26 Things I learned at Google

Published: 2024-08-21

some of the soundtracks I would put on while working

So how do I get into Google?

I don’t really have any super specific advice, anything you can read about or what other people can tell you is similar to advice I could give. What I will say is that you should try to focus specifically on the Google interview format, and practice doing phone interviews with your friends. I did around 1 interview a day for 2 weeks leading up to the interviews. (I did so much talking I lost my voice after the real interviews happened).

This post is miscellaneous list of things my summer at Google had taught me. This was originally a part of the JJPA for this season but I decided to separate them for the sake of length.

Not really ordered in any specific way.

1. The bins behind the TSA person at LAX airport are things that haven’t gotten checked yet.

Don’t go around and take the things out because you think that’s the drop off for people on the other side, because you’re concerned you’ll miss your flight. Especially if you have a big steam deck that got notified in the scan for it’s large battery.

Don’t (almost) get arrested.

2. Cheap things generally aren’t super nice or clean.

Makes sense, but it definitely hit me for the first time living on my own. But considering how high cost of living is in the bay area is, places that would be incredibly expensive here ($2,300 CAD a month) are kinda dingy and small (cheap is relative).

3. Student housing generally isn’t very nice either.

Same problems as other cheap places, but there’s also usually NOTHING there, so you need to get everything yourself. Pro Frugality tip, take a trip around student housing trash bins on moving out day, you might be able to find some things that students didn’t want to take back with them (I sure got rid of some stuff.)

4. There’s so much America.

Too much even. Why it so big? I didn’t do any traveling but everyone was seemingly from a different part of it, each state feels like it’s own country in some way. I know there’s that thing of Americans thinking there the epicenter of the entire world, but being in there I can tell why they started to think that. There’s an entire person’s world worth of things in just half of America.

5. Airbnb support is pretty good!

They got me out of a cheap, small, dingy place with mold in the cabinets and hair on the sheets. They also reimbursed some of my subsequent hotel stay!

6. Companies that are designed for developers will have good dev experience.

My development environment at Scotiabank felt like it was built out of workarounds, like they gave me an accountants laptop and expected me to be able to run a node server.

Google was designed for people to write code, it’s extremely nice to not feel like I’m fighting against the system to do my job. And it allows you to do better and more interesting work. Google has a lot of amazing internal tools that take a while to onboard onto but it’s worth it.

7. Wait, Sports are fun!

I got to try a lot of sports while I was there.

Boxing/Muay Thai

This was definitely the one I spent the most time with, my interest in boxing and martial arts is entirely because of Hajime no Ippo. I am delighted to let all my fellow nerds know that there is a significant amount of overlap between concepts in fighting games, and concepts in fighting sports. There are an uncountable amount of times I went “Oh just like x”, x being something like:

Counter Hits
Hit confirming
Using dash momentum to link elbows
Backdashing to make normals wiff
Dandy step into pilebunker like Slayer from Guilty Gear
and so much more! This could be an entire post onto itself so I won’t get too into it. The Google kickboxing community is a very kind group of individuals, if you’re ever in sunnyvale go to Coach G and Coach Greg’s classes!

Bouldering/Top Rope Rock Climbing

Very fun, nice to go monkey mode and climb. Quickly learned you need to use your legs instead of your arms, which makes sense (pulling up your entire body with your arms gets very tiring quickly). People who boulder are very cool and I was adpoted into a group of boulderers when I simply asked for some stretches to do for my wrists.

Pickleball

Pickleball is the Mario Kart of sports, it’s easy to pick up and everyone is incredibly confident at their skill in it.

It’s like tennis but slower and smaller, and the point/scoring system seems very arbitrary (there probably is some solid game design considerations as to why only points scored on your serve count, but it’s certainly not intuitive).

Spiking the ball is very fun though and is unique to Pickleball.

It’s a real pick up and play sport, party game ahh sport.

8. Wait, Sports are expensive!

Some sports require a lot more infrastructure than others, and that requires you to buy a bunch of stuff. climbing gyms and boxing gyms can be quite expensive. That’s probably why I haven’t given them a try until now lol

9. Katy Perry was right actually.

Or I guess the beach boys beat her to it, although they have opinions on girls all over america, seems like a lot of generalizing, someone should let these artists know that girls are individuals! But some of those individual girls, irrespective of state/geography of origin or current residence,

…are undeniable.

10. Good Intranets are nice.

Not surprising that Google has a incredibly good internal search engine, Google in general has a lot of internal tools and documentation that would be incredibly difficult to find without having a good search engine to rely on.

11. Free stuff is nice, Creature comforts are valuable.

Everything you’ve heard about the Bay Area Google offices is true. I spent around 12 hours a day there because it was much nicer than the place I was staying.

Shout outs to the food team for handling the logistics of feeding so many engineers. It’s not easy and the food is still good!

12. Walkable downtowns are loud.

Downtown San Jose is loud and the infrastructure is kinda bad. Get earplugs, Use earplugs.

13. I was too hard on Toronto Public Transit.

I spent a LOT of money on Ubers. Bay area isn’t very walkable unless where you’re coming from and going to are next to the Caltrain. Imagine the GO Train but there’s only one line. That’s the Caltrain.

14. The memes weren’t exaggerating, mexicans love Dragon Ball that much.

I saw poncho’s for other anime like One Piece and Naruto. I asked about ponchos for Dragon ball because they HAD to exist too. Turns out they were sold out.

15. I can’t tell how hard the work is supposed to be.

It should be challenging for sure, but how challenging? Am I mid? I was definitely too reliant on my hosts, and I started trying to focus on figuring out how to find the answer instead of asking for the answer from them, because that’s what they were doing after all (they don’t know everything, there’s too much to know).

16. There are benefits to separating your personal and professional identities on the internet.

I met someone who was confused as to how he figured out how I had found him, considering he tried to separate his personal and professional programming work. I told him I simply “Found the link to his github from the software’s website, his github linked to his personal site, which linked to his linkedin, which listed he worked at Google. Looking him up on Google’s internal search, the Linkedin pfp and Google pfp matched.”. So reasonable lengths, really.

Anyway, not associating your personal opinions with your professional opinions allows you to be more flexible and not let what you say or think impact your professional life. Not in a “time to be racist” kinda way But in a “big tech companies like Google are nice to work at, but their products have a lot of qualities that antithetical to some of my opinions on good software” kinda way.

I do like to be open and I enjoy sharing here on this site, so I’m not sure if I’d scrub super personally identifying information off here and make separate “personal” and “professional” websites, but it’s something I’m thinking about. I’ve met people who do and don’t separate their personal and professional work, It’s up to the individual.

17. Use your benefits you’re already paying for them.

Get massages, talk to someone about your mental health, Rent an E-scooter for Free (although the scooter itself was nice but the process to get and later return it was kinda cumbersome. Why did Fed Ex change their mind about being able to mail a scooter back, after sending one back from the SAME Fed Ex????), Get your… wisdom teeth removed? One of the interns I know did that American Healthcare I guess. Speaking of-

18. I have no personal opinion on american healthcare because I didn’t have to experience it.

And maybe that’s for the best actually.

19. University house parties are exactly as I anticipated them to be.

If you like drinking or dancing to loud music then it’s a good time fine, otherwise you aren’t missing out on much. As someone who does neither of those things (not surprising) They aren’t for me, but now I know! I’ve never been invited to one before this, and I am pleased to let all of you know that I didn’t start any conversations with cute girls by talking about how Pac-Man was named Puck-Man in Japan. (Speaking of Scott Pilgrim vs The World, I’ve been interested in media depictions of contemporary Toronto, and have been trying to actively check out more of them, out of pure curiosity, and maybe being away from home sparked some kind of patriotism in me).

20. You can’t expect friends and like-minded people to wander and find you. You need to create spaces and opportunities.

Friends are usually formed in environments with frequent interactions and common goals. Having to try to make friends again in california was harder than anticipated, Google interns are more “normal” than I thought they’d be. I think I’ve learned that I’m just a bit more different than other people, and that’s fine. But in order to find people who vibe with me, I need to create environments and curate the vibes, and allow like-minded people to find themselves there, wasn’t really able to do that in california but it’s a lesson I can carry with me into the future.

Friends won’t just arrive, you need to go out and seek them.

21. Boys, hear me out: it takes deliberate effort to open up to others.

It’s unnatural and we aren’t taught how to listen to each other, but girls can’t solve the male loneliness epidemic. Turns out we CAN talk to other guys about our feelings? And they’ll listen? and we can help each other out? Together we can get through it :)

22. Interesting and nice people work at Google.

My team was filled with people with interesting personalities, lots of very well written people. I’m sure Christy will never forget my “production babies” bit (truly one of my finest pieces of trolling) I also met other very interesting folks, a big highlight would be being able to speak to Robert Nystrom, author of Game Programming Patterns, and Crafting Interpreters I hope the chat web team and all my favorite Googlers are doing well! If you’re a Googler reading this then you’re definitely one of my favorites :)

23. American bills suck!

Bills feel like they’re going to disintegrate. Canadian money is so much nicer, we got an update in 2011 and they missed it. $1 bills feel like curse cards in your slay the spire deck, your goal is to get rid of them as fast as possible or your deck starts to become nothing but them.

24. Costs of living is a real thing and going to other places will make you feel it.

aside from $1700 for a dingy spot, I had expected things to cost less, considering 1 USD is about 1.3 CAD. But things cost MORE, IN Usd than they would’ve been here in CAD. It’s the first time I’ve lived somewhere else so having to mentally adjust how I perceive price was strange. I was going “wow that’s expensive” before converting the price from usd to cad in my head.

25. There likely a non-insignificant amount of people that think Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comics are Japanese.

Which isn’t even that unreasonable considering how hard Uniqlo and other asian brands have been pushing it recently. I had asked one of the Sanrio Girls on my team why Peanuts was so popular among the crowd of people who also liked Sanrio characters.

she replied succinctly: “cuz it’s cute”.

One of my fellow interns thought that Dutch author and illustrator Dick Bruna’s Miffy character was Japanese in origin, and considering a similar adoption by popular east asian culture, It was easy to see how that mistake could’ve been made.

26. Good Eats!

Marufuku Ramen in San Francisco’s Japantown. You need to place a reservation at the place and wait, but it’s in a mall so there are things to do

House of Bagels in San Jose was awarded best bagels on the west coast or something? Yeah I believe that. I know New Yorkers are approaching my location rapidly to tell me how great their bagels are and yeah they’re probably better, but as someone who’s only really eaten Tim Hortons Bagels- actually a side note about that:

PSA TO ALL AMERICANS: Tim Hortons isn’t good, it’s just cheap and consistent

and the quality has the declining as of late. It’s tragic.

But House of Bagels’ Bagels are the best bagels I’ve ever had (it’s also tax free and they don’t ask for tips).

Cali Spartains. The Menu was in spanish and it was cash only 😩. Get yourself some big crispy tacos with a 24oz strawberry horchata. Tell em big Jay sent ya (they don’t know who I am)

That’s it

Check out the subsequent post to learn about what I’m up to for the rest of the year.