I can't speak to the business itself but they recently published a refreshing take on improving the product engineering interview experience in the age of AI
https://sierra.ai/blog/the-ai-native-interview
Well worth a read even if you are generally anti-AI.
That isn't surprising for most people. It is also hard to say without knowing which year and model Porsche she was driving. Someone with a Cayenne Turbo GT will have a different experience from someone with a 1st gen base Macan.
A juniper Model Y is very fast, no engine noise, can drive itself better than a lot of cars on the highway for a similar price, doesn't need gas - convenient if you have a fast charger at home/work, fewer moving parts to think about in your day to day and control.
I like knobs and AA and will never make that trade... but it makes perfect sense for many people who don't mind the interface.
I'm glad Genesis still has knobs and Lexus is getting back to that now. The German luxury cars can't rely on fantastic engines alone forever.
Damn, what a turn of opportunities from just saying yes and showing up (and obviously a ton of hardwork and sacrifices). Thanks for sharing!
I can't resist ...
> There were other dramatic events that evening in Cambridge that I think sharpened all our minds and made us appreciate there’s no time like the present, but I’ll leave that story for another day.
> ... appreciate there’s no time like the present ...
The present is now! Some of us are dying to hear the story.
Context is still relevant though. "Highly Scalable" means something different if you're working on core AWS infra vs an app to be used by 100k people at the same time for instance.
I'd expect the interviewer to engage and set some helpful boundaries (and the interviewee if they have the experience to talk about what changes between the two situations)
"I'm known for hiring the best engineers". BUT if you're really known for hiring the best engineers, please show us your accomplishments! You just told us you look for trivia which means you're great at hiring engineers who are good at language trivia.
That set has a pretty small overlap with "best" engineers. "Best" itself has a small overlap with "useful" engineers.
Your trivia knowledge is great to impress like minded people but irrelevant if the problem space doesn't depend on it.
PS: Someone could consider you a pretty junior engineer if you ship:
"if(!!1 && b.some(e=>e>6)){
foo();
}"
because the you're increasing the risk of error in a codebase that would likely be maintained by people of varying skills. You write code to solve problems and you write code so regular earth humans can grok it and manipulate it to solve problems.
Writing code with a high risk of introducing problems and misunderstanding does not signal senior in many domains.
> As someone who has been working for over 20 years and the last 10 at Google, I am not close to retiring and I don't believe the compensation at Google is that much greater than other software jobs, as my previous compensation was comparable.
You're probably well above the average comp at your level ( assuming L6+ ) given how much G stock has appreciated over the past decade though.
> So what am I saying, yes, you might be able to retire early if you work at Google a long time and are very diligent, but you probably could do the same at most other software jobs in the region.
The biggest advantage of these large companies is that the stock units + refreshers + stellar stock performance compounds wonderfully over time.
Most other workers are chasing 5-10% raises every few years with poor 401k matching, no free food and no stocks so the gap widens over time.
HELOCs ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_equity_line_of_credit ) exist to solve the problem of cash being locked up in your house. You can take a line of credit using the property as collateral or other purchases.