At least at Microsoft, my recruiters told me that a huge portion of the resumes submitted were from people who submitted either every day or multiple times a day. There's a "zeroth" reviewer that is a computer that determines and processes duplicates. I'd assume Google has the same problem and a similar solution (or else they hire a lot of recruiters).
I don't think this graphic's "25% increase" number accounts for attrition. I would expect Google's total attrition number (bad+good) to swing between 5-10% year to year.
Would people please stop quoting salary numbers as if that's the major portion of compensation at these kinds of companies? The reason it's hard to leave places like MSFT/Google/Amazon isn't the salary; you can get that anywhere. It's the N-year vesting stock grants. Once you've been there for N years, you have a full set rolling and vesting each year, with the number increasing every year. As you pass N years, you typically go from 100% of your salary in additional stock-grant income to some moderate integer multiple. Not counting bonuses. It's getting people to leave behind many hundred thousand dollars of pending grants that's tough, not matching the salaries.
And displaying top salaries as a pie chart is confusingly meaningless.
Out of college I was hired as an Associate (not currently in the role) and making about $50k base, plus a 3k signing bonus and roughly 3.5k in stock grants per year.
Can anyone who has seen Google grow comment on culture shift over the years?
I don't think I've been at Google long enough to evaluate how much politicking there is, but I don't seem to have many meetings and as far as I can tell people are happy with me just for being productive.
If I were you, I'd interview at Google and, if you get an offer, request to be on a team which is more academic in nature...e.g. ask to be on an AI/ML/NLP team rather than an infrastructure team.
When one of the questions to "ask the eng elders" is "how do I become an elder", and when the only real answer is "go start your own company", the sweetheart days are gone. If you weren't there in the beginning, you missed the train.
It's unfortunate, too, since there's a lot of good infrastructure left over from those classic times which is all tied up inside. It's treated as Secret Sauce and will never see the light of day. Various escapees have started re-implementing bits and pieces on the outside, however, so this will eventually take care of itself.
1. Holds a BS/MSc/PhD from a famous US university (Stanford, Yale, Berkeley, etc) or a PhD in a known university.
2. Has publications or is a well renowned CS researcher/professor/veteran (including famous progr. lang. gurus)
3. Is/was the committer of a famous open source software
4. Has invented algorithms or data structures or programming language
5. Has worked on a major company like Microsoft, Oracle, or Intel;
6. Has been the finalist of programming competitions like ACM, TopCoder, etc.
