from installing the OS on one of its netbooks just for fun. Now, hot on the heels of a Dell-specific Chrome configuration, we have word from Amit Midha, Dell's President for Greater China and South Asia, that the two companies are in talks regarding future use of the blingy OS. Midha isn't indicating just what that future use might be, saying only that his company just wants to be 'one of the leaders' with the technology. With Acer seemingly ready to announce hardware any day now, Round Rock's best had better get rolling.

Dell confirms talks with Google about Chrome OS originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 21 Jun 2010 08:34:00 EDT.

Ephone International EPI Life handset does ECG readings

Phones with ECG Reading..

The EPI Life handset from Ephone International is different from all of the other phones on the market, after all, even the iPhone is unable to perform ECG readings, right? What makes the EPI Life phone different from other portable ECG devices would be it sending relevant data back to Ephone's servers instead of going straight to your doctor, where a team of cardiologists will then monitor said readings around the clock. Should they detect a hint of abnormality in the ECG, they will straight away send emergency services to wherever you are, or simply obtain priority admission for you into partner hospitals. Check out its rather impressive list of health-related features in the extended post.