> <i>Google is the opposite: it's like a giant grad-school. Half the programmers have PhD's, and everyone treats the place like a giant research playground. While the company is hush-hush to the outside world, it's 100% open on the inside. Everyone knows what everyone is doing, everyone is working on pet projects. Every once in a while, a manager skims over the bubbling activity, looking for products to "reap" from the creative harvest.</i><p>I tried to join Google in that era, unsuccessfully. (I got surprised by a weird whiteboard interview, with an interviewer who seemed to implicitly assume they were better than me, and came off as dismissive.)<p>In hindsight, I wonder whether I would've 100% liked a company driven by software engineers (other than the apparent aspect of recent grads with senior-sized egos).<p>At the time, I would've thought that would be a total fit for me, since I was full of application ideas, a diversity of skills to help execute on the ideas, and drive to see it done.<p>But I've since worked in a place that hired a lot of PhDs from top schools/advisors as engineers, many of whom had no non-academic experience yet, and then they weren't managed towards the definite this-isn't-grad-school goals of the company.<p>The minority of us who had experience in startups and/or in Big Tech companies -- where the company had to determine a product, make it work, and ship it -- were baffled by this, and then alarmed.<p>It wasn't the PhDs' fault. I suspect that most of them just needed a few of the right nudges, and to be spared the wrong nudges they were being given.<p>But if you do have to make a working product, or even just collaborate between teams to build two pieces that will fit together, then hearing "giant research playground" today sounds like a warning sign to me.<p>(Though, in Google's case, they did ship some great things, so obviously they weren't stuck entirely. Their big problem today might be the big-corp careerism they seem to have locked in, starting with interview rituals, and continuing with promotion criteria and bigger dollar signs.)