Part of that is because of the expectation at Google that you will just move around. You don't really hire specifically into a given team, and that could be disconcerting, for sure. But you are also given enough respect by the company to assume that as a competent SWE you should be able to move around fairly easily to almost any team in the company.
When I started (9 years ago) it was stated during onboarding that you would be expected to move every two years or so. That's probably softened a bit, but it's still a part of the culture.
So even if you don't love where you're initially slotted, nobody is going to frown excessively when you transfer elsewhere after getting past your noogler phase.
I've found it frustrating to interview at other places and get blank stares when I ask about how team mobility works within the company, what happens when the team is restructured, etc.
Doesn't that put off a lot of very high-quality candidates though? If someone joins because they want to work in an interesting machine learning team, they probably don't want to be potentially moved on to a legacy Java CRUD app. Or is transferring determined more by what the employee wants?
1 point by kinkrtyavimoodh 0 minutes ago | edit | delete [–]
Among the bigger companies, Google is by far the friendliest when it comes to intra-company transfers. All you need is the manager of the destination team to accept you. If the team is in a different country, the immigration teams will do what needs to be done.
You don't need permission from your current manager.
Maybe you don't care about this, but many would consider this a huge 'perk', that justifies Google's focus on hiring good generalist SWEs who are not too wedded to a specific team.
It's a very strong part of Google culture, and it manifests itself in every aspect of Google life, such as general openness wrt code and documentation across the whole company, internal job boards etc. which make it easy to take a call about what team you want to work on next.
The latter. You transfer to where you want to go. There's an internal listing of open positions, but there's also word of mouth. Assuming the team has headcount and you get on with the manager, it's usually not hard, and doesn't take a lot of effort.
Yes, the first bit doing something you don't like might suck. But I like that Google conceives of software engineering positions as a broader discipline than "I'm a fullstack developer who uses XXX language and YYY framework"; that isn't going to be of any use to Google anyways. We generally build our own tools and have our own frameworks.
Does it put people off the hiring process? I'm sure. Luckily Google has lots of people to choose from.
Employees usually get to ask where to go next, and the expectation is generally that you spend at least a year in a position.
But I seriously doubt anyone who wants to do ML is going to sit through a year on the java team on the off chance that they could move to an ML position in a year.
When I started (9 years ago) it was stated during onboarding that you would be expected to move every two years or so. That's probably softened a bit, but it's still a part of the culture.
So even if you don't love where you're initially slotted, nobody is going to frown excessively when you transfer elsewhere after getting past your noogler phase.
I've found it frustrating to interview at other places and get blank stares when I ask about how team mobility works within the company, what happens when the team is restructured, etc.