Life at Google with Emily Bennett

Olivia: 0:00

Hello, and welcome to The Router, the official podcast of the UQ Computing Society, where we explore the human side of tech. I'm your host, Olivia, and on this week's episode, we'll be talking to Emily about her experience at Google. So tell me a little bit about yourself, Emily.

Emily: 0:28

So, I studied at UQ for four years. I did a Bachelor of Science, majoring in computer science. And then I did computer science honours for a year. And, uh, I now work at Google. I started at the beginning of the year. Yeah.

Olivia: 0:50

Cool. So, you went from just a computer science degree to straight into Google. Did you have any internships at Google along the way?

Emily: 1:00

I didn't actually, while I was at uni, I tutored, so tutoring was kind of the job that I did throughout uni. I didn't really do any industry stuff. Didn't really do any internships. I kind of wish I had looking back now, but, tutoring is a good time. And I'm doing industry now, I guess. So, yeah.

Olivia: 1:19

How did you, like, prepare yourself to get into Google?

Emily: 1:27

I guess I got, uh, the recruiter reached out to me basically. Um, and I had kind of a chat with them on the phone and then I had a chat with a technical person, like a little virtual interview. For those, there wasn't a huge amount of prep that needed to be done. Uh, they were just kind of chats. And then the interview even was only an hour, just one technical problem. For the main portion of interviews, which was four interviews over a day. I did, you know, the standard, a bunch of LeetCode, a bunch of HackerRank preparing for that. Not as much as I probably should have done, but you know, a little bit of that.

Olivia: 2:18

Yeah, I feel like that's, um, pretty standard. Do you have any like tips for getting through the technical interview part? Because I know that a lot of people can find if they encounter a question that they get a little bit stumped on, um, they find it difficult to get through.

Emily: 2:38

The technical interview process from the outside is, is super intimidating. Like it looks really intimidating, but in reality, the interviewers that I had for my on-sites, which are the full hour long interviews were really, really lovely, like super nice. You can kind of tell they want you to succeed. So if you get stuck or if you don't understand the question, you literally just ask them and often they'll like give you little hints, and help you along your way. Cause they, they kind of want you to get to a solution. That's the ideal outcome for everyone. So just ask, ask any questions that you have, that kind of thing.

Olivia: 3:21

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that's a good tip. I am glad to hear that they are friendly and trying to make it, so yeah, now that you are at Google, what do you get up to?

Emily: 3:33

Yeah, so I work within the next billion users team so NBU, and NBU is kind of aimed at making new products and even versions of existing products, which are more accessible to people who are using the internet for the first time. So especially in countries where slow internet and low-end devices are much more common. And my, my kind of day to day involves working on a Flutter app. So Flutter is the framework, the Google framework, for writing Android and iOS apps. So I do kind of front-end Flutter development, on a team where we also have some web front-end people and a bunch of server people and project managers and UX people. And we kind of work on a project together.

Olivia: 4:25

Cool. When you started with Google, do you kind of know where you were going in terms of teams and did you have like much of a choice there?

Emily: 4:33

So the hiring process, you go through all of the interviews and then after your four on-sites, you have, um, at the hiring committee process, which is basically where they look at your interviews and they decide whether your outcomes there and what your interviewers said about you, make you a good fit for the company. And then you go through team placement, which is basically where they see if you are a good fit for any of the teams that are currently looking to add new people. And as part of that process, I got to chat to my current manager. We have a little like 30 minute phone conversation, and he got to ask me questions and I got to ask him questions. And he couldn't really tell me a huge amount about the product, because it's, it wasn't public yet. But, I knew a little bit about the team that I was going on too. And I, I had like spoken to my manager before actually starting.

Olivia: 5:27

And are you enjoying it? Do you feel like it was the right team for you?

Emily: 5:31

Yeah, the team is really lovely. It's, it's quite like a tight knit really friendly environment to be working in. We're a fairly new team. So, uh, the word that they always use is scrappy. Like we, we kind of have to get things done and move quite quickly. So the team is a really, really great place to be.

Olivia: 5:54

Yeah, that's really awesome. What are the other kinds of teams out there that, um, I suppose you're around?

Emily: 6:01

Yeah. So there are a couple of other NBU, uh, projects that, that are around us, so that they're the people that we are kind of nearest to in the office. And then Google Sydney also has, uh, the main one is Google Maps, which actually started it at Sydney. Google Photos. We have a little bit of payments, and then a couple of other teams kind of scattered here and there. We also have a bunch of Google Cloud operations that happen in Sydney.

Olivia: 6:32

Very cool. So within that, I guess, like, because you're all working in, I suppose, the, the team that is dealing with the bleeding edge and like, new technologies at Google, what kind of new technologies do you think you'd be really excited to work on?

Emily: 6:52

Hm, that's a good question. So I work with the Flutter framework, and we specifically are making an Android app. Most of the time that involves writing Dart code, which is kind of what Flutter interfaces with, but occasionally do have to touch native Android code. And for us that means Java. But as of quite recently, the official Google recommendation for Android development is actually Kotlin. And especially since I have a housemate who works with Kotlin and raves about it constantly, I would be kind of interested in starting to use some Kotlin, I realize that's not new per se, but it is new to me, so I would be pretty keen to do that. Yeah.

Olivia: 7:36

And I guess it's like quite different and it's meant to be like, I suppose, the new way to do Android specific stuff?

Emily: 7:47

Yeah.

Olivia: 7:55

And in terms of what you have, like already worked on, what do you think, like has been your favorite part of working at Google?

Emily: 8:02

Yup. So my team specifically is, we're kind of doing a bunch of testing of our product at the moment, and we've been doing a bunch of research in places like Brazil. We've done Kenya, India, we're going to Mexico shortly, and it's been super cool to see like different perspectives on technology and how it can be used. And we've also had the chance to interact directly with end users, which has been super interesting. And, as much as it was kind of terrifying knowing features that I had written were live in production was pretty cool. Uh, high pressure, but, very satisfying. Sorry. That's been, that's been a cool part of it.

Olivia: 8:48

Yeah. Cool. Yeah, I definitely in the little bit of development that I have done professionally, whenever your feature goes out, it's very, very intimidating, scary, but then like seeing people actually use it and being like,"Oh, you like, you've built in this feature. And it like works really nicely."

Emily: 9:12

Yeah, absolutely. Um, I would also say a cool part is, um, I guess this is not a project specifically, but, uh, one of the cool things about being at Google is inter-team communication is like a big thing. So if anything on flutter is not working, you can kind of directly thing someone from the Flutter team or like the GPA team where GPA is like one of the big Flutter users and you can just kind of ping someone and be like,"how do I do this?" So that's pretty cool.

Olivia: 9:37

Oh, that is very cool. It's yeah. So I guess you do get to have like a little bit of like involvement with the other teams too. Um, so I guess like looking a little bit back on your like, university experience now, um, what part of working in the professional world, do you think that university really didn't prepare you for, or at least before?

Emily: 10:10

That's a, that's a tricky question because, realistically none of the technology that I use in my job today was taught at uni, but I do think that uni is kind of less there to teach you how to use the specific tools you'll need for your job, because you're probably going to learn those on the job anyway, and more to give you the basics and then kind of help you build skills. It'll let you adapt quickly to new technologies. Um, one thing that I would say, and I do kind of mean this in a positive way, but university gave me like a very skewed idea of what teamwork would look like, in the sense that at uni group projects are kind of seen as generally not a really fun time, in industry working on a team where everyone contributes and collaborate as well. It's been a really pleasant surprise in terms of how teamwork actually looks.

Olivia: 11:03

That's always good to have, because I feel like a lecturer has always like to say,"Oh, the teams you work in at university, it's going to be just like, when you work in a professional team."

Emily: 11:13

Yeah. And what a terrifying concept that would be! No, thankfully.

Olivia: 11:20

And so, like, I guess, on, on the other foot, would you say that like, yeah, I guess like the basic skills are really what you do learn in university. Do you have any, like favorite, like what your favorite courses were that kind of helped you out given that? Yeah.

Emily: 11:40

Um, I would say so the basics, like what you learn in say CSSE2002, like the fundamentals of, uh, I guess 1001 is technically the fundamentals, but 2002 is where you start writing kind of a structured code architecture. And you start learning about that. That's really like the fundamentals. And if you can get those down, um, that that'll put you in really good footing for a job, um, in terms of actually getting a job, you can't go wrong with, uh, COMP3506, algorithms and data structures, um, really, really useful stuff for interviews. And I actually tutored that course, which was a super good, uh, thing to do, I think, in retrospect, because you get really familiar with the material and, um, it definitely came in handy for the whole like interview process.

Olivia: 12:35

So is there anything in university that you think you would have wanted to do differently aside from like working, maybe working in an industry position?

Emily: 12:49

I don't know. I think university is a good time to like, uh, learn new things, you know, like, uh, try all of the technology is really get a feel for what you enjoy doing. So that you have kind of an idea of what you want to do after university. Like, for me, that was, uh, not really doing industry stuff. So I didn't really know whether I wanted to go into industry after university or whether I wanted to go into kind of academia do a PhD, that type of thing. But some people in general, like, if you know that you want to work in industry, try out a bunch of technologies, try out a bunch of front- end, try out a bunch of backend and kind of work out what the thing that you want to want to do is, and that might save you some time in the workplace, but yeah, just, I guess, do more kind of experimenting with what I enjoy, would have been maybe a thing to do, but I've gotten really lucky even despite not doing that, I've ended up doing something that I really enjoy.

Olivia: 13:50

That's fantastic. Yeah. I think in previous episodes of the podcast here, it's been like a common piece of advice is to really, uh, try a bunch of different things. And I guess we're pretty fortunate at like at UQ that we have like lots of opportunities, like just here even like, industry, because, you know, there's always like research projects always a whole bunch of, fortunately we have like a variety of subjects in a whole bunch of different areas to try different things in. I guess maybe moving back to Google a little bit, I'm assuming your work from home now?

Emily: 14:38

Yes, I am.

Olivia: 14:40

How have you kind of found that transition from in person to being working from home?

Emily: 14:49

Yeah, quite devastating. I really got a month or two of the free coffee situation before having to head back to working from home! I've actually been working from home longer than I was working in the office. Um, so it's kind of, this is just kind of how it is now. You know, this is what I'm used to. Google Sydney is, mostly work from home mode. We have like a rotation going where people can go back in. I think we're at about 10% capacity on any given day. But I don't know, working from home is not the greatest from the perspective that you are a lot more disconnected from your team than you ordinarily would be. So, you lose that convenience of just kind of being able to tap your colleagues on the shoulder. When you have questions, questions, you have to like, uh, actually message them. You know, there's a record of you asking dumb questions. But having said that, everyone on my team has been super good about trying to like emulate those types of interactions over video chat. Um, and Google as a company has kind of been super supportive, made sure that we have everything we need to work from home. So with that in mind, I think things are going about as well as they could be.

Olivia: 16:04

Yeah. So like, where do you see yourself kind of going at Google, like further in the future?

Emily: 16:15

It's difficult to have a plan too far in the future at the moment, given like any plans at the moment are kind of staying in Australia. At the moment I'm really happy on my team and I have no intention of like trying to move away from that or anything like that. So I'm pretty content with where I am at the moment. Um, and then we'll kind of see how things go in the future. One of the nice things about Google as a company is that they have offices all over the world. And there are plenty of cases of, uh, people moving around within the company at different offices. So even on our team, we have people from all over the place. We have someone who used to work in the Japan office. We have someone from the New York office. We have people from all over the place. So I think it would be really cool to do some traveling, even if it is within Google. But yeah, we'll see how we go. Yeah.

Olivia: 17:14

See how the world is, I suppose.

Emily: 17:17

Yeah, for sure.

Olivia: 17:20

Yeah. I think, I think that pretty much covers it for the Google experience. Is there anything you'd like to maybe add, or maybe advice you'd like to give to those out there, hoping to secure a position at Google for graduate?

Emily: 17:41

I would say just kind of like doing what you're doing, like when you're at uni, you know, put the effort in to actually engage with your courses because a lot of the courses that we do at uni, in some way or another are going to be useful for your job one day, and for the interview process as well. So try and like engage while you're there. Um, I would say as well as that, there are a couple of things that aren't really stressed at uni that it would be worthwhile putting some time into. So like, this is not necessarily good for getting hired at Google, but once you're at Google, it's a reasonable, it'll be a useful thing to have if you know, about like version control, which is something that UQ doesn't really do. So there were a couple of things that are kind of fundamentals of working in industry that UQ maybe doesn't stress as much as it should. I think UQ has recently started doing version control and a couple of the fundamental courses, but that is a newish thing. So, uh, make sure that you have all the basics in place and you should be good to, you know, get in and start, start working.

Olivia: 18:53

Yeah. That's good advice. Like make sure your foundations are good and then it should be good to extend yourself further.

Emily: 19:00

Yeah, absolutely.

Olivia: 19:02

Okay. Well, um, yeah. Thank you so much for joining me, Emily.

Emily: 19:07

No worries. Thank you for having me!

Olivia: 19:10

That's all we have for you today. Please join us again in two weeks from now for our next episode, and until then come join our community to talk about it at slack.uqcs.org.