[apphacker]

What's the draw for an engineer to work at Google these days? Seems like you'd be a small toad in a gigantic pond where your ripples make little impact. Kind of like working at Oracle or IBM or Microsoft or <Big Software Company>. Except there are those dumb bikes all around the campus. Yet still there seems to be this perception there is something 'special' about working at Google that sets it apart from any of the other places, isn't there? The emperor has no clothes? It's not like you're going to get any wealthier from options there than you would at any other relatively same sized company.

[moultano]

Here are the advantages of working at Google (from my perspective.)

- Excellent infrastructure. If you want to run a job on 2000 machines, write 10 lines of boilerplate, press go, and you're done.

- Lots of people smarter/better-educated/more-talented than me. (Though maybe this is common. :)

- Lots of resources. For a batch job, you can spend 10k machine-hours doing something frivolous without getting approval from anyone, since there's usually enough idle capacity somewhere. For instance, rendering the largest nebulabrot that has ever been rendered. http://www.danvk.org/wp/2007-04-06/nebulabrot/ Or finding the highest possible scoring boggle board. http://www.danvk.org/wp/2009-02-19/sky-high-boggle-scores-wi... This is also great for prototyping something new that requires crunching a lot of data to create. I made a rhyming dictionary that was based entirely on datamining lyrics pages. It's also super convenient that we have a copy of the web on disk to play with.

- Google's brand behind any product you launch. Things might fade into obscurity, but they at least don't start out that way.

Disadvantages of working at Google:

- It's hard to fail fast because everything has to preemptively scale. It's probably easier to scale here than at most other companies, but still much harder than spit+duct-tape on a machine in your apartment.

- Google-wide goals/approvals can eat into the time to focus on product-specific things. There is some big-company overhead, though it's kept to a minimum.

- Established products are somewhat ossified, whether that's due to refinement or over-fitting is up to debate (and debated.) Thankfully though Google is remarkably not risk averse about making major changes to major products if you have the data to back it.

[jsnell]

There are things that are easier to achieve in a big company than in a small one. Working on products used by almost everyone means that even small incremental improvements will have a larger effect than the whole product of an average startup has. Even a smaller Google property is probably on a much larger scale than the successful main product of a startup. There's better infrastructure and more machines to throw at problems than elsewhere, making it easier to solve really hard problems.

I'm sure that at some point Google will go the way of any large company and become an organization of middle managers shuffling paper around with nothing getting done, the rot hasn't set in yet. There's a big cultural difference to a standard big corp. (No, I don't mean the food or any other shiny baubles).

And while nobody is going to get fabulously rich from Google stock options/grants any more, I have absolutely no complaints about my total compensation.

[maxawaytoolong]

Google still has great perks. If you just need a job and having the best cafeteria outweighs working with dinks, it's the best choice next to Facebook, and the only choice of giant dot-conglomorates if you live in NYC.

[apphacker]

IAC is in NYC. It's kind of a giant dot-conglomerate. I don't know about the cafeteria there though.

[exit]

iac?

[loganfrederick]

InterActive Corp, owns a ton of web properties such as Ask.com, CollegeHumor, Match.com, and Dictionary.com

[muhfuhkuh]

They're having the same growing pains as Microsoft had in the mid- to late-90s. Everyone prior to Windows 95 had a LOT of options sitting in the wings waiting to be vested or for a galactically large liquidity event (like, say, the revolution of the Desktop PC), and everyone post windows 2000 were left with the big company sitting on hoards of cash and a stock price that will never go above their options value but maybe 2-5 bucks max.

Google has all of its earnings built into the stock price for more than a decade, so anyone they hire (unless it's a chief muckety-muck) is going to be even-steven in stock. So, Google has to differentiate on culture, salary, and benefits, which they can obviously do.

[apphacker]

From what I've heard Google actually pays less than average because you're working at "Google". Whatever that means.

[wololo]

laszlo bock always says that according to some very quantitative surveys they do, compensation is not the primary reason why googlers leave (impact is).