[TriLUG] Positions with Google in NC

Aaron S. Joyner aaron at joyner.ws
Sun Feb 18 15:26:58 EST 2007


Warning, this is one of "those" Aaron emails that goes on for ever.  I
actually wrote it in two sittings, it took so long.  If you're not
interested in the internals of Google compensation, you may safely stop
reading now.

bak wrote:
> Bear with me for a minute, I haven't discussed this with more than a
> couple people in the last six months, and I couldn't resist the
> opportunity to do so now.
I'm always interested to hear other people's viewpoints, especially as I
do around an interview or two a week, and yours was quite interesting. 
Do you mind if I ask you what position you interviewed for, which
recruiter and which group?  You said it was an SA position, I'm going to
guess it was probably with SysOps (not to say anything bad about them at
all, quite the contrary, just that it kinda doubt it was with our group
or I would have heard about a guy from NC).  If you want to elaborate on
this I'd be happy to take this portion of the conversation off-list as well.

> As someone who was offered an SA job at Google last year and turned it
> down, I would describe my experience with the Google interview process
> as prolonged (i.e. about 3 months) and somewhat aggravating,
> consisting of two phone screens, followed by an on-site interview of
> epic length, during which I was grilled in half a dozen hour-long
> interviews on various UNIX, scripting, networking, and SA-related
> topics at a depth of something like 300 meters.
No offense intended, but what we generally tend to look for in
candidates is the type of person who thinks what you just described is a
fun and enjoyable thing, as opposed to the grilling you seemed to
interpret it as.  Perhaps that's the fault of the interviewers
(occasionally certain people can be a bit harsh if they're having a bad
day, but in my experience that's pretty rare, we only do much
interviewing if we enjoy it).  Ideally, the chance to consider things
you may not have thought about before like scaling a given task up to
work on 10,000+ machines, or the internals of how a file system works,
or the ramifications of how various networking implementations do packet
delivery... should be an interesting and fun way to spend a day.

We've also been working on reducing the time it takes to get from one
end of the interview process to the other.  3 months is a good bit
longer than we'd like it to take, and we've got a lot of changes going
on internally to improve that.  I think, particularly for the Lenoir
positions, we'll see a lot shorter turn around times on the whole process.

> I must have acquitted myself fairly well, because they offered me the
> job.  But the fact that they had free food, drinks, and scooby snacks
> didn't really make up, in my mind, for their middling salary offer --
> the recruiter even told me at the interview that they compensate for
> the salary with their benefits, free ski trips, free food and
> t-shirts, etc.  This is an argument that would have pulled more weight
> with me had I been just out of college, but not so much at this stage
> in my life.  And the "We're Google" factor didn't make up for the fact
> that none of the techie interviewers made the time to answer my
> questions about what working at Google was like, except for the last
> guy, who reluctantly gave me five minutes.  Career path?  Work
> environment?  We're Google! Our benefits are great!  Don't ask
> questions, we have to double our workforce next year!  Perhaps this is
> not an unreasonable attitude to encounter at a company like Google,
> but I have to admit that it worried me a great deal.
So, base salary isn't what one might typically expect.  And even from
the offer letter, it's sometimes hard to make an accurate assessment of
what the compensation package provided by Google really is.  Having been
in exactly your shoes, I'll describe my reasoning, and what I learned
after the fact.  As you may have noted from the 3rd link I provided, how
the compensation would work out was very much on my mind when I left the
interview as well.  I was quite concerned at the cost of living,
especially as I looked at housing in the valley.  I set my baseline as
what I'd like to make, was 2x my current salary in RTP.  I decided if I
got at least 1.5x my current salary in RTP, that I'd still happily
accept with out any questions.  1.3x my salary in NC and I'd have to
talk with the wife about it, but probably decline, as it would mean
living on a bit of a tight budget.  What I ended up being offered was a
base salary of around 1.2x of my salary in RTP, plus some other stocks,
annual bonus, etc.  (For reference, my salary in RTP was quite healthy
for the time, it was about 2x what I was making 6 months before that). 
We sat down and made some tough decisions about moving out to CA, but
decided we could make it work on that base salary alone.  The deciding
factor for me, at the time, was that if we could make it work
financially, it would be worth it to work with such amazingly
intelligent and talented people.  Fast forward ~20 months.

No, we did not buy a house.  We bought a condo roughly equivalent to our
apartment in Raleigh (very nice but only ~1100 sq ft), which was
stupid-expensive.  The thing I learned after having been here a year and
a half though, is that little side line of "other stocks, annual bonus,
etc" is really an amazingly large side item.  Google bases a substantial
portion of it's payout on performance.  They provide an annual bonus
which is N percent of your salary.  I won't go into precisely what value
N is (it varies based on your offer, but typically a low double-digit
percentage), but the important part is that it's modified, based on your
performance, and the companies performance.  The percentage of
performance expectations can be 0 to X00% (where X can be significantly
more than 1).  Thus, if you're performing above expectations, that bonus
gets multiplied based on your performance and the companies
performance.  I thought originally that on paper, based on my experience
with previous employers, "oh a target bonus percentage of N% of my
annual income, I'll be surprised if I ever see 0.5N of that".  I've gone
through the annual bonus process twice now, and at least in my case,
it's always I've always been exceeding expectations, and the company
blows them out of the water.  Thus, my annual bonus has consistently
been *vastly* more than N.

The net effect of all this rambling, is that on my W2 from Google for
last year, my taxable income was markedly above 2x of my base salary
before coming to Google.

Then there's all the benefits (health, vision, dental, vacation time,
food, massages, etc, etc), the fantastic people I work with, the
complete absence of unintelligent people (that's not to be
underestimated as a feature), etc, etc.

> So I took the job I'd been offered here in RTP for a couple thousand
> less -- and it turns out that I can easily afford a house here and rub
> shoulders with half of the techies and nerds on the east coast (the
> other half are in NYC it seems :), whereas in Northern California I
> would be renting and probably wind up with a roommate.
Yeah, housing in the valley is insane.  If you're not comfortable with
that insanity (coupled with the realistic possibility that it can all
fall down into pieces in the next earthquake), I don't recommend moving
out here.  I'd say looking into a nice job for the same company where
land is cheap, houses are large, and there are gazillions of servers to
play with.  Perhaps Lenoir?  :)

> Would I have taken the Google job if it were here in NC instead of in
> CA, or if I were a software guy instead of an SA?  Almost certainly!
> But Google is a company like any other company; they just have this
> thing about saying "Don't Be Evil" a bunch of times, having an
> impossibly huge server farm, and giving out Kool-Aid, and I've heard
> the same "it's awesome!" and "it's insane!" stories from Google
> employees that I've heard from countless other folks.
True.  It's good Kool-Aide (gourmet, even) and I enjoy it every day in
one of the 11 cafes.  :)

> So thanks for putting up with my little rant.  I guess my point is
> this: don't sell yourself short!  Quality techies are in demand, and
> the company with the best co-workers, leadership, and compensation
> wins. The prospect of free food is nice and all, but as an adult, I
> have learned to feed myself. :)
Rants are good.  Having more than one perspective, and constructive
discussion, is what makes mailing lists like TriLUG such a wonderful
thing.  My perspective, from personal experience, is that the
compensation package is deceptively wonderful, and we should do a better
job as a company of helping educate potential recruits on that.  I'm
still working on getting my viewpoint accepted in the larger population
of Google.  :)

> Maybe I should have had Taco Bell like Aaron before my Google
> interview -- I went to In-N-Out. :)
Mmm... In-N-Out.  To avoid re-inciting the burger thread, I'll avoid
saying more than, "I wish I'd known about In-N-Out when I came out for
the interview."  :)

Aaron S. Joyner

> --bak
>
> Aaron S. Joyner wrote:
>>
>> Having said all that, let me tack on two things.  The Google interview
>> process is both highly educational, and a real treat in-and-of
>> itself. Even if you're not sure you would be interested in moving to
>> Lenoir, or
>> if you'd make it through the interview process, I'd strongly encourage
>> you to try it.  I promise you'll learn at least a dozen things you'd
>> never thought of along the way.  In addition to the sheer educational
>> value, it's really quite a fun experience to just geek out for a few
>> hours with some of the smartest, most technically challenging and
>> interesting people you're likely to meet this year.
>>
>> So, what now?  Send me a resume, and I'll punch it into our internal
>> recruit-tracking system, along with a friendly recommendation.  You'll
>> likely hear back from a recruiter by mid next week, at the latest.  As a
>> friendly reminder, you probably want to reply directly to me, not to the
>> list.
>>
>> Aaron S. Joyner
>>
>> 0 -
>> http://www.trilug.org/pipermail/trilug/Week-of-Mon-20070115/046024.html
>> 1 - http://tinyurl.com/3cwowy (Google Maps showing location of Lenoir)
>> 2 - http://joyner.ws/Google-Interview.html





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