Today I attended a lecture by a visiting Google employee, a former student at the Faculty of computer and information science in Ljubljana, my college. He’s Slovenian too so the lecture was even more interesting for me.

The lecture was in Ljubljana at the Faculty of computer and information science. The lecture was short, but there were a lot of questions. The main topic of the lecture was how it is to work at Google and how the job application process looks like, the majority of the questions from the public were technical.

I learnt that:

• it’s normal to work for 10 hours (or more)
• it’s vital that you promote your 20% products so that more co-workers help you develop them
• if you have a good idea (and preferably a prototype) you can get to an interview with Sergey and Larry in a few weeks (in our lecturers’ case it was three weeks)
• it’s hard to get a job at Google if you’re mediocre because the selection process is looking for bright developers
• the majority of employees at Google are developers
• the main development languages at Google are C++, Java, Phyton and Javascript
• 99% of Google developers use Linux as their OS
• employees plan for the next 3 or 6 months
• employees have ‘team building’ events without their superiors
• each co-worker from the team evaluates every member of the team, including themselves; this is the basis for getting a promotion
• efficiency is not really measured
• every line of code gets code reviewed by a peer
• the documentation is done by developers that write the code
• the payment is good, you can afford things, it’s better that in other companies (in California)

The lecture was very interesting and it got me a better view into Google’s logic and environment.