Reading it back, my comment was harsher than I intended, especially with the reference to Amazon, but most of my aversion to working at a place like Google is just the shear size as well as where most of the offices are located.

I grew up in a tiny midwest town and I love it here. I would not enjoy living on either one of the coasts.

Many of my classmates in college couldn't wait to get out of the midwest. I have friends at Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and other large names in the tech industry, but more often than not, when I hear them talk about their jobs, even when they are talking about them positively, I am glad I stayed in the midwest because that is what fits me the best.

You could try Google Pittsburgh; it's almost the midwest :)

(I work for Google Seattle, but I grew up in Pittsburgh -- Seattle is definitely more my speed, but I do enjoy a trip home now and then)

Google also does some dev work in Chicago.

I've worked with teams that are based in the Google office in Boulder, CO and visited them a few times - it's a nice office.

> I would not enjoy living on either one of the coasts. Have you left the tiny midwest town and know that for a fact? Or do you base that on just word of mouth, articles, or..?

I have lived in a lot of different places: (New Jersey, North Carolina, Texas, Southern California, Northern California (don't laugh re: me splitting those!) and briefly in Illinoism Connecticut and the Dominican Replublic. ) and find value in their differentness.

I live in the Midwest, and have traveled frequently to Silicon Valley for work. It's a nice enough area in most ways, but I get a really nice view of it through travel-expensed meals and hotel accomodations where the commute to the office is 10 minutes of pleasent traffic. The experience the locals have involves more traffic and rather fewer trips to modestly nice restaurants. I don't hate the area by any means, but it certainly isn't so much better than where I live that I would want the commute or to buy 5 or 6 fairly nice houses just to live there... which is a rough approximation of the housing costs vs. where I live now.

To be clear, I'll say again it's not like I hate the Valley, but the reality is that day-to-day life between my Valley coworkers and mine just isn't that different, but sure is more expensive. If you find a Silicon Valley job from a SV company in a remote office... and there are rather a lot of them, just not all in one place... there's not that much advantage left, unless you really love something about SV specifically, which is of course a totally reasonable and sensible thing.

It's a mecca for programmers. I can go to talks on various technical topics every day of the week if I wanted to. I have spoken to the creator of Scala, the Symfony PHP framework and Optimizely. It's just really exciting (to me) to have that level of access.

Whereas my friends in Houston get to go to one conference a year (if that). But I totally agree if you want a house with land to raise kids personally I think it sucks to live here.

there's a chicago office, fwiw...

Chicago is midwest in geography and climate only. Someone who grew up in a typical small midwest town would feel as out of place in Chicago as in San Francisco, New York, or Paris.

Chicago is a large city, and with having a large city some of the small town-isms just don't fly.

However, I do enjoy living in Chicago, and that I do consider it a huge difference from the coasts.

Probably the closest to the vibe the person is looking for would be the Google Waterloo office where I work, or the Pittsburgh office the other poster mentioned.

Google Chicago is almost all salespeople. Not much technology going on there.

It's true the sales people do out number us here in Chicago, but we do have O(100) engineers in the office. We are working on lots of cool stuff: Ads, Search, and Privacy to name a couple.

You guys need to help the CJUG get some more talks! It's been a while since Google has had a role in that.

And you guys have a super-cool and mildly famous engineering site lead!

Everyone is different - while I don't doubt that Google has fantastic perks, I can't think of many things that I would want to work on that aren't the moonshot crazy experimental projects (and, let's face it, most people won't be working on them). And working on a giant campus that's isolated from the outside world... no thank you.

But like I said, we're all very different.

"I can't think of many things that I would want to work on that aren't the moonshot crazy experimental projects (and, let's face it, most people won't be working on them)."

This is true of almost everyone, of course. Every year i read the incoming intern abstracts, and they all literally say the same thing "I really would like to work on <whatever really popular crazy project was in the news lately>". Literally all of them.

That said, often you can work on them if you are good enough at what you do.

(But yes, often you have to prove that first, either internally or externally)

Are there ever new, fast-moving projects at Google? That's the core of my perception - I don't want to work on Google Docs, Gmail, etc. etc. or other large, established projects. I want to work on something small, iterate quickly, etc. - but to the outsider, I don't see any Google products doing that.

There are lots of them, but they tend to get canceled early. As an outsider, you only see projects once they've reached some baseline threshold of viability - a large number of projects never reach that, not because Google says they can't but just because they're bad ideas to begin with.

I spent about half my time at Google working on mundane improvements to search - visual redesigns, feature unification, infrastructure improvements - and half working on crazy green-field projects. Most of the crazy stuff was eventually canceled, and the stuff that did launch (eg. Google Authorship) ended up being a lot more toned-down than we initially envisioned. Ultimately I think I learned more from the crazy projects, but it's a very different kind of learning, much more experiential than factual.

The other thing you learn when you actually succeed at a crazy new idea is that people build up a tolerance to them really quickly. The first time we did an interactive doodle on the home page (PacMan...actually technically that was the second, but it was the first people noticed), everybody went wild, it was in all the newspapers, and we calculated people spent 4.82 million hours playing it. Now when an interactive doodle comes out, most people don't even notice. Remember that Google Docs, GMail, etc. were revolutionary in their day; it's only because they've become successful that you don't want to work on them.

There are, but as you might expect when a project like that gets started, even the smell of it attracts a lot of people. I can't say that anything I've seen at Google iterates quickly compared to where I've worked before. It's just not a company built for quick iteration -- between the code reviews and style guide and readability restrictions, a lot of discussion around design docs, interacting with a lot of other teams, etc.

But it has other strengths.

    working on a giant campus that's isolated from
    the outside world

You don't have to work in Mountain View! The remote offices are really nice, and are generally well integrated into their cities.

Right, even the one in San Francisco.

> But like I said, we're all very different.

Actually, I am indistinguishable from everybody else.

yeah those are fun projects