My wife interviewed then... She was an Admin Assistant for a CEO of a fairly large pharmaceutical company in the bay area. They asked her what she wanted to do and she responded she would and could perform quite well as an admin asst. They they said, "no, what do you want to do?" I think they were asking about pottery or saving whales or whatever. My wife didn't get it; nor the job. If only she could have said "Chase Rainbows". sigh (edit: words)
Its not. There rejection rate is higher, though. Still, a person who gets into Harvard is more likely to also get into Google than vice versa.
Google gets more applications per open position, so they also have to reject more. Lots of people think "Why not give it a shot and apply at Google." Very few think the same about Harvard. Also, I would say it takes more effort to apply to a university. They will require essays, SAT/GRE and letters of recommendations for a valid application.
I applied to Harvard as a "why not give it a shot?" It involved ticking an additional box on the Common Application and paying an additional $25 or so. I needed the essays, letters of recommendations, SAT, etc. anyway, to apply to other schools. Harvard had no additional requirements besides them. (Amherst and Dartmouth, however, required additional essays. I ended up giving up on the Dartmouth supplement because I couldn't be arsed to finish it, then have them nag me for another 2 months about my uncompleted application before I finally told them that no, I didn't actually want to apply.)
Not really true at all. Having no degree at all may present an obstacle in entering the interview process if you don't have strong experience to make up for it. But once you've entered the process as a candidate, the type or lack of degree will have absolutely no bearing on whether or not you're given an offer. It may be used past the decision phase when the hiring committee is deciding how to level you, but if so that will only be meaningful if they're slotting you for the first two levels or so.
Everything becomes easier with a degree, doubly so with a degree from a top university. But they only use that as a factor in deciding who to interview; all they care about when deciding who to hire is interview performance. Someone without a degree should be optimizing their search by convincing hiring managers or employees to refer them into the process directly, thereby short circuiting the recruiters.
Have you considered the possibility that a degree from a top university could influence an interviewer's report of the candidate's technical proficiency?
During one interview I had at Google, I stumbled when performing addition on base 64 numbers.
Since I don't have a degree, it seems likely that interviewer will write that I have a conceptual deficiency with numeric bases and mathematics.
If I had a degree from CMU and gave an identical performance, they might instead write that I was rusty with numeric bases.
There's also the fact that most of the interviewers have a degree, many from a top 10 university. Hiring people that match their own profile validates their own background which benefits their career, so a self-interested and rational interviewer should rightly tend to give more positive ratings to people with degrees, ideally from institutions similar to theirs.
I think this is relevant at every stage of the interview process. If you sound nervous and don't have a degree, they might think you have a mental disorder, whereas if you have a degree from CMU they might just think that you don't want to disappoint your family.
I feel disadvantaged at every stage of the interview process for not having a degree. I'm sure there's no moment where someone is consciously docking me points or arguing against me with specific reference to the lack of degree. But I do think it's heavily influencing how academic types perceive me, and what they write about me in their report.
This will vary widely based on job function: it may be true for engineers, but it's not true for marketing. From what I hear, at Facebook and google, if you apply for a marketing job, You absolutely don't stand a chance unless you've come from a top 10 school or ivy leage school
Everyone I've talked to in the industry views people with a Masters much less favorably than people with a Bachelors or PhD.
And from experience I can say there is a shockingly high number of people with Masters in Comp Sci churning through the hiring pool who can't write a single line of code or even valid HTML.
I don't know why this is, but I think a Masters is getting a negative reputation to the point that you might consider not listing it on your resume at all in certain cases.
Getting an MS is a sign that the candidate wasn't particularly good before getting one, because of the various reasons people get an MS. And it's not like they became a better developer as a result of getting one.
The way to determine this is by measuring actual performance.
With more information, like why or how they got an MS, the probability distribution changes. My impression is, there's a set of dimwits from a dimwit part of the industry that decide they should get a Master's in order to better their career. As opposed to, say, getting one right after school because you didn't want to enter the real world, or because a 5-year MS seemed like a good idea, or being brainwashed in general about the value of formal schooling.
Don't ask me! I never got a Master's, and if I did get one, it wouldn't be in CS. In general I think work experience would inform your course selection or the decision to get an MS in the first place. That's pretty much the main way it would affect it.
Only true for recent grads (2-3 years after college). Google itself (and ex-googlers) say degree doesn't matter for job applicants with some work experience.
> Not just men! Men, Women, and everything in between.
fella (fel·la)
- nonstandard spelling of fellow, used in representing speech in various dialects.
So we follow 'fellow':
fellow (fel·low)
- a person in the same position, involved in the same activity, or otherwise associated with another.
And so we can conclude that this is completely fine. It can easily be reasoned that the GP was using it to refer to a generic group of individuals not just a single gender. By you drawing attention to it when it was a proper usage of the word, actually does more harm than good to your cause.
> Nearly every usage of "fella" I've heard has implied that it referred to a male.
Neat, and I've heard it implied multiple times to refer to generic groups of people, in US English as well too just like you. The thing though we need to consider is definitions, facts, sentence context, and even the auhtor's intent much more heavily then both of our personal experiences.
It can easily be argued based on context that the author's intent was to refer to a group of people generically, they even used the "nonstandard" and generic version of the word.
Not sure what dictionary you used, but this sounds highly irregular to me as a native UK English speaker. I've never heard of "fella" being used to refer to anything but someone of male gender.
That said, clearly our experiences and interpretations differ.
There is no right or wrong here. As such I dont think we can easily reason that they were using it to refer to generic group at all as clearly there is confusion and different interpretations of the word. Using "fellas" to address colleagues in an email (for example) that includes non-males may lead you to inadvertently offending people who share my interpretation of the word.
I think it would be better for everyone to just use non-gendered terms in the first place to avoid this sort of confusion and potential to give offense (e.g. "guys" is another loaded term: some people think it is non-gendered, whilst others think it is strongly-gendered - as such probably best avoided in a lot of situations).
Some alternative options that are non-gendered could have been "people", "applicants", or "potential employees" (and for the "hi guys"/"hi fellas" email opening you can just do "hi all" or "hi everyone")
That's actually not a bad thing in my book.
When I was at the beginning of my career, the fact that most companies completely disregard any non-work-related experience was extremely frustrating to me. I'd been tinkering with computers my whole life, working on stuff far above and beyond your average "just learned it in class" folks, and it was all irrelevant unless qualified by work experience.
Of course today its commonplace to show off your "hobby-based experience" to employers via a Github page and F/OSS contributions, but back then it wasn't.
And please don't email code samples through BITNET because each IBM SYSOP has their own different home brew set of EBCDIC<=>ASCII translation tables. (That's why C has trigraphs!)
Senior Operations Analyst -- Knowledge of scripting languages (Korn Shell, Perl and/or Python)
Korn shell surprises me! I thought that Google was always a Linux shop, and never used any other Unix. Was Korn shell ever popular on Linux, as opposed to bash?
I didn't use shell back in 1999, but I thought that bash was already popular back then. bash was apparently the first program that Linus Torvalds got running on Linux, back in the early 90's.
I saw a bit of early Perl at Google when I worked there, but it was mostly all Python. I never saw any Korn shell, although I guess bash is compatible with Korn shell, so maybe that's what they meant. Or it was written by a recruiter who copied from other common job postings at the time.
I'd argue it's pretty standard, I mean you don't have to use it.
I find lunch at work already a pretty big perk, where it's not offered it's an easy E5-7 per day (I can't be arsed to make it at home), that adds up over a year.
For many alcoholics, it's not possible to have "just one beer". If it's there, it's a constant, overwhelming temptation that is at best a distraction from your work and at worst the cause for a relapse. In addition to trying to avoid the distraction of the beer in the fridge, you need to be around people who _are_ enjoying a beer or two responsibly, which makes it even harder.
Fortunately, I'm not an alcoholic. I quite enjoy a beer or two with colleagues now and then, and that's the end of it. But I'll bet at least some of those same colleagues were going through a silent torture keeping it under control.
But I'm pretty sure I'm a compulsive eater. If there's a box of donuts I'll have one, for sure, like everyone else. Then a couple hours later, after having thought about donuts for the last two hours - (and hating myself for having eaten the donut), I'll have another. If there's free chips I'm sure to grab a pack when I walk by. A failure of willpower? Sure. A sign that I'm a lesser person, maybe lazy (funny since I would cycle 12 miles to work while they all drove...), and definitely gluttonous? You'd think that based on how some people treat you.
I lost 100 pounds by keeping absolutely, positively, nothing in my home that I could eat without cooking - this was an effective deterrent to impulse eating since cooking was a sufficient pain in the ass (these days I actually enjoy cooking! But I also weigh under 200 lbs now so I guess it's ok. Workplaces with free food can destroy that for people who struggle with eating. An aside - anyone who's gone from very obese to merely overweight or normal will tell you it's shocking just how differently people treat you. Not just potential romantic partners - _everyone_.
Anyway, I guess I'm saying that free food in the workplace, for me, is a psychological nightmare. Though if the free food is apples and carrot sticks, that's fine. I'll eat them if I'm hungry, and only then.
A workplace that offers free snacks, drinks, ping-pong tables and relaxation pods is set up to maximize your time spent in the office and encourages a culture that excludes people who value their time off work, for example because they have a family.
This is ridiculous. I'm married, have two kids, and prioitize family. I leave at or before 5 nearly every day. And....
I love office perks. On-site haircuts are fantastic - much faster than going to a salon on a weekend. Snacks and free good coffee make the day more pleasant. I don't take advantage of all of the possible perks, as some are clearly aimed at people working different schedules than I. But the reverse holds true as well (the single 23 year old likely does not avail themselves of bring your child to work day activities. :)
It's not all a conspiracy to screw workers. Improving quality of time at work and productivity during work hours is a win for everyone. I leverage perks to get more family time, not less, and I observe many of my with-family colleagues doing similarly.
I've worked at plenty of places with free snacks/drinks (some even considered enterprise), but never a place that had ping pong tables or relaxation pods, so casually introducing those to the argument is a tough sell and changes the context enough so that I don't think the rest of your point still stands. What are your thoughts on a more fitting comparison, such as snacks/drinks provided vs. BYO/vending machine/go to the store?
Not OP but I'd say it's the shortest path to obesity, unless you have a very strong will.
I never buy anything at the automated machines at my workplace, but when my colleagues bring some food for others to share, I always take some, for instance.
Depending what's available. At my job, if I forget my lunch, my only option is driving to a fast-food joint. If my employer offered snacks (some healthy, some not), I'd likely end up healthier. It's situational, depends on the person and workplace. Willpower is only a small part of it (at least for me).
I work at Google. I get in at 8, leave at 4, because I value my family time more than my work time and it has not held me back whatsoever. Not even an eyebrow raised.
That's largely true for me as well (also Googler, albeit recent). Looking after a somewhat broader area in SRE as a manager, the one thing that makes that tricky at times is time zones of partner teams and stakeholders. I think Google does an overall good (but not perfect) job at trying to lessen the negative impact of that. There is a culture of respecting people's private time and working hours. There is certainly a culture of caring about each other's well being. (This may be biased by my org, SRE, or my office in Europe.)
Turns out, I've got willpower when in the supermarket, but not when there's a fridge in the office. I could just about limit myself to 1 of each a day, but even that was too much.
That's one thing that bothers me too. If they provide something for free it's almost always junk food, candy or soda. I prefer not to have this in my face all the time while I am at work.
Almost definitely not the case at Google presently. 80-90% of the fridge space is dedicated to non-soda beverages (flavored seltzers, cold brew coffee, iced teas), and the chips + candy are hidden out of sight in the snack areas.
I think my workplace has set an effective deterrent by making all these ridiculously cheap, but still like $0.10. Hungry people eat, but not so much impulse eating.
We had chocolate covered digestive biscuits (both kinds of chocolate!). I got through them like nobody's business, but I only ate the chilled ones from the fridge (marginally healthier).
Interned at a place with free food and snacks (better than the ones I’ve seen at Google IMO) to a place without any and I lost weight. Nice side benefit.
I almost did. My professor would become Google's director of research and when she did she encouraged me to send a CV as I was about to finish my degree in C.S. I sent it but didn't get hired. Maybe I was just not Google material (i.e.: not good enough) but the official answer I got was that they were focussing on hiring U.S. residents at that point which I wasn't.
I remember reading stories from the era following this (maybe the late 2000's) where getting hired by Google was incredibly difficult. As in "You're already a superstar, waste 6 months of your time going through a complicated and disorganized process, and still get rejected" difficult. Made me wonder how they actually managed to hire anyone, let alone thousands of employees.
Google were not "evil" for a long time after this. They really were a force for good in the world for a long time. I have never admired a large company so much as I did the Google of the early 2000s. Youthful, gifted, moral, crazily ambitious, constantly doing things I thought impossible…
The "evil" only really crept in once they started to take over all of the world's advertising.
If you think that's when "evil" crept in, you really should think again how "evil" works - or, how would you implement and scale such a business model. Hint: long before they even started taking over the world of ads. The goals were defined at the beginning.
This is a common pattern that companies follow; make a good product now, make money later. Many products become crappy and companies go sour when they turn this corner.
Even from a user’s perspective, if a product is not profitable, it will either disappear or the company will have to do something user-hostile to achieve profitability.
I like simple business models. I give the company money and they give me stuff.
> This means we base employment decisions exclusively on our current business needs and the given merit of a candidate. We encourage excellence at all levels in our organization, and are not influenced by race, color, gender, sexual orientation, age, handicap, religion, or any other factor irrelevant to doing a great job.
I suggest they were incorrect in their claim not to be influenced by those things - that's why they have a diversity problem now.
Edited to add: In 1998 I probably would have read this and cheered it as a place where diversity was recognised and welcomed; in 2018 I read it as "we don't feel we have to do anything about our unconscious biases, which we're satisfied with"
(warning typing on bumppy airplane ride on tiny phone, where is my emacs again ?)
Given how successful how successful they are and how right they were on so many other things it is hard to tell if they were incorrect or not.
But while we are at it let's talk about unconscious bias. This is brought up a lot. If it does exist and is affecting people's decisions why do we always talk about it in thr manner you just have.
Could women not have unconscious bias to men and wanting to work with them? Maybe. I see a lot of hate spouting out of "Diversity Warriors". Just the other day a lady from glitch was so happy about diversity she had to talk disparaging about men -- making a very very welcoming presentation.
Could blacks have unconscious bias to whites? Maybe. I often hear the problem is "I see to many white faces" - while living in a majority white nation. Just watched a video where that was sighed as a major problem at Evergreen. But this dotey has been told many times befor. Nobody does the math to realize that in a majority white nation the only way to fix the "problem" is to active limit reproduction or inclusion of white people. You could also attempt to reproduce no whites at a higher rate or import more non whites. With way the peoblem translate in to "white".
Could gay or trans people have unconscious bias twars cis gender people? Maybe. Given the distain all over social media for srait people, even more so for white men.
Could it be that these groups of people also too have unconscious bais and don't want to work with white men and found employment elsewhere?
I don't bring this up because I don't want diversity. Or that I have a problem with any of these groups. I bring it up because it is awfully shitty thing to constantly blame a single group of people every time somebody feels the outcome is unjust.
Why don't I see marches of women demanding to work in trash pickup? Or people demanding more men veterinarians? Or having better quotas of who gets to die doing their job today (80% men today, women have it safe).
Doninreally want these things? No. I think people while chose to do what they want do in the long run. But you cant make the "why" people don't chose a given job because of a single group for purly being that group.
Also. When working with code nobody gives a fuck who you are. They give 10 fucks about how awesome your code is and 100 fucks if they learn something from your work.
I was curious about this and it turns out that in the United States and Canada women have indeed become the predominant gender by far in this line of work, at least according to what I could find in this study (which is quite old, back from 2003): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC340187/
> Veterinary medicine, previously a male-dominated profession, has experienced a significant increase in the number of women studying at veterinary colleges and practising in all fields of the profession. In Canada, and in the United States, women constitute approximately 80% of the veterinary college student population. Forty-three percent of practising veterinarians in Canada are now female, and women are predicted to represent the majority of the veterinary profession by 2007
It's curious because over here in (Eastern) Europe I'd say that men are at least as equally represented as women when it comes to being a veterinarian, I wasn't aware that in Northern America things had changed.
"We encourage excellence at all levels in our organization, and are not influenced by race, color, gender, sexual orientation, age, handicap, religion, or any other factor irrelevant to doing a great job."
