Working at Google - First Impressions as a Software Engineer

[@NeetCode]

🚀 neetcode.io/ - 25% OFF LAUNCH SALE Discord: discord.gg/ZdDafbpw

[@hituyonabundake]

discord link is broken?

[@dynamic.6302]

Hey NeetCode, loved the video and thanks for the insights. I do have to disagree with you on one thing though - If there's anyone who does deserve nice employment, it's gotta be you, mate. You've done so much for the community and I'm sure you've transformed so many people's lives!

[@jimmylan4139]

I second this. There are countless other vendors out there just trying to take people's money, and they provide nowhere close to the quality of NeetCode's content.

[@matthias2447]

10/10 for the intro lmao

[@anuragroshan2195]

Lol

[@eobardthawne6903]

He definitely knows how to keep people engaged

[@mtnrabi]

Love that you mentioned the internal abstraction problem!! It’s something that I’ve heard from a lot of engineers at google. I can definitely see how that’s an issue.

[@rimurusama9695]

I still remember when you say "I'm still unemployed so let's do this leetcode question", jeez.. now you're at google, totally savage. Thank you, I learned A LOT from you. I hope the best for you

[@varunshrivastava2706]

It was nice talking to you at the discord event. Please do more of it!!!

[@NeetCode]

Thanks, yeah for sure! 👍

[@peterkim1867]

Share a link to the discord for us casuals that don't have it

[@dynamic.6302]

@@peterkim1867 You can find it in the description of this vid

[@reessimmons2159]

As a Google senior engineer and follower of the channel I was really interested in your opinion. I guess this will come with time but I'm very interested in your opinions on design docs and perf culture in the future. Anyways regards from your fellow Googler in Canada Edit: Sorry forgot to mention, your opinions of internal tooling and documentation is 100% spot on

[@cloudstrife7083]

your not afraid that when a company abstract too much (instead of using industry standard) it can backfire on you and make your business less agile and fast ? it happened to so many company in different industry outside of tech... because your starting to live in your little tech world you created yourself FOR yourself and it cause more issues than what it solve etc for example Google Cloud can't compete with Azure / Aws etc why use different standard than the industry standard in others fields like Ansible etc

[@rodrigoramirezb]

Hi Neetcode, I recently got an offer for Microsoft, and I will be starting next year! Thank you so much for your videos, it helped a lot!!

[@NeetCode]

Congratulations 🎉🎉🎉

[@nero9985]

Best of luck

[@camcommute]

Hey congrats! Got any tips that I can use to get into Microsoft too?

[@_checkit]

R u gonna fix Windows? No? Nobody is.

[@rodrigoramirezb]

@@camcommute Yes! Try to focus more on the behavioral side of the interview, they give a lot of importance to that portion. Also, study a lot of strings problems, all the problems I got on my interview were about strings, and it's a common pattern for microsoft interviews. Best of luck!

[@mariedesignz1659]

Great video! I failed my google technical interview a couple weeks ago but I’m going to continue to try. I still work for a pretty good company and now I k ow what areas to work on if I want to work for Google.

[@saiphaneeshk.h.5482]

All the best, I'm gonna start my IT carrier in 2 months and hope I'll be able to join google in 2 years

[@mrengineer555]

Hi @marie could you please guide me share me the materials you prepared so far 🙂

[@gwynbleidd9921]

Really happy for you dude. I think you deserve it :)

[@mightyshenanigans2607]

I just got my offer from G and its all thanks to this channel!! You are the absolute best!

[@pavanreddy1568]

Congrats!

[@mahoihei]

I just start a job in Amazon partly thanks your channel👏🏼 I definitely feel the same pain as you regarding company internal tools.

[@khalidm.3038]

Glad you settled down and you're thriving. Thank you for always updating us.

[@icerabbit225]

Very relevant video to someone who just escaped a long stride of unemployment and got an offer from a huge company that offers free meals and has a labyrinth of internal tools unfamiliar to most outside of it. Just gonna say I really appreciate your channel! It was probably the best resource I found for preparing.

[@efe9659]

Thanks to your channel I accepted my Google offer last month! I've loved onboarding so far. You're awesome Neetcode!

[@NeetCode]

Congrats 👏🎉🎉🎉

[@talhakaraca]

Kanka türk müsün

[@lifeincentralvalley9430]

your videos on leetcode problems are so helpful! I just got my first frontend engineer job at Uber, and i'm on my week 1! Thank you

[@jaafaralawieh]

Please strangle the backend team for me. The android app makes me want to die.

[@rogue4340]

@@jaafaralawieh LMAO

[@Pivotanimator1298]

Got into google, starting this summer. Thank you for your leetcode videos and the insight to working there!!

[@bishakhdutta8427]

Hey can we talk?

[@fpsgamer3688]

@@bishakhdutta8427 are you selling something or buying?

[@bishakhdutta8427]

@@fpsgamer3688 I just wanted him to take my mock interview smh

[@TimoRoseNDFilms]

@@bishakhdutta8427 hey how did your interview go? I ll be interviewing in a week

[@netzaltali]

The internal tools used in Google is an example of specialised training where employees are trained towards their products and software which are unique so that its harder to transfer your skills in Google to another company like Facebook.

[@pvic6959]

this is true. i started at google right after college and dont even know how i would change jobs if i even wanted to (which i dont at the moment). i only ever had one internship as well lol

[@Paul-ys3eu]

@@pvic6959 That's so scary. I had the same problem in Microsoft, though they don't have as many internal tools, and I left because I got afraid that if I didn't leave then my skills would degrade to the point that I'd find getting another job extremely hard. I'm glad I left for the startup world to sharpen up.

[@matthewhormis8368]

Because of your videos I was able to land a job at a FAANG company. You’re the goat

[@morbidlyocheese]

I have been using your videos to help me prepare for my Google interview in a week. Thank you for providing some of the best leetcode content I have encountered!

[@talesfromspace]

How did it go?

[@drmonkeys852]

I'm a student working at a mid-sized tech company (~50mill ARR) since my COOP in september and honestly I had pretty much the same experience (tho at a way smaller scale haha the closest thing we have to a personal chef is a keurig machine that brews coffee lol, but we also get free beer). Especially the lack of docs in internal tools. It's the most frustrating thing to get to a point in debugging where VS just skips over the code where the bad thing happens and you can't just google the problem. Now you gotta look and find the repo and dig into the code spend hours tryna understand wtf is going on only for the senior dev to basically know what's going on and fix it instantly. IMO the best thing about it is the variety of stuff to do which is what I think differentiates working in software companies vs working in a company with an IT sect. I've had a friend who spent their time in something like the later and it's not fun. Basically an office job: you spent little time coding/ solving problems and more or less dealing with bureaucratic corporate stuff. Based on my experience so far (and contrary to a lot of my beliefs I had during hs), I learned you don't need to work at FAANG to get that software culture and work environment (tho you will make the most money working there)

[@rahulkumaresan920]

You are just modest to think that yo udon't deserve such a good job, that's what would keep you striving and content at the same time. Loved your genuine opinion!

[@Skenvy]

4:27 describes generally how it is feels to work with any gcloud library; it's easier and quicker to read the code and frob the inputs in such a way as to coalesce it into behaving as expected than it is to read the documentation which is generally either old, incomplete, or missing.

[@schrodingerscat1863]

As someone at the end of their programming career I find this very interesting. Back in the day everything was proprietary because there were no open source frameworks, few commercial tools and pretty much every company had very different ways of doing things. Moving job was always a huge learning curve. Then things improved with more standards, open source frameworks and popular commercial tools being used everywhere but it looks like large corporations are now going back to proprietary in house tools and frameworks to give them an edge. Things seem to have gone full circle.

[@NeetCode]

That's a really interesting perspective i hadn't heard before, makes me wanna learn the history of software.

[@schrodingerscat1863]

@@NeetCode Here's a nice bit of history for you, back in the 1970's most coders were women. It was considered a job requiring too much accuracy and patience to be entrusted to men.

[@mazenemad8222]

Is it all worth it in the end ?

[@sandeepi9519]

Your content is helping me at lot in my journey. Thank you for doing this.

[@jessiz-]

Super interesting hearing about how all the internal tools add a lot of Googlely layers of abstraction and complexity. Also funny how Google doesn’t use GCP much, and spanner pretty much breaks the CAP theorem. It definitely sounds like there are some unique challenges to working at Google. Thanks for sharing - hope you get to reverse some linked lists soon!

[@halcyonramirez6469]

Because Google literally is the definition of NIH. They invent everything themselves for example they recommend gradle for Android but use Bazel internally for some of their projects Which boggles my mind

[@Cvarier-channel]

@@halcyonramirez6469 Bazel is meant more for large codebases, using it in a small Android app would be overkill. But you have a point nonetheless

[@anony88]

I work at a FAANG company. The free food is nice. I think the company I work at does their food really well and they have good consistency across locations. They hire regional culinary managers to focus on quality in those regions and the menus.

[@hoongfu]

That's pretty crazy to hear about the differences in food! Eat all you can man! You deserve it. Thanks for sharing about your experience. Thanks to your videos I was able to land a new job and get a competitive salary. Keep up the good work.

[@HeyItzJD]

Really great insights. Hopefully you can turn this into a regular quarterly series or something.

[@observer698]

Thank you so much for sharing your job experience. It is so funny how they make candidates reverse linked links or difficult algorithm questions with rarely used data structures and not use it at real work :}

[@jcanbb]

I have an onsite interview coming up thanks to ur channel - keep up the miracle work!!

[@_Mohanned]

Good luck my friend.

[@doom-hell]

Thanks for sharing. At least we have a chance to see google from inside. Please keep sharing, most of us won't be able to get there and having a friend working there is super Cool.

[@Oscaragious]

If I was Google, I would hire a team that does extensive documentation and that's all they do. They listen to any new commit, update documentation accordingly, and reach out to the author for more details if necessary. I could also see them do design docs for better code and doc organization. They would also be the goto for asking about any project. I imagine this team would have to be very large, but like you have Google money. It should be worth it in the long run.

[@shiffterCL]

Those people would have no fucking clue what is actually going in the docs, and would need to reach out to the guys making the changes(ie: get the guys who wrote the code to write the docs)

[@Spekt3r_808]

Loved the transparency, thanks for sharing.

[@danzengjiacuo9075]

Thanks for your video. Received email form Google’s recruiter and hope I could get enough luck to join Google. Really nice working environment especially in NYC, heard from my friend working there.

[@darkfoxwillie]

Hey bro good content. Thanks for the neetcode in the next months it will be my resource to study :)

[@huehuehue-x3c]

You have to realize that at companies the size of Google, culture is highly dependent on your department or division. I work at a very large tech company and I love my department but we also score extremely high on our employee satisfaction surveys compared to the rest of the company. It's pretty obvious that if I were working in a different part of our tech org, I would not be as happy. This is just something to keep in mind for people who are new to the tech scene (or really the corporate job scene in general). It is very important to grill your potential employers when you are interviewing. If one company is offering $150k but you don't get a good feeling from them and another company is offering $130k but you feel like it's a great fit, the second job is going to be a better use of your time and feel more rewarding overall (unless you're a masochist...)

[@Kidpunk98]

This came at the craziest time lmao. I am interning there now and all these internal tools are so annoying, because I can't learn them from some online youtube videos like I usually do, I am limited to the subpar internal docs.

[@thunderingeagle]

Hey sorry to be a bother, but can you please tell me how did you get the internship ?

[@nirvik-das]

I hate reading the old code more than the internal tools. As you said, subpar documentation of old code can take so much time to actually make the code any clearer.

[@eyeamhai6032]

Hi NeetCode! I just stumbled upon your channel today and I am grateful I can get information and relate to somebody who has also been Neet. I am still currenlty Neet, but I have quit a lot of bad habits (including losing weight, getting into exercise, quitting drugs/drinking) recently. I am glad somebody who was neet managed to get out and is now a successful youtuber and programmer! It's recently been my dream to learn about mathematics and learn how to be a SWE. The thing thats kept me sane and gave me purpose when I didn't think i'd quit drugs or drinking was math and coding. Tell me, when you were in your lowest point as a neet, did coding or academics give you purpose in life like no other? Im thinking of picking up a part time job soon and wanting to go to school for mathematics and maybe minor in CS or vice verse. Just want to understand your frame of mindset when you decided to just put your nose to the grindstone and learn coding

[@alexs591]

The thing about abstraction feel kinda weird. To me, google exposes waaaay more of how things work than most orgs, especially if they’re built on public clouds. Like, you can see how racks/servers are organized in a way you typically wouldn’t think about elsewhere. You can see the code for everything - databases, distributed processing, VMs, whatever. A lot of the most unique stuff isn’t open source but the papers have been published to the public - spanner, flume, mapreduce, Zanzibar, etc - so you can kinda see how things work from the outside. It’s pretty awesome.

[@abrorabyyu6221]

the level of honest is incredible

[@elginbeloy6205]

Google engineer here, you hit the part about struggling with internal framework errors on the head. But our internal docs is not bad if you use our internal Q&A site (in my experience at least - my team answers very quickly if I tag my question and ping).

[@NeetCode]

Definitely agree, the Q&A site has been a life saver for me.

[@Electrifize]

I need some advice if you don't mind, I am wanting to become a software engineer at google but was wanting to know if I have to take math as a subject in Grade 12. I already know basic things in math and I am great at studying Computer Science.

[@elginbeloy6205]

@@Electrifize Is it linear algebra or calculus? Linear algebra is incredibly helpful I would say. Neither are going to hurt. It exercises the same part of the brain as algorithm questions IMO.

[@Electrifize]

@@elginbeloy6205 Linear algebra I am already not so bad at and I feel like I could just study it more at home, so would it be ok to skip Math in Grade 12 or would it have any affect on me getting a Bachelors Degree in the future?

[@elginbeloy6205]

@@Electrifize IDK man, to be completely honest with you I didn't even finish High School. I learned all of my coding online and dropped out to start working at 16.

[@bianchialex]

I’m an intern in the New York office, it’s great!

[@TF242]

Great video man. I love the honesty

[@shockearth4295]

This is my DREAM! Nobody wants to work at google more than I do. I would love to be a software engineer here. I’d be happy to work here. I could work here for the next 40 years. I’m currently working on learning coding so I can have the skills to work here.

[@MeqdadDev]

A new perspective for describing Google.... Hats off to you

[@nicholasli]

Tbh I feel exactly the same about the internal tooling issues, but I work for a 150 ppl company instead. Our own tool is amazing, for most of the times. When there's a bug, I head directly to my mentor.

[@thefatehpuri7038]

Thanks GOD for a real video on how working at Google really is. A lot of internal tools we use at Google are not something super unique and are still transferable. They are based on similar core concepts.

[@ratnadeepbhattacharya1307]

I am right now interning at the MP1 building (5:08) and the food is pretty cool in the campus. Breakfast has less variety though. Work wise I feel there is a lot of interesting things going on and while output is expected, you won't really feel the pressure. And oh, Google has an extensive network of free transport here in the Bay Area.

[@heyrmi]

I can relate to you abstraction point. I used to work for a company which used to do the same. Its really pain, you don't understand whats under the hood. Still nice video mate.

[@koalakakes]

FAANG has a huge difference from the rest of the world. So many things are handled automagically for you through internal tools that you need to kind of relearn how to exist outside of FAANG

[@wayneomondiomoga1722]

Placing this here for when I join Google after writing Neetcode for some months. Currently unemployed

[@weichen1]

I love the M&M example so much.

[@cruxae]

Great perspective from a new grad POV. There are lots of other quirks at Google that you will learn once you have more experience.

[@tigerrx7]

Insurance guy @4:02 made the day. P.S. When you use your own product consistently, there’s a high likelihood that it’s going to get better. That’s why Amazon is whooping Google’s butt. 1/2 measure doesn’t get it done.

[@samCoder]

Congrats man! I really want to part of Google some day.

[@arunvenkit5373]

Thanks for being so honest!

[@humansoftech5905]

Thanks for sharing! Google is a huge company, there's so many micro cultures that exist

[@rodneyleiestrada8423]

You deserve more subscribers

[@oakleyorbit]

Well I’m glad you’re enjoying it…cause at the end of the day that’s what matters.

[@FalioV]

I once had a chance to chat with a dude who worked few years for Google. When i asked him "why did u quit ?" his answer was, wierd to me at the time, but now it make sens. He said the same thing, they use a lot of internal tools and for him this was just waste of time, cuz most of them will never be a public tools or not in the nearly decade. So he said to me "I don't want to work with tools that are bound to one company. My knowlage over them is usless after i leave google, so it pointless to waste time in learning and working with them." As far as i know he was happy of his work, payments and people, but this little "drawback" made him quit. He said, he is twice as happy working for the new company. But there is a big PLUS for poeple working there, when you need to change your job for some reason "x years of experiance as Software Engineer in Google" doesn't sounds bad. :)

[@TFCxSwagx7]

internal documentation being bad or non existent is THE WORST! I want to learn some company specific things that I can't just find online, but since the documentation isn't up to date or isn't there, I have to take up the time of the more senior developers or managers. I feel like every software company has these problems, funny to hear that Google has it too!

[@AdekTaufik]

I like this. You said it from a different point of view. Maybe after 2 years working there, you can update the video 👍🏽

[@XxCalloGamingxX]

At Amazon/AWS, they try to use public AWS but teams are often required to build on internal tooling that often feel clunky or outdated

[@obanjespirit2895]

love the "can't imagine a better job" disclaimer at the end for his bosses watching XD

[@NeetCode]

Had to throw that in there 😉

[@bandhammanikanta]

thanks for sharing your genuine feedback

[@robertmazurowski5974]

all the stuff your talking about depends on the team you are getting. In corporate environments you can get into 2 hour a day work, or 12 hour a day work. You can get into a toxic team or a nice team.

[@Pabs8h]

Thanks for the insights, very interesting stuff. I tried getting an internship at Google, got into the project search stage, but they could not find a project for me. hopefully I will have another opportunity in the future.

[@matyasurban]

Same for me :(

[@Aidan_Au]

Sounds like NeetCode is either going to launch a video course or coaching services or both

[@joelwillis2043]

yep, sounds like the real world is too hard

[@mehmetnadi8930]

You deserve that job bro!!

[@joeljoseph26]

This is awesome! 👏🏻👏🏻

[@jkrigelman]

Intro is true. Was pissed I had to study for shit I have never nor ever will need at work

[@ChaosB7ack]

Did you feel impostor syndrome in these months? After numerous successful projects and 2 years in FAANG I finally stopped thinking about leaving the job because of the feeling that I'm not good enough. Which is crazy because I also realize I've been ignoring all the overwhelmingly positive feedback at all times and discarding it as "fake".

[@Terracraft321]

Everybody feels impostor syndrome, man you're doing good. I don't think they're "fake". I think most people are honest and truthful, and even if it's just positive, it will help you to keep going. Well, like what I'm saying right now haha. But you get my point. :)

[@kristophertadlock779]

I work at a different big tech company, and it's very similar. Especially in the tech stack and tooling. I used to work with a Microsoft stack, and I miss it a lot. The cool thing about extensive internal development is that it fits the dev process like a glove (or at least it is supposed to), but the bad thing is it doesn't get vetted in nearly the same way as public tools do which allows it to get...weird. My interviewer told me that in the six years he worked there he never used stack overflow - just internal documentation and help channels. He was right. I never use stack overflow either. I wish I could. I wish my internal tools were documented as well as Microsoft tools are. Tech island is a great way to describe it.

[@Terracraft321]

Thanks for the observation.

[@kell7689]

Super cool insight to help us see behind the Google curtain.

[@raptorsbeak8206]

Love your content man 👌👌

[@manashisarkar9775]

I had to pause during your explanation about the internal tools. I think most of them are OK, except the whole resource management system. I can't believe how outdated and tedious the whole quota allocation and setup process is, with permissions, memberships, approvals, etc. They really do suck. But the internal tools I've used seem pretty great to me, especially because of the monorepo which makes dependency management super easy. Plus the concept of dedicated hardware for testing instead of testing locally is pretty neat because of the level of standardisation this approach offers. I'd say Google's internal tools (except the one I mentioned) are a bit of a golden handcuff for me. So, the difference in our opinions are probably due to lack of experience in the ecosystem, rather than there being problems with the tools. It is also nice that you have the tool creators on speed dial. You can message them directly and get replies within reasonable time. You can also tell them exactly what's missing in the documentation. Internal chat app sucks, and it is one of those products that keeps getting worse with new features.

[@satyam3993]

Even Google's open source FE framework Angular is so sophisticated and has so much abstractions everywhere! Sometimes reading the docs use to feel like I've entered some mysterious land which is so cut off from the outer world(FE toolings) that if I spend more time in here I'll forget to live like a normal person! I think I over over-exaggerated a bit 😆

[@DavidDLee]

Welcome! GCP is a lot newer than other Google stuff. Eventually, more stuff will be on GCP

[@TechOnScreen]

I don't think you really need a job in the first place, reasons below.. 1. you are a good programmer and could lead his way to something innovative maybe build a library/product, supports its community to grow it further.. 2. gr8 youtube channel where you explain your mind and heart clearly in each of the problems, maybe you could even teach computer science topics/interview prep/ latest tech trends/ web 3, etc. 3. you are an influencer who really has a substantial amount of impact on the coding community! millions of ways to leverage that, you know that better :)

[@GuruTheCoder]

tf

[@Terracraft321]

​@@GuruTheCoder Yeah money doesn't grow on trees, lol and even if you work your butt off, at least having a job seems more stable with the paycheck even if it's not like instant millions. Of course, there are risks in everything, but that's generally the safer option; you could lose everything at any point. The other guys' points are fair though in the way that you can 10x other devs with libraries and explain concepts, but the work just doesn't magically come out of nowhere.

[@GuruTheCoder]

@@Terracraft321 you're talking random BS.

[@ThewarmakerHD]

Thanks to you i have got a job at amazon!

[@Danjovisagat]

This sounds like where I work, tech jobs are incredible.

[@TheFurball1212]

Congrats!!!

[@vmaxxk]

"No one uses GCP" at the same time "throw everything in Spanner" Love the video btw.

[@bobgodwinx]

Nice update. I need to train more b4 applying.. I am coming.

[@kalahari8295]

Honesty 🔥❤️

[@tahirraza2590]

Man you’re awesome!

[@spamlogs2701]

You live like a king man like if good not pretty good

[@suprcodr]

Great vid. Hopefully I can make it to Google one day!

[@mohdjibly6184]

Awesome video...thanks for sharing :)

[@forthehomies7043]

Absolute dream job... Hard work pays off!

[@ollietinsley6223]

Nice review, I feel like you just described where I work as well same thing tools and abstraction, yamls and configs, automation....

[@rocker19943]

One day I will also say day one! thanks for sharing your impression

[@siddheshabnave2101]

Great review

[@AkinduDasanayake]

Great video!

[@skjoldgames]

I'm going to Apple next month. I'd love to hear some thoughts on the culture between the two. I've always assumed Apple would have much better company culture, but I was surprised by your video.

[@mmsegura]

I’m interning at Apple in 5 months at their Austin location. May I ask what background you came from or what experience you had that set you in that position?

[@skjoldgames]

@@mmsegura As you probably already know, there's not a lot I can say, but what I can say is my degree was in education and I was working as a coding instructor before. When I was interviewing, a big part of the determining factor was how well I would fit in with the company culture and the energy I would bring. Feedback is a big part of the culture and knowing how to receive and give feedback is important. Ask lots of questions. Congratulations, Apple is a great company to work for.

[@Endar92]

As a normal person, I like Google, most of it's products are very useful and smart.. On the other hand, as an iOS mobile app developer, I really hate using google libraries due to being too big, sometimes buggy, without good documentation, having too much dependencies and a lot of times behind current standards.

[@NeetCode]

Yeah, I mostly agree

[@venugopalraosapare]

Honestly speaking, No company has TOXIC environment... its the team within the company. I worked for a giant us bank (in their IT Dept.), here in India, and my management sucked.... specially Middle management.... while i could see and hear members from other teams having monthly team lunch sponsored by the company - we were paying from our pockets as and when we had a higher manager (above my manager) visited our site.... and trust me its was not cheap taking him out to a 5 star restaurant...... On top of that, i found out that my manager would claim that as company expenses.....this is just one example.... i have a lot of bad experiences... which finally led me to leave the firm...

[@eddieh7962]

Aye today’s my first day as an intern!

[@usefulprogrammer9880]

Please keep leetcoding, every single day, you will seek higher compensation in less than 12 months, be prepared to interview for new positions. Other FAANG plus emerging industries and startups. This industry is a competition for resources, take advantage of it.