Aren't Google acquihire offers conditional on passing the usual Google employee screening process?
I ask this not to be negative, but out of serious curiosity.
Say your employer is bought by Google - are you axed because you slept poorly and couldn't prove Fermat's Last Theorem on the whiteboard in 15 minutes?
I don't know about Google, but I've heard of this happening during other acquisitions. A friend of mine with a Ph.D. in CS worked at a startup that was just acquired. He was responsible for the a lot of the tech in the platform they were acquiring, yet since he didn't pass their algorithms heavy interview they didn't want to hire him. He ended up working for one of the other companies interested in buying the startup.
I have heard that Facebook also has a rigorous screening process for acquihires too, and people get sent away althought with a generous severance package.
The industry complains about being unable to find enough programming talent, while dismissing entire swathes of highly trained, highly educated people for investing in themselves.
What a PhD in CS teaches you is how to do research in CS. This skill may or may not be valuable for a specific company and may or may not intersect with raw dev chops. Production Dev is a distinct skill from CS research.
As a dev who has both interviewed and worked with several dozen PhDs and ABDs, the intersection of skills required to both be a great developer and complete (or nearly complete) a PhD are nearly zero.
That doesn't make sense at all. I do not see why a PhD would disproportionally filter out people with talent for coding, so that the graduates even after years of industry experience afterwards would still be unable to be great at coding.
No, but not having a PhD filters out people without a talent for coding. Same with not having a college degree at all - it's not that going to college makes you worse at coding, but that getting a coding job without a college degree requires you to be better at coding.
I'm speaking anecdotally, and there are many ways my sample may be biased. (Also, maybe bad PhD devs make sure everyone knows they have PhDs, while competent devs never mention it?).
OTOH, there could be something in culture and personality that pushes lesser devs into getting PhDs.
the assumption here is that people can only learn at adequately fast rates before earning their phd? aka, isnt the expectation that if you can earn a phd in at least a highly related industry you should be able to pick up just about anything. Are they going to know how to wrangle a huge dev ops stack into submission, or pump data through some realtime frame work to maximize throughput or setup paxos properly from day 0, fine. but neither does any other entry level engineer and these guys can either learn it or be placed on a different team within the company that does deeper research that would make use of their phd...
One of my former colleagues failed to pass his interview after his company was acquihired by Google. He had designed and contributed a decent portion of the core of the product. One of his projects for the company had about 50 stars on github.
I am terribly sorry. While looking up information about the company to be able to answer the reply, I couldn't find any news about its acquisition by Google. It was shuttered by its parent company and I presume a portion of the company must have been sold to Google if my colleague was being accurate. I can't edit or delete the comment. If I'm unvoted/downvoted then I certainly understand and agree!
More info: he is a director for a well-used standard in the IETF, so he's no slouch.
> One of my former colleagues failed to pass his interview after his company was acquihired by Google
amazing: they spend n million dollars just to get that talented individual, and then just throw it all away. My question is how is this expense reported/justified and who gets the difference? What about shareholder value?
not to troll or anything but I find it utterly stupid that this is done. Also is it a big deal to have 1000 stars on a github project you run? I am curious because I do not know what the general perception is of github projects, I mean how much do they matter? I do not have a formal training on algorithms and I am studying machine learning now. Also I have a project having 200 something stars and one having 1000+ stars
1000+ stars is a pretty big deal! I imagine you could leverage this to gain software development job interviews if you were looking.
Do they matter? It is just one of many metrics of how useful a repository is. I think it's one of the most public metrics that can be distilled to a single factoid on HN. There are absolutely better metrics to judge the quality of software.
from what I've seen at Google specifically, when hiring for team talent, acquihires are typically performed in a binary fashion -- they take everybody who wants to go, without going through the regular screening process.
Speaking from personal experience, that's not always true.
When the company I worked for was acquired for team talent, they interviewed all but a handful of the engineers. Around half were given full time offers. Another group were given fixed-term offers and the remaining engineers didn't make it in.
I was given a fixed-term offer. Several months and many interviews later, I made it in as a full time employee. I was never outright rejected, but due to circumstances involving my contract and project work, I probably took around 9-12 Google interviews over that time.
They aren't fun. But in the end, I'd say it was worth it.
I doubt this is always true. I've been involved in acqui{hire,sition} due diligence for a number of startup at a couple of different (large) internet companies. My experience has been that the terms can vary quite a bit, both in the set of folks given an offer (all, all or none, some) and in valuation relative to average developer comp at the acquirer.
I believe anaskar is saying that, for the one instance they've seen, Google either takes on the entire team or no one, and they don't do the normal Google interview.
And he may be right for n=1, but I know of n>1 instances where he's incorrect and whole teams were not taken. I even know of one instance where the CEO/founder was non-technical and they refused to allow him to remain in charge of the product post-acquisition. The direct of product, who was a Google SWE before the acquisition, took over.
> I ask this not to be negative, but out of serious curiosity.
And yet you referred to it as "BS" and provided a sarcastic example in the same post. I'd say your attempt not to be negative and to sound serious failed.
Google's "Bachelor of Science" interview screening process? I'd assume that they would have an interview that would be appropriate to the degree they obtained. I'd also be surprised if Fermat's last theorem would be involved in any way - that's more of a math problem, and isn't relevant to the work of most software engineers.
I ask this not to be negative, but out of serious curiosity.
Say your employer is bought by Google - are you axed because you slept poorly and couldn't prove Fermat's Last Theorem on the whiteboard in 15 minutes?