Adelphi alumni explain what it takes to work at Google and what makes the job so coveted.
Stephen Bloch, Ph.D., first applied to work at Google in 2005 when he heard that the company was opening an office in New York Cityâits first outside of its Mountain View, California, headquarters. An associate professor of at the time, he applied on a whim and landed an interview, but not a job.
Google, though, held on to his rĂ©sumĂ© and a few years later invited him to interview again. âI spent six hours with techies answering technical questions,â Dr. Bloch said. But the phone call that came two weeks later was a polite rejection.
Last year it happened all over again. Google invited him back. He recalled his reaction: âIâm just going to have a fun day solving other peopleâs problems.â Two weeks later, on his 50th birthday, Google made an offer.
Today Dr. Bloch is a software engineer at Googleâs New York office. As Google has grown, so too has its New York outpost. About 3,000 âGooglersâ work in a hulking building in Manhattanâs hip Chelsea neighborhood. (Some Googlers even use scooters to traverse the massive space.) With Dr. Bloch are at least three Adelphi alumniâJoseph DiLallo â08, Anastassia Drofa â05 and Nick Miceli â12.
Despite its growth, Google remains highly selective in its hiring. Last year, it reported hiring about 0.2 percent of its three million or so applicants.
What does it take to become a Googler, and what is it like to be one? Dr. Bloch and the three Adelphi alumni shared their insights with AU VU.
Want to be a Googler? Take these steps.
Google wants people, particularly software engineers and designers, who can not only solve problems, but who also thrive on doing so.
Despite what you may have heard, interviewees are notâor at least no longerâfed brain teasers (how to escape from a blender if youâre the height of a nickel, etc.). Instead, said the Adelphi Googlers, youâll be tested with problems relevant to your area of expertise.
âYouâre interviewed by people who have the position you want to go for,â said Nick Miceli â12, a software engineer. âYouâre being asked questions exactly relevant to what you would do here.â Not that the questions are easy.
âBy the end of the day, your brains are leaking out your ears, but itâs fun,â Dr. Bloch said.
Miceli, whoâlike Anastassia Drofa â05 and Joseph DiLallo â08âhas interviewed numerous aspiring Googlers, offered this guidance, especially for current college students: Go beyond your books and class assignments and try your hand at solving real problemsâ create an app or game, get a job or an internship, contribute to open source code.
Drofa said she looks for passion in potential colleagues. She listens for clues as to how enthusiastic people are for problem-solving work and why they are excited about being at Google. âA common feature that everyone shares here is being super, super passionate all the time,â she said.
âThis is a company full of problem solvers,â Dr. Bloch said. Take, for instance, Googleâs Project Loon, an initiative to bring the Internet to remote parts of the globe using weather balloons.
As a senior user experience researcher, Drofa works with software engineers to ensure that the products they dream up are âusable, useful and desirableâ to people. She summed up Googleâs culture as âanything is possible.â âYour expectations rise really, really high as a result,â she said.
Dr. Blochâs three interviews are a case in point. DiLallo interviewed twice before getting hired as a Google software engineer.
Googlers are expected to adapt quickly to new situations and ideas. âWe iterate, we amend, we try again, we do,â Miceli said of the Google development process. Google is constantly reinventing and refining its own code. Miceli noted that âprobably over fifty percent of the code Iâve written is no longer in use.â
âYou have to be willing to throw something away,â Dr. Bloch said. He said there are even competitions within teams to delete the most lines of old code.
DiLallo said that interviewers look for people who can take feedback and input from colleagues. Interviewers commonly point out mistakes that candidates make. âSome people get very offended and very defensive and then thatâs a very bad sign, especially here where that will happen to you all the time,â DiLallo said.
âGoogle is a very collaborative place; you never work on anything by yourself,â DiLallo said. âPeople always review your code. Itâs part of Googleâs policies.â
DiLallo explained: âNobody knows everything. Our field is so expansive. I learn things from my peers, and, thankfully every so often I teach things to my peers.â
âYou do rely on each other a lot,â Drofa said of Googleâs team-based environment.
Rubbing elbows with senior management is par for the course. Google co-founder Sergey Bryn regularly holds fireside chats with employees. Miceli even described teaching an Android coding class to Craig Nevill-Manning, the engineer who started Googleâs New York office. âHe was so cool,â said Miceli.
DiLallo summed it up this way: âAt my previous job, knowledge was power and so people hoarded what they knew and were very hesitant to teach anybody anything⊠Google is the absolute opposite, where itâs like, âIf I teach you how to do this, then I donât have to do it anymore.â And everyone wants to go work on the next cool idea.â
For further information, please contact:
Todd Wilson
Strategic Communications DirectorÌę
p â 516.237.8634
e â twilson@adelphi.edu