It does for me, at least. I'd absolutely hate having my job satisfaction determined so much by a manager and team that I was assigned. (Ideally I wouldn't want it impacting much at all, but truly flat companies are still hard to find, despite the rhetoric.) It works for some people, but it won't work for me.
I spent about 5 years at Google starting in 2006. When I arrived I was assigned to one manager, but I wasn't _super_ excited about the project. A week in, another manager offered me another opportunity and got me permission to transfer. Problem solved.
A couple years later, a new hire got assigned to a team I was on. He was a little bummed because he'd really had his eye on another project. So we talked to our manager about it and he was allowed to transfer to the team he'd been hoping for.
I have more anecdotes like this, but the long and short of it is that in my experience Google is a lot less capricious and uncaring an organization than you imagine.
>I have more anecdotes like this, but the long and short of it is that in my experience Google is a lot less capricious and uncaring an organization than you imagine.
I think the problem is that their interviewing process is. That's the first thing people encounter and it's the only thing rejected people encounter. That harms people's views of the company, even if they understand the explanation about false positives being so expensive.
In my hiring process, I interviewed with multiple managers. I picked my favorite, and I ended up working for him. It didn't work out. Within a few weeks I was working for a new manager.
And frankly, I've never once worked for a company where I was immune from re-orgs.
> It does for me, at least. I'd absolutely hate having my job satisfaction determined so much by a manager and team that I was assigned.
Well put. There were a lot of reasons I turned down my Google offer out of college and have been unenthusiastic to re-apply, but the process of saying "We'll find something for you" was a huge part of it. (The recruiter wouldn't even listen to something as simple as wanting SWE over SRE.) I ended up at a much smaller company where I could know my job and product and meet my boss before I signed.
I think the best analogy for Google is that it's like being accepted at a University. And they think it's going to take you a while to declare your major. You may not like your weeder classes. You may not like your first few professors. But pretty soon, you'll find a home for yourself, if you want to make the best of it.
Transferring within Google is easy. Yes, you would be expected to stay on your first project for a reasonable chunk of time, but transfers after that are not only possible but expected.
How do you reconcile that with your claim elsewhere that "staff turnover is very very low?"
I worked in the Mountain View office. Transferring is indeed easy, and people did transfer frequently. As a result turnover was high, and it was hard to build friendships, or gel as a team.
Two months after I was hired, I realized I hated my assigned project and talked to my manager. He talked to the site director, and passed back his response to me: "We don't care." Policy is to stay on your first team for 18 months. Exceptions to that are exceptions.
Your first team after hiring can be a bit arbitrary - you aren't cut out of the decision loop, but as an outsider it is impossible for you to know enough to make an informed decision.
Every team after that is your choice with full access to information. Google has a thriving internal job market.
