Difference between revisions of "1415T1g1 Silicon Valley/Participant Information/Reflection/11 Dec"
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<div style="font-size: 15px"><b>Shopping At The Great Mall A Simon Center (Assignment Center)!</b></div> | <div style="font-size: 15px"><b>Shopping At The Great Mall A Simon Center (Assignment Center)!</b></div> | ||
| + | It poured cats and dogs today, thus initially most of our plans were drenched out :(. Dropbox got cancelled (really sad :( wanted to get some space on my dropbox account) and Google was initially called off but we were lucky that Yihao's brother offered to personally bring us around! Anyway I'll talk about that later! Since initially we had nothing we could do for the day due the the largest storm of the decade! We decided that it ain't gonna rain on our parade! We decided to visit one of the large malls around called The Great Mall A Simon Center which featured a wide array of well known brands the group split up immediately upon arriving and everyone was off doing their shopping! It was great to have sometime hanging out around the mall chilling after the past few days of intense company visits. Bought a pair of slacks and checked out a really cool arcade which looked like a casino! Once we were done with shopping we headed off towards Google! | ||
<div style="font-size: 15px"><b>Google - The Results of Googling Google at One Infinity Loop</b></div> | <div style="font-size: 15px"><b>Google - The Results of Googling Google at One Infinity Loop</b></div> | ||
| + | We arrived at Google at around 3 after travelling down from the shopping mall and the sky was still pouring. The company has many complexes around the campus and they have a very university like structure around the area, with classes and projects that employees can pickup and join at their own will. Our host Yan Hao, Yi Hao's brother, met us at the entrance of his complex where he worked at and then brought us into a meeting room. In the meeting room, he gave us a small presentation about Google and about his experience and story of how he got to where he was, we also had a Q&A session where we could ask him some questions about the company and himself. There were a couple of things in which he explained and showcased to us during our conversation with him which I felt was pretty impressionable and related to us. | ||
| + | |||
| + | The first thing I remembered about our exchange with him was about the massive scale of operations which Google has, in order to meet with the extremely massive scale of service that they provide to the entire world. Any function or service that they provide has easily millions of users and therefore their infrastructure and technical reliability teams has to be close to perfect or at least the best of the best. The massiveness of their services I believe trains their infrastructure employees in a way only possible at Google as nowhere else are there operations in such a massive scale. The staff are so good at handling with such infrastructure matters that, when ObamaCare crashed due to the massive scale of users using the website, the a group of their infrastructure employees were called down to fix the problem as mentioned by Yan Hao. | ||
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| + | The second thing about Google I picked up was that it was very open as any individual within the company can look into or check out the codes and information of any of their products/services even if they are not working or related to the operations. This helps with the generation of ideas, facilitates integration and also help with the development of new services. Furthermore, Google also encourages their employees to take on multiple or switch between different groups that work on different projects within the company. This is not something we see in many companies as most of the other companies we visited either only has a main focus of on their core business like Nitrous.IO or do not normally allow people to jump around between project groups. This i believe is one of the reasons why the company is said to have one of the best working environment as well as having a very innovative workforce. | ||
| + | |||
| + | Last but not least the most important thing i got out from Yan Hao, was on the interview in which he had in order to be offered a job within Google. The Google Interview generally consist of 2 off-site phone interviews, 4 on-site interviews & evaluation by a panel of engineers (Mainly for engineers). For the on-site interviews, applicants are given a algorithmic or data structure problem/scenario where they are suppose to come up with a solution to the problem and then explain the big O complexity of their solution. Next they are expected to improve the complexity of their proposed solution and as a final test for just one single on-site interview they are expected to write down on a white board the correct syntax of the implementation of the code. As can be seen the difficulty and requirements of the interviews by Google are extremely high, this is so that they are able to sieve out those that are not good enough to work at Google and also to ensure that the talent pool at Google are kept at a high level. This is also because at Google they generally do not fire people when they do not do well or perform at their job but instead try to help improve and support the individual who is not performing. On the whole, our time at Google was a very fruitful one and it has truly inspired me to working harder towards improving and making myself a better stronger developer. | ||
<div style="font-size: 12px"><b>Key Learning Points</b></div> | <div style="font-size: 12px"><b>Key Learning Points</b></div> | ||
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| − | <li> | + | <li>When the problems are massive and difficult, it trains and makes the best people.</li> |
| − | <li> | + | <li>At Google, the open and encouraging culture of the company, makes it one of the most innovative companies and also accounts for it having the best working environment around the world since it value adds on their employees.</li> |
| + | <li>We've got to work really hard to improve on ourselves everyday because there are extremely difficult tests and obstacles out there that we have to face & overcome in order to achieve or to get our hands on the fruits of labour once we've overcome this obstacles.</li> | ||
</ul> | </ul> | ||
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Revision as of 17:10, 13 December 2014
It poured cats and dogs today, thus initially most of our plans were drenched out :(. Dropbox got cancelled (really sad :( wanted to get some space on my dropbox account) and Google was initially called off but we were lucky that Yihao's brother offered to personally bring us around! Anyway I'll talk about that later! Since initially we had nothing we could do for the day due the the largest storm of the decade! We decided that it ain't gonna rain on our parade! We decided to visit one of the large malls around called The Great Mall A Simon Center which featured a wide array of well known brands the group split up immediately upon arriving and everyone was off doing their shopping! It was great to have sometime hanging out around the mall chilling after the past few days of intense company visits. Bought a pair of slacks and checked out a really cool arcade which looked like a casino! Once we were done with shopping we headed off towards Google!
We arrived at Google at around 3 after travelling down from the shopping mall and the sky was still pouring. The company has many complexes around the campus and they have a very university like structure around the area, with classes and projects that employees can pickup and join at their own will. Our host Yan Hao, Yi Hao's brother, met us at the entrance of his complex where he worked at and then brought us into a meeting room. In the meeting room, he gave us a small presentation about Google and about his experience and story of how he got to where he was, we also had a Q&A session where we could ask him some questions about the company and himself. There were a couple of things in which he explained and showcased to us during our conversation with him which I felt was pretty impressionable and related to us.
The first thing I remembered about our exchange with him was about the massive scale of operations which Google has, in order to meet with the extremely massive scale of service that they provide to the entire world. Any function or service that they provide has easily millions of users and therefore their infrastructure and technical reliability teams has to be close to perfect or at least the best of the best. The massiveness of their services I believe trains their infrastructure employees in a way only possible at Google as nowhere else are there operations in such a massive scale. The staff are so good at handling with such infrastructure matters that, when ObamaCare crashed due to the massive scale of users using the website, the a group of their infrastructure employees were called down to fix the problem as mentioned by Yan Hao.
The second thing about Google I picked up was that it was very open as any individual within the company can look into or check out the codes and information of any of their products/services even if they are not working or related to the operations. This helps with the generation of ideas, facilitates integration and also help with the development of new services. Furthermore, Google also encourages their employees to take on multiple or switch between different groups that work on different projects within the company. This is not something we see in many companies as most of the other companies we visited either only has a main focus of on their core business like Nitrous.IO or do not normally allow people to jump around between project groups. This i believe is one of the reasons why the company is said to have one of the best working environment as well as having a very innovative workforce.
Last but not least the most important thing i got out from Yan Hao, was on the interview in which he had in order to be offered a job within Google. The Google Interview generally consist of 2 off-site phone interviews, 4 on-site interviews & evaluation by a panel of engineers (Mainly for engineers). For the on-site interviews, applicants are given a algorithmic or data structure problem/scenario where they are suppose to come up with a solution to the problem and then explain the big O complexity of their solution. Next they are expected to improve the complexity of their proposed solution and as a final test for just one single on-site interview they are expected to write down on a white board the correct syntax of the implementation of the code. As can be seen the difficulty and requirements of the interviews by Google are extremely high, this is so that they are able to sieve out those that are not good enough to work at Google and also to ensure that the talent pool at Google are kept at a high level. This is also because at Google they generally do not fire people when they do not do well or perform at their job but instead try to help improve and support the individual who is not performing. On the whole, our time at Google was a very fruitful one and it has truly inspired me to working harder towards improving and making myself a better stronger developer.
- When the problems are massive and difficult, it trains and makes the best people.
- At Google, the open and encouraging culture of the company, makes it one of the most innovative companies and also accounts for it having the best working environment around the world since it value adds on their employees.
- We've got to work really hard to improve on ourselves everyday because there are extremely difficult tests and obstacles out there that we have to face & overcome in order to achieve or to get our hands on the fruits of labour once we've overcome this obstacles.
Today, we learn about the product development lifecycle of Google. They used quite a bit of time planning before writing code. Code can be written pretty quickly, and with modern tools such as CakePHP code is written for you instead. However, while the planning is done there will still be changes – and google engineers easily change it(after all, they are good programmers) however, it is interesting to note that there has been little done to ensure that the documents are not updated frequently. I like the fact that they believe that rigorous testing – I saw a poster in the toilet that said something along these lines: the more time spent testing the lesser time debugging. I think this is true. A lot of time spent doing the different testing(unit, integration) would save a lot of time debugging.
What’s interesting also is that they have an internal google testing before a product is launched that reaches over 50 000 users. That’s a good number of users to really test the service in terms of being able to load the number of users and bug testing.
It is also interesting to note that for the ‘average task’ such as version control and issue tracking, google uses a proprietary solution – while it’s understandable that they may have greater requirement as compared to smaller software shops, it is quite a mystery that they do not themselves share with the world their solutions – afterall, the produce solutions for the world, and their inspiration for new products are simple – I believe there’s a better email solution etc.
One thing however, is that google is moving away from having internal teams build new products. There has been a recent trend of buying over companies to break into a new market(like android). Could this spell the end for google’s rapid growth and it’s position as a kingpin? What does this mean for the employees of google?
The news that we’re going to Google was received with much excitement. Google is one of the companies that almost every engineer or developer wants to work at. Of course, it’s natural to dream of working at a company that ranks top for best workplaces, great salary, great employee benefits and free food. Google’s work place is structured much like a university with buildings (a.k.a complexes) with facilities such as meeting rooms, work stations, quite rooms, etc. for the staff to book and utilize. Such a workplace is immortalized in the tech world and is adopted by many tech companies and startups.
My thought that Google have managed to allow its employees to generate ideas and thus, retain the startup culture was wrong. Because according to the discussion at Google, the company has grown too large and is facing difficulties in churning out new projects. The current CEO, Larry Page has taken initiatives to shut down unsuccessful projects. This may mean that Googlers will become less willing to propose new projects. Since new projects give the company an opportunity to avoid being stagnant and keep up with the upcoming trends, Google’s strategy is to invest in successful startups that deal with the fields Google is interested in. This strategy can be seen in the company’s acquisition of robotic firms recently. Therefore, this may be a sign that the company might cut down on internal project proposition and adopt the aforementioned investment strategy.
It is interesting and humbling to hear how people get hired into Google. How Google stays fair in it’s hiring efforts is something I respect about the company. As a young secondary school student who had joined the school’s IT Club, I was excited to learn programming and go for competitions. It is unfortunate that at that young age, I didn't had much guidance and had to be independent both in learning and participating in IT competitions. I used to join National Olympiad of Informatics (NOI) organized by NUS during my secondary school times and always wondered how people could program an algorithm so fast and efficient. I had to learn coding, data structures, problem solving myself. I had no idea that a field called computational thinking existed back then. Perhaps, I would have had a chance to win one of the many NOI competitions I joined if I had formal training. Nevertheless, I am glad to have shared this connection of participating in NOI with Yan Hao, our host at Google.
A programmer's dream, Google is one the biggest tech firms in the world. The sheer size of the company is just overwhelming. One has to take transport to get from one point to another. Initially, the storm made it impossible to visit Google but thanks to Yihao's brother, Yanhao, we were lucky to visit this fine institute eventually. Like the general consensus, it is very hard to get into Google and Yanhao actually went through with us the selection and hiring process. The most important thing is not about the entire hiring process itself because everyone knows that it is tough, but instead it is the amount of effort that one is willing to put in in order to get the job. A lot of times people just give up halfway when it gets too tough, and therefore did not make it to companies to Google eventually. One of the attributing reason may be due to the fact that Google is in the States, and it is so far away from Singapore. That causes a lot of people to lose sight of it during their study days. It is good to go on trips like this TSM, to visit institutes such as Google to get back the dream that one had.
The most daunting factor of working in Silicon Valley may be the corporate tax rates here. With a whopping 40% of corporate tax rate, the bring-home pay is much less. However, Google realises this problem and also knows that money is not the only determining factor of keeping a good employee. As such, they have one the best facilities in the world in order to provide employees entertainment and relaxation at work. At the same time, they also provide meals and transportation for the employees. It all goes to show that in Silicon Valley, pay is not the only detrimental factor of keeping talents, work benefits are very important too.
