Competent people.
Enough resources to succeed.
You have the chance to build products that millions of people will use, rather than worrying if you will be able to build something that anyone uses.
Management is generally in touch and cares. Their opinions are sometimes wacky, but the fact that they know about every project and aren't being bamboozled by middle managers is a huge win as compared to most tech companies this size.
Politics have gotten worse.
People have gotten more defensive in their decision-making. There's a disappointing lack of trust between employees that didn't exist in the past.
We have hired too many people who are only interested in making themselves look good and have lost sight of what's best for the company as a whole. Management hasn't successfully recognized and fixed this in many cases.
Lead by example in trying to keep politics out of the way.
I applied online and was surprised that I actually received an email back. I interviewed at my college in January, starting with an initial phone interview, followed by a one-on-one at my university. After that, I was flown out to Mountain View for
1. Simple phone screen to weed out wildly unqualified candidates - mostly HR questions. 2. One phone interview - coding done in Google Docs. This was a hard question dealing with dynamic programming, but I happened to study this kind of question in
One HR phone interview with some technical problems. Two software engineer interviews with more advanced technical problems and programming tasks.
I applied online and was surprised that I actually received an email back. I interviewed at my college in January, starting with an initial phone interview, followed by a one-on-one at my university. After that, I was flown out to Mountain View for
1. Simple phone screen to weed out wildly unqualified candidates - mostly HR questions. 2. One phone interview - coding done in Google Docs. This was a hard question dealing with dynamic programming, but I happened to study this kind of question in
One HR phone interview with some technical problems. Two software engineer interviews with more advanced technical problems and programming tasks.