> Is a google employee in US somehow more competent than the one in India?
It depends.
There are people in India that are brighter and more hard-working than most people in the USA, just by statistical chance. But there is something that can happen there that I don't know what it is and affects some.
In another job our company had a site in India and I remotely supported them. Most people I interacted with wanted step by step instructions and hand-holding. One day someone news enters, bright and full of energy, so we could give him the documentation, point him in the right direction and he did the job. Until he didn't and also wanted step by step directions and hand-holding.
To this day I don't know what prompted the change. My only guess is that there's something cultural going on that can make people tone themselves down and not be proactive.
> Google is really interested in hiring the best engineers but rather a specific type of engineer.
I think you made an excellent point. It seems that outside a tiny minority of world-class experts, Google is more interested in hiring interchangeable workers.
As it happens, I have. You are correct that there are tons of smart people there (in my less modest moods, I'd take myself as one such datapoint). What of it? That does not contradict, and therefore did not disabuse me of, the observation I noted above.
"I wonder why google can hire top talent in bangalore and something like Guruji cannot build a better search engine?"
Ha but that was my point. The really good guys prefer to work for companies (and mostly emigrate to America) rather than start their own companies in India.
Guruji can't build a better search engine because they aren't as good as the folks who work on Google's Search Engine.
hint: that (kind of core tech )work doesn't happen in Google Bangalore anyway.
hint2 : look at the bios of Guruji's founders and employees for evidence of significant technical expertise. Compare them to Page and Brin and the others who created the Google search engine :-)).
Someone will outcompete Google some day. It won't be Guruji.
Do you know how hard Google has found it to hire the (very few) people they have in their Bangalore centre in spite of offering astronomical (compared to the rest of the market) salaries? Talk to someone in Goog recuiting for their tale of woe.
I have friends in Goog India and I know what they work on - believe me it is nothing of company shaking importance.
The technical centre of gravity of Google (or Yahoo or Microsoft, or Oracle, or Intel) , especially on the innovation axis (which is what we are discussing here) is well away from the shores of India.
Google hires some 'technical talent' in India sure enough.But do they hire people good enough to create the next killer startup? There is no evidence yet. I'll be glad to be proved wrong.
"I think there are pretty smart people will India who will start it sooner or later it just remains to be seen who it will be."
I agree. But I'd bet on "later". It is not about how smart people are. Given a billion people one would expect quite a few smart people. It is (among other things) about what the culture is like as (you report) Sacca pointed out.
>> I routinely got to see people who I would never want to work with get hired there.
Can you expland on this? It doesn't really mesh with the preview sentence for me.
>>If Google becomes less of a target for barely-qualified people who want to rest and vest
It's always been my impression that people who actually manage to get a job at Google are extremely competent(so by definition - qualified) - is that not true?
> The same job with Google pays 2-3 times less than in the US..
Is that the case? (a) How does Google justify that internally? (b) Doesn't it cause a huge amount of ill-feeling internally? (c) If that is so why are there people elsewhere in this thread saying that FAANG jobs pay very well in London?
> But they don't want employees in Bangalore. They want indentured servants and poverty wages.
Google has a ton of employees in Bangalore that passed the same interviews and are paid way more than typical offshore devs, this just isn't true. Google gets the best people in India who wants to stay there, those are good enough to develop software without much help.
> think of the comp savings when you hire from outside the Bay Area
Just considering the US, I wonder how many engineers are talented enough to work for Google, are interested in working for Google, and aren't already there, even in a satellite office? I'm sure there are some, but between a variety of office locations and good pay, I'm not convinced there's a large untapped pool of rural tech talent.
> There are tens of thousands of employees at Google. Most of them interview.
You say that as if it's a good thing. Do you expect that most people could be e.g. effective teachers, effective marketers, or effective taste-testers, with no previous experience?
> So if you apply for a position at Google and they offer you a job that suits your skill set and background you should not take the job because Google potentially has a list of thousands of people they could replace you with? wat?
Yes, exactly. If it is trivially easy to find thousands of people with your skill set and background, there is something wrong with that skill set and background. You will need to work on it, because these things are an accident waiting to happen.
> a) The company is a sweatshop and burns through junior developers like tissue paper to flame.
Not really. They have a real problem and they cannot readily find someone to solve it. And then you come along. Now the problem may finally get solved. This is how it best works. If not, there is something wrong with the entire situation.
> b) The work you will be doing will be the worst sort of low skill crap work that no one with a half way decent resume and experience wants to do.
If you do not have a pretty much unique selling proposition, you will indeed compete at the bottom of the market. You need the ability to solve a particular type of non-trivial problems and you must preferably have been specializing for years in doing that. People in your field understand what the value proposition is, and there is no need to endlessly debate this with them first.
Google do not use the technology in which I specialize. One day they may, but at the moment, they don't. So, I would never run into them, when occasionally looking for a project (once every 3 - 5 years). The day that Google starts using this technology, they could indeed try to ask me for an interview, but why would I prefer them to the established players? Am I replaceable? Yes, but Google are even more replaceable. I will have done fine for years, before they decided to enter the field too. Who exactly is the one that is replaceable here?
> “5 years of Python” at a Google is a different story from having spent “5 years of Python” at an Infosys.
Yep the Infosys guy has experience of being airdropped into unfamiliar companies in foreign countries, getting up to speed with business requirements and technical constraints and producing something reasonable in three months.
The Google guy probably spent five years writing Yet Another Messager App.
Broadly speaking, I would argue yes.
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