I was thinking the same thing. This is sloppy writing. It reads as though it was written by someone unfamiliar with the content, and possibly translated from another language. Some of the grammar is a bit off from what you'd expect from an official release of some kind from Google.
The capitalization of the word "university", and missing the capital H in GitHub. The "Artificial Intelligence" bullet has a formatting error. Missing articles ("work on project").
Not to mention it is vague. The "Learn other programming languages" bullet lists several options, but doesn't say anything about how unrealistic it might be to try and learn all of those languages (it says "and" instead of "or")
I don't know, I don't view Google as having the same level of perfection as, say, Apple. I know when I use Google products, almost infinitely in beta, there's going to be some things lacking and unpolished. Helpful yet unfinished, you take what you get.
Perfection is one thing. But this is a page on their website trying to help them recruit for engineers? Shouldn't that have a bit of a higher standard?
all of these comments about non trivial matters are bike shedding. even this comment, its only increasing entropy, your missing the forest for the trees.
@rockdiesel, it's definitely "for" the trees, where "for" means "because of". You can't see the forest (big picture) because you're paying too much attention to the individual trees (details).
If you look at the page now, it's been changed. JavaScript is now one word, university is no longer in caps, the "learn AI" bullet now has been formatted properly, and they've now properly capitalized GitHub. Looks like Google is listening to the suggestions made above (in parent post).
Why is so much importance to written language? Why not practice casual writing like casual speaking. I think many of these expectations put lot of pressure on the people who wants to communicate in writing but that language to be written is not mother tongue or might not even gone to high school.
The expectations are higher when it comes from a major company like Google, especially when it's speaking from a position of authority on a topic like what to do with your life.
With casual speaking, you place emphasis and pauses, naturally... With writing, nobody can read your body language... hear your pauses... notice your _emphasis_... unless you s.p.e.l.l. it out...
I loathe this kind of thing. To me it evokes an image of someone who only knows computer science, and is entirely ignorant of other topics (say, history and literature) that a person needs to know to be a successful human being.
> I loathe this kind of thing. To me it evokes an image of someone who only knows computer science, and is entirely ignorant of other topics (say, history and literature) that a person needs to know to be a successful human being.
Actually, what it evokes to me is someone for whom English isn't a first language (at least not a mainstream American dialect of English) of but who has domain knowledge writing a guide in English in the domain in which they have knowledge.
It could certainly use editing, but the awkward word choice you point to isn't really something that suggests to me anything about what the person's knowledge of history and literature might be.
In defense of the list, I don't think it was intended as a blueprint for becoming a well-rounded and educated person, it was meant to provide a curriculum for learning the sort of technical skills people at Google would like to see in a candidate.
That said, there's actually a tremendous amount to learn on this list, and there are only so many cells to hold information. While it's always nice to say "and yes, also learn history and literature", truth is, eventually you have to not learn something in order to learn these things.
This may be a case where where the extreme rigor of the interview process and tolerance of false negatives may hurt large companies and create an opportunity for small startups and individuals. Here's why - a candidate who is very very talented at CS but also learned history and literature might come in at 90%ile, but let's say it's nearly impossible to come in higher than that without neglecting those other topics. However, the interviewers are all demanding a 95%ile+ performance. As a result, they pass on the more well rounded candidate.
It's even more insidious than this - because they select for the 95%ile, and it is very very rare to be able to achieve this feat without a single minded focus on CS, the people doing the interviewing will be at best faintly aware, and possibly completely unaware, of what they are missing.
Before getting too irritated, though, remember that any blind spot on the part of a large company is an opportunity for a small, nimble one. This is largely what is going on, I think, when you read those stories about talented programmers getting rejected by google and Facebook and coming back 5 years later to sell them a company for 100 times what their salary would have been. Of course, it's a much higher risk path that requires being broke for a while, and may just not be an option for people with other substantial life obligations.
There's this story I really liked about Andre 3000 (sorry, no link, just something I read, may be apocryphal). During an interview, he was asked how he chose the three chords for the song, and his answer was that he was learning guitar and those were the three chords he knew so far. So he took just the slightest bit of knowledge and turned into something great.
I read this at a time when I went to a music store and saw an incredible guitarist doing such impressive things with his instrument that he drew a small crowd. He wasn't just showing off, he was the local instructor. I believe he was also available for small gigs, weddings, parties, that sort of thing.
A lot of companies would pass on Andre 3000[1], and hire the awesome guitar playing dude, because Andre 3000 wouldn't be able to play a Bflat scale on demand or explain the circle of fifths or sight read a medium complexity piece of music at at least 150bpm. And I'm not knocking those skills, if you're a musician, by all means, yes, learn those things. But if that's all you focus on, to the exclusion of more creative things (and there's enough complexity that you could easily do so), you will starve other important things.
[1] prior to the hit. eventually, accomplishments do speak for themselves.
I meant "academic learnings." "Learnings" is not a word in the English language.
When I see writing that is this bad, it evokes, to me, an image of an Indian student who effectively only learned math/computer science/engineering, and does not have a sufficiently broad education to think critically and independently about anything else.
As much as you might loathe it, learnings is now a word (and has been used intermittently for a new centuries [1]) so deal with it.
Additionally, Indian students do the best they can given the limited resources (we have). And even when they do have broad education it's not going to be about Mozart and effect of WWII on the western nations - they will always be out of context when it comes to western culture. It's the same kind of lack of ability to think (or express without getting eyebrows raised) about everything else that you might be showing here.
I'm sure there are others who have learned many of these languages as well, but that doesn't mean it's not unrealistic. It probably also depends on how we define "learn".
One of the (many) problems with this page is that it is geared towards computer science students (see header or URL). Listing 10 languages (with an "and", not an "or") may give a student the impression that he/she needs to add these 10 languages to their repertoire in order to be a successful engineer.
I'd be less critical of the page if it listed "or" instead of "and".
The capitalization of the word "university", and missing the capital H in GitHub. The "Artificial Intelligence" bullet has a formatting error. Missing articles ("work on project").
Not to mention it is vague. The "Learn other programming languages" bullet lists several options, but doesn't say anything about how unrealistic it might be to try and learn all of those languages (it says "and" instead of "or")