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Jobs at Google. From Ukraine to Silicon Valley

He solved a couple of mathematical problems and got an internship on Facebook, left Ukraine in Silicon Valley, went to Google and now works from home 4 days out of 5. We talked to Vova, a Google engineer who shared the story of how he got to the internship on Facebook, why I decided to leave there, and why Google is more comfortable with it.
Below we have attached a video with a full interview.



For me, mathematics is the backbone of a worldview


I divide it into an understandable school one, and an ultra-specialized university one. Objectively, I don’t need the second now in my life. It would be useful if I wrote machine learning, or the core itself. But I do not do this, so I have enough school curriculum in algebra.

Mathematics helped me understand what proof is, that there is a clear problem that can either be proved or not. And it cannot be solved in half. In this case, you have a clear understanding of what is truth and truth, that there are logical chains. And this makes you a skeptic who puts the knowledge of the world on the shelves.

I participated in the olympiads from the 7th grade to the 11th. I already dropped out of this at the university: I discovered Dota and a free life.

How I got to Facebook


I participated in the Facebook Hacker Cup Olympiad.

Large IT companies hold their olympiads. At Google it is called Google Code Jam, at Facebook - Facebook Hacker Cup. They pass in several stages.

The first stage is just an open registration, where they check whether you know what programming is. At the next stage, the tasks are already more complex. Then a stage of medium complexity, and then candidates are selected for the final On-Site, where you need to solve problems directly in the company’s office. True, their prizes are funny. In the first place, the guys get $ 10 thousand. For a student, this is a lot, but this is not serious money.

More importantly, these olympiads are monitored by different companies. A recruiter wrote to me asking if I want to get an internship. I never in my life imagined that I would leave Ukraine at all. I had a plan to earn a thousand dollars, rent an apartment - and that’s it, life was a success.

Then there were no student exchanges, no international conferences. Then I was in isolation, even to some extent in stagnation. We received knowledge 20 years ago, it was absolutely uninteresting. Teachers, roughly speaking, came to the lecture drunk. And you could not go to university at all, do nothing and graduate anyway. What I actually succeeded.

Therefore, I did not believe that I could get there at all. A recruiter wrote to me and said: “You showed yourself well. If you want an interview and an internship, then solve these problems, ”and threw me a link to their assignment page. My neighbor and I were a bit over-dramatized, and we tried to solve all the problems. Made somewhere 11 of 13. Moreover, the latter were already very difficult. As a result, it turned out that the recruiter just wanted to see if we could click on the buttons at all, or if someone decided for us. That is, we could just solve 2 problems and relax.

After that there was a telephone interview. I successfully passed it, partly due to the fact that I already knew how to solve what I was asked. So here is my advice to schoolchildren and students: all the technical interviews that companies are currently conducting are essentially Olympiad tasks. Moreover, olympiads at the regional level are much more complicated than interviews. Therefore, if you show good results at regional olympiads, interviews for the internship are held with eyes closed.

Then I was invited to Silicon Valley. I was offered a salary of $ 5800 per month + $ 1000 per apartment, or they themselves pay for housing. I chose the money. For comparison, in Ukraine I earned $ 1300. That is, they offered me a price 5 times more. So my reaction was: “Yes, take me with your hands. I am ready for anything. ”



Objectively, Facebook and Google are the best companies for programmers


At least for beginners. At the basic levels, you choose the tasks yourself, work at your convenience, because you have access to all the equipment. Unlimited internet, modern cars, interesting projects and so on. I don’t want to do it.

My only problem with Facebook was that I did not use the product. From Facebook, I needed only a messenger. Therefore, what I was working on was indifferent to me. And it hit hard on motivation. There was still not always enough money, and then the question arose of why I was doing what I was not interested in.

I’ll run ahead and say that this year my salary at Google will be $ 254 thousand.

Why I left Facebook


Because he did not know how to manage himself. I got into the team of games, and although I like to play games, but unfortunately I got into the team of browser games that are uninteresting and repetitive. They are made just to squeeze money. And I really didn’t like it.

Now a man from some brokerage company is writing to me, trying to lure me to him. But I do not answer him, because I am not interested in financial matters. And although I can earn more there, but ... I will give an example: now I work from home 4 days out of 5. On Google, there are only 10 for 100 people who have such conditions.

I currently live in San Francisco, and my job is in Mountain View. The corporate bus round trip takes 1 hour. Both at work and home I come squeezed every time. Naturally, the motivation is zero. And at home I just put on my pajamas and sit down at my huge monitor. Partly this is precisely the reason why I do not want to change my team: such an opportunity may simply not exist.

It happened historically. My manager began to work a lot remotely, and then our team connected. I won’t say that it’s easy, because it’s often difficult to motivate yourself, and the success of the day depends on what you started to do first - to work, or to enable YouTube or a game.

But if something needs to be done urgently: to write a prototype or a new function, I will do it in a day or two. I respond to such requests instantly, so there are no hanging urgent tasks for me. But I have problems with long-term ones. Because you need to plan your time, paint everything and so on, and it is very easy to get out of the mode of operation.



How i got to google


I was found through Facebook. If you got an internship and you have one of the large companies in your resume, then the conversation with you will already be completely different. Experience in such companies overlaps grades and a university diploma. An internship on Facebook gives a very, very many points.

I don’t know where they found me, maybe on LinkedIn. The recruiter wrote to the post office and invited him for an internship. I passed the interview, it was technical - olympiad problems of the regional level. But they didn’t pick up a team for me and said: “Go boy, take a walk.” A year later they found a team for me. At first I worked in the Google Glasses department, the Aura project, and then I moved to RMI - Research Machine Intelligence. And here I have been working for almost three years.

I like almost everything on Google. I set tasks for myself, work when I want, I have unlimited resources, if needed. That is, I can access the data center or some kind of video card or computer. I'm not micromanagement. The job of a manager in a company is to help you advance through your career, and not make you make a project. My tasks include: setting priorities, looking for customers, writing a product, testing it, drawing and developing, maintaining documentation and so on. For this, they pay me so much. All that specialized people do is hanging on me.

I’m typesetting and writing the frontend and the server part, and the databases, and I work with them, and I create experiments, collecting data - all in a row. There are areas in which I do not climb, but if it’s very impatient, I can master them. Here is my main job - endless study and study of all technologies.

One of the features of Google is that within our company almost everything is self-written. We have our own build system, language framework, development environment, and even tracker tasks. When hiring, the experience of other companies is useful, but there are no special requirements for the candidate, because he will have to learn all the technologies again.

And here I don’t like the fact that Google always judges someone. Because of this, we are having problems in terms of data availability. Each year, working with data becomes more and more difficult. Collecting data is a huge hemorrhoids. We need to write documentation on how this data will be used, how to store it, they need to be encrypted and updated every week. And this greatly slows down the development.

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