[tentosay]

Googler for close to a year, so take this with a grain of salt.. I had heard of this exact reputation before I joined and frankly it was one of the things that worried me most.

After I joined, I kept waiting for the hammer to fall, to see the competitive mean streak in people and in my team at least, it was exactly the opposite. It's frankly the best environment I've worked in because they are genuinely caring people.

Now, it's not all rainbows and unicorns. I've also run into the aspergers poster child, into the competitive assholes, but I don't have to deal with any of these in my daily life. So, yes, there are assholes, but I don't think this is the norm.

[ChuckMcM]

While I worked at Google I noticed a huge disparity between how people responded to other Googlers and how they responded to non-googlers. A more interesting observation would be to find people you know and look for their outside interactions. If you find the same disparity as I did you might want to bring it up with them, sometimes that helps sometimes not.

[hueving]

But are the people you interact with the ones in the big public positions the grandparent is referring to? (e.g. Open source projects like Kubernetes)

[wstrange]

My experience with the Kubernetes engineers has been awesome.

They are incredibly helpful, and very tolerant of newbies like me who sometimes ask dumb questions...

[yourapostasy]

There are never dumb questions, only practical and valuable examples of areas for improvement in documentation and/or related collateral (tutorials, cheat sheets, FAQs, etc.).

[tentosay]

I actually interact with teams that bring a lot more revenue and is more highly visible to the public. And, again, I may be lucky here, but all the way up to my SVP are nice. I may have been lucky, but I think it's more an issue with people generalizing some issues. I'm not going to generalize my experience either, but I had to offer a different perspective.

Honestly, think about how many companies let their nerdiest of engineers be the public face of projects. The reputation is easy to come by when your front is not a "people person".