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EDIT: Please do not PM me about how to get a job at Google. There are a ton of brilliant Quora answers out there which will be able to guide you much better. Thank you.Disclaimers:1. All views listed are my own. Google doesn't endorse them. It may or may not be applicable to other Indian Googlers. Most points are based on my perception. Some one else may have perceived things differently. Let’s agree to disagree :)2. I worked in Hyderabad office. So some of the answers might be more applicable to Google Hyderabad vs Google Bangalore or say Mumbai. I have not worked in all the organisations at Google India. Most of them may be more applicable to my organisation than others.3. I am no longer employed with Google. I left to pursue higher education.What is it like to work at Google India? Let me share some of my experiences in form of short stories/snippets. I have divided the answer into 2 sections - Exceeds expectations (thing that Google India does really really well) and Needs Improvement (things that can be made better).EXCEEDS EXPECTATIONSa. PERKSOne fine Monday morning, I had a single ten rupee note in my wallet. I checked my wallet again on Friday evening and it still had that single ten rupee note in it.At Google I don't spend a dime during weekdays. I reach office in an office provided cab, eat at the free Google cafes, have snacks and dinner at the office itself and then reach home in one of the office cabs.One of my favorite perks of working at Google India was sleeping in the office cabs on my way to home after a hectic day at work. Also, the cab service is only offered in India. In US, Google provides a shuttle service but the cab service doesn’t exist in any other country (to the best of my knowledge).Talking about wallets, the security is pretty great. You can leave your wallet, watch, laptop etc. anywhere in the office and can expect to find it back in the same place the next day or with security. In my 2 years at Google, I never heard of anyone’s stuff getting stolen.Most roles allow for some overseas travel opportunities. I went on a business trip to Europe. I followed all the guidelines for daily allowances (which is pretty generous) and wasn't asked a single question about it. I had drinks when I wanted to and had all kinds of exotic food on the company's card. Some Companies are cost driven where as Google is Value driven. (The cost of asking for business justification for each & every bill is more expensive than letting the employee do some productive work in that time. See point no. 4 under culture)Google offers a generous dental and vision insurance on top of health insurance. I underwent LASIK surgery and it was covered by Google’s vision insurance completely. Generally LASIK is considered as a cosmetic surgery and is not covered in most insurances.I know a couple of Indian Googlers who will never leave Google just for the amazing health insurance that it provides to some of their family members who need permanent medical attention.During employment, if you undertake any professional course that is related to your job, then Google reimburses 2/3 of the total cost. In case of personal development, Google reimburses 1/3 of the cost. Guitar lessons, Dancing lessons, learning a new language etc. come under the purview of personal reimbursement. I have used personal reimbursement couple of times and it was a smooth process. (Upload the bills and fill a small form and done)Much has been said about Google’s food over the inter webs. I don’t have anything new to add to it, but you realise the importance of it during the weekends when you have to get your own food. (I am a bachelor who lives alone and doesn’t like to cook)Other perks that I have enjoyed during my tenure in Google India - On site Gym, playing table tennis, pool, xbox, foosball, concierge service which takes care of all your daily errands like dispatching a courier, paying bills etc. (not free but nominal), laundry service (not free), mail room where you can order all your Amazon and Flipkart goodies :D. Also, there is an in house coffee shop(free), library in the office, culture club, theatre club, football club, cricket club,basketball club (in Hyderabad at least).Google tries it best to care for you. They celebrate every employee’s work anniversary by decorating their work desk and offering them some massage points which in India translates to 60 minutes of free massage.This is how my desk looked like on my 2nd work anniversary. If it makes any difference, I was on my notice period on this day.9. Free Goodies. Team has extra budget? Great, let’s order some goodies. Organisation has some cash leftover from the annual budget? Great. Let’s order some goodies. I have received Google t-shirts (5–6) , couple of hoodies,external hard disk, wireless speakers, headphones, backpacks, selfie stick, neck pillow, keychains, pen drives, coffee mugs etc. in just 2 years. The amount of money Google spends on each employee is staggering.A lot of other companies would pat themselves in the back for saving some money from a party budget and carry it over to the next year. Not Google :)Talking about goodies, the grand daddy of them all - the annual Christmas gift awarded to each employee. I received a Nexus 5X last Christmas and an Android One phone the year before on Diwali.b. CULTUREGoogle allows you to be yourself. They don’t have a one screw fits all bolts policy. Come at what time you want & leave when you want to. There is no concept of attendance or normal office hours. One of my colleagues who got an exceptional rating last cycle had the habit of coming to office at 3 pm. (In his defense, he did work till 12 in the night.)You can wear whatever you want to. No dress code bullshit. You are not judged on how well your shirt is pressed.One of the unsaid rules of working at Google is - Be Nice and Be Respectful. People hold doors for you. You will hold doors for people. Expect to hear the word “Thanks” (or some variant) every other sentence.Elimination of bureaucratic bullshit. Google tries its best to eliminate hassles for its employees. There are proper channels for everything. Have a question about your latest payslip? Mail an email alias and get your concern addressed in 24 hours or less. Need to get some expenses reimbursed? Go to an internal portal and fill out a form and done. You don’t have to jump through the hoops to get things done. This is true for pretty much everything.There is an internal memes site ( check out Eric Schmidt’s book for more details) where you can criticise the CEO, senior VPs, management etc. without any repercussions. You can voice your disagreement and it is OK!. You can respectfully agree to disagree. Also, Googlers are the first to be up in arms against any decision taken by the company which may not be in the user’s best interests. ( Integrating G+ with Youtube was an unpopular decision internally and people weren’t shy when it came to expressing their disagreement)Google India celebrates multiple festivals every year by decorating the office and preparing special food on those days. It also has Bring your children to work multiple times a year where they install make shift slides & play houses in the office for children. Also, there are multiple initiatives organised by Googlers and for Googlers to give something back to society.c. WORKYour work will largely depend on which organisation you join and on your skill sets.Annual increments every year are quite generous. The only time people bitch about their increments is when they compare it against their neighbor. “I only got 20% while so and so got 30% last year blah blah”. Obviously, increments are dependent on your current base salary and your appraisals.You can say NO to projects. If the project doesn’t interest you, then you can decline to take it up. Obviously you need to convince your manager. Most managers will agree to not give you some project which you don’t want to undertake.Google has a pretty good internal mobility program. But the competition is very immense.( See point no.1 in Needs Improvement section)Needs ImprovementOne of my colleagues used to jokingly say that Google hires Ph.Ds to work as janitors. This is true to a large extent. Google hires CEOs to work as mid level managers. Most of the people who work at Google (and in India too) are way over-qualified for their jobs. If Google India wants to hire someone to write an email, they will go and hire a topper from DU. If they want to hire someone who can provide call support to users, they will go and hire an English hons. topper from DU (Do remember that you need some 99% in your boards to just clear DU’s cut off) . There are Ph.Ds at Google from IVY league colleges who just move data from one database to the other. You can see the pattern. This leads to immense competition.Most of the interesting roles are in Mountain View. The Engineering division in Hyderabad and Bangalore work on Google Apps for Work. It is a small team. I am not sure about the exact numbers but it is definitely less 1% of the total engineering workforce at Google. The two largest organisations at Google India are the sales org and the anti-abuse wing of Google which take down offensive content. If you come to work at Google India don’t expect to work on some cutting edge product like Driverless cars, Brain or Loon. Expect to work on something boring.Google India offers very limited scope for career growth. You obviously can’t become the CEO/SVP/VP working from India when more than 80% of your workforce is based out of Mountain View. The roles in India are very limited too since only a handful organisations are based out of India.Sooner than later, anyone, who has some iota of ambition and are not constrained by family, move to Mountain View. (The internal mobility is pretty great by the way minus the tons of competition for good roles. See point no. 1)Google runs a lot of programs to train its management and provides a lot of support to its employees to keep them stress free and remove all politics from the workplace. However, Google is a system run by people and at the end of the day people are flawed. Some politics does creep into the picture. It might be comparatively less than many other places but it does exist.Promotions in the non-tech organisations are very messy. It comes down to how much your manager is willing to push for your case. So, if you don’t have the best of relationships with your manager or your manager doesn’t like your face then find a new manager ASAP. If your manager is someone who backs down easily then say bye-bye to your promotion. I knew a guy on the floor who would stand behind his reportees like a wall (the noun, not Rahul Dravid). Multiple reportees in his team got promoted each cycle. Same cannot be said about the manager who had the reputation of backing down easily. It is not like there weren’t any hard-working or deserving candidates in the latter’s team. The scene is significantly different and less messy for tech ladders.Talking about Promotions, the lack of transparency around the committee who sits down to evaluate your candidature for promotion can be unnerving. Google allows you to be yourself & disagree with the decisions of the upper management. But at the back of your mind, you are always scared of what you say because you never know at what stage it may come to bite you in your backside. Almost any senior person on the floor can get you screwed out of your promotion. You absolutely cannot afford to piss off anyone who sits in one of those promo committees. What if the senior manager whose XYZ decision you disagreed with says he is not happy with your work in one of those closed committee meetings. If your immediate manager doesn’t fight tooth and nail for you, your promotion is gone.This point is specially true for Google India. I don’t think Google India managers are good at taking criticisms from their reportees. Almost all the questions asked during town hall meetings are anonymous. If the management doesn’t allow anonymous questions for some town hall, no questions are asked in that town hall. There is a lot of mistrust between management and non-management.This needs to be FIXED ASAP.Google India takes an awfully long time to weed out bad managers. Managers with bad approval ratings are given multiple chances to become better at their job. It can take anywhere from 3 years to Never for Google to identify a bad manager and ask them to either become an individual contributor or find another role somewhere else. Problem with this is the following : A bad individual contributor screws up a project. A bad manager screws up the career of their multiple reportees, multiple projects, the entire team and relationship with stakeholders.That being said, Google does put in some checks through the internal culture & escalation mediums that ensures that your manager will show consideration for you as a human being (unlike the notorious Indian IT industry where you are addressed as a ‘resource’ and not a human being).However, some people are simply not cut out for people management. I don’t blame Google for any of this. I simply hope they get better at filtering out such candidates early on and removing them sooner.They should also change the annual Manager feedback survey to bi-annual and make it more actionable & hold the manager responsible. Currently, the manager feedback survey is useless and is only used for the manager to self-introspect. So, if a particular manager thinks along the lines of ‘Hey. I am a good manager. All of these people reporting under me who have given me an approval of only 30% are idiots. I don’t care about this survey’ then the survey becomes entirely meaningless. There is no accountability for a manger with a bad survey rating.This might be slightly controversial but - Google doesn’t fire anyone for low performance. How is this a con? Let me explain. Amazon has a policy of firing 10% of its staff every year after stack ranking them. Google rarely fires anyone for low performance. At best after multiple bad reviews, they are asked to find a new team or job and are given enough time to do so.Both Google and Amazon in my opinion are at the two extreme ends of the spectrum. One leads to slack while the other leads to stress over fear of losing your job. I think a middle path is a more suitable approach. My 2 cents.That being said, Google does provide incentives for you to work hard. Hard work leads to good ratings which leads to better pay, more equity, better & faster career growth. However, you will occasionally find some people who are content with putting in their absolute minimum at the job and are simply happy with their take home salary and flying under the radar of the management.Google India is notorious at hiring people at the wrong level. I know so many people who were hired one level below than they should have been. If you are offered a job at Google India, then definitely try to reach out to an existing Indian Googler and evaluate which level is suitable for your profile and try to negotiate with your recruiter. Also, don’t let them push you around. Some recruiters think they have the birthright to hire you at the wrong level for a low salary because they are offering you a chance to work at Google.Again, this point is applicable only for non-tech ladders. Google uses internal tools for everything. You will learn a lot of skills during your job but most of them won’t translate to something that you can re-use in the industry. You will have to rely on your soft skills to get your next job.Open Work space: The floor can be very noisy at times (specially post 5 pm) and sometimes it can be impossible to work without your headphones on. For whatever reasons beyond my comprehension, a few folks used to take meetings from their desks and take 30 min+ personal calls sitting on their desk, happily oblivious of the amount of noise & annoyance they are causing to everyone in the bay. You either need to put on headphones or go up to them and request them to move somewhere else. Most often than not, it is you who will either put on the headphones or move somewhere else because you don’t want to appear rude.The amount of freebies & other perks can sometimes make you entitled. Some become more entitled than others. Some bad apples do treat the temporary employees (TVCs) with disrespect. Some engineering guys do look down on non-engineering guys. (Please notice the word - some. Some doesn’t mean all)Your work doesn’t speak for you. You need to spend a lot of time to market your work. This includes sending emails, reaching out to upper management during their office hours and very subtly praise yourself and your work, speaking out during meetings and again talking about your work and so on. This can be difficult for introverts and for people who are uncomfortable with boasting about their work.Related to Promotions - The amount of work put by you is completely meaningless. To get promoted, you need to deliver on projects and show impact. If the management keeps flip flopping on the scope of the project or you are collaborating with someone who doesn’t care, then either you need to Superman up and deliver the project end to end all by yourself or forget about your promotion.Also, even if you successfully execute a very complex project but for whatever reason, the metrics gods aren’t favorable to you and the impact numbers don’t look good, then it won’t do you much good. On the other hand, it is quite possible for someone to land a super easy project and gain a lot of brownie points by showing some good numbers thanks to business requirements of that particular product.The Microsoft Problem. Google India, like Google is expanding at a fast rate. This means more competition and lesser budgets for everything. The budgets for parties, gifts, events, off sites have decreased over the years. Don’t get me wrong, the perks and budgets are still very high, but every time the number of coffee machines on the floor get reduced or your favorite expensive candy in the micro kitchen go missing or the size of the packets of cookies in micro kitchen go from large to small, a lot of old timers start speculating about the upcoming apocalypse. (Apocalypse here being end of perks and culture as we know it)Throw Nooglers in the ocean and let them either learn to swim or drown completely (metaphorical). This is more of a Google culture and less of a Google India culture. As a new joinee, and after a couple of short meetings explaining the role of your team, you are expected to fly on your own. You are given a span of 3- 6 months to ramp up and learn things on your own. If you run into a problem, you are expected to reach out to someone and seek help. No body will come and ask you if you need help.I am not sure why I am including this in the needs improvement section. Google hires self-starters & ambitious people who like to get things done. However, in the beginning this can be very intimidating and you are expected to struggle a lot. Even basic things at Google from getting the right accesses and getting added to the correct groups to submitting a simple change in the codebase will require you to read some internal documentation or ask someone for help.Bottom line :You will come to work for Google India for the brand and leave to pursue better quality work elsewhere (either to Mountain View or to another company). Google India is a very good employer and treats you well but once the honeymoon period is over, it is the quality of work which will keep you satisfied (or dissatisfied) at the work place and no amount of free chocolates or other freebies will be able to compensate for it. So choose your role wisely and don’t expect flying unicorns or something. Do keep in mind that all the free stuff will cease to excite you..just like your cell phone isn’t exciting anymore and just like your last car or clothes stopped pleasing you after a couple of days/weeks.

As Mark Miller noted below, a fairly complete history of Smalltalk can be found in The Early History Of Smalltalk. Part of the history is an explanation of how long it took me to see the deep implications of what was in front of me (this is because I started with a conventional mindset about computers and languages, and that made me pretty blind to what was new and important).The simple answer is Yes!In the context of Biology and Mathematics, the object ideas came primarily from Sketchpad and Simula (and cells), the messaging ideas came from thinking about objects as being like cooperative processes in a time-sharing system or between computers on a network (and cells), and a lot of the metathoughts and underpinnings were directly influenced by Lisp (and math and cells).There were a number of revolutionary architectures to see in the early 60s — Sketchpad, Lisp (basically Lisp 1.5), the B5000 (a computer that could directly execute byte-codes completely safely, and was essentially a multiprocess “Simula machine” before there was a Simula), and APL (not yet implemented, but in Iverson’s book). And, even Algol (with its recursion, call by name, nested block structure, etc. was revolutionary at the time). (And there was quite a lot more to see as well, especially some of the meta systems for generating languages from metalanguages, etc.)Just sticking with Lisp here, what was cosmically interesting was the idea of Lisp, meaning that there could be something mathematical about programming that could also be practical — that is: you could do something with relations and inference — and most especially, that a powerful universal language could also act as a practical metalanguage — not just for implementing, but for thinking about programming and programming languages.For example, if you look at McCarthy’s beautiful lead up to the bottom of page 13 in The Lisp 1.5 Programmers Manual, you can see how John thought about these ideas. And once the whammy of the half page interpreter in itself has been grokked, then you will start thinking new thoughts about the semantics of programming and programming languages.It is also worth looking at some of the rest of this little book to see how the implementers of Lisp went about their business. One thing that made it into the 1.5 version was the realization that “special forms” — which seemed to be called for by the functional underpinning of Lisp — could be thought of as a base “functlet” delayed parameter evaluation idea, and that normal functions could just be a special case of this. (Many different interesting thoughts came out of this realization, which in turn came out of needs for implementing “special forms” such as QUOTE, LAMBDA, COND, etc.)It’s also worth looking to see how the practical dynamics of implementing and using overwhelmed some of the cleanliness of the initial ideas. Part of what went on happened “too fast” for the kind of thinking needed for great design. This led to some kludges. (And very similar things happened with Smalltalk later on once we started to use various versions of it.)Some of the kludges and not quite solutions came about with regard to functional arguments, the “prog” feature, scoping of variables, closures (Lisp 1.85 at BBN had four different, and interesting, notions of “closure”, etc.).Another kludge was leaving out John’s “m-language”, which was supposed to be a much more readable way to do Lisp programming, in favor of just programming in the “machine code” of S-expressions. (There is another whole history of the ramifications of this “basically lazy” choice of the early implementers.)Most of these kludges were cleaned up, sometimes years later, and some in other languages. Interestingly, McCarthy had had some influence on Algol (for example, Algol conditionals), and Algol had some of the solutions that Lisp needed (such as static nesting scope, and the “call by name” mechanism for functional arguments — however, it is worth noting what was positive about the dynamic variable scoping, especially in some AI reasoning processes … it would have been interesting to allow both …).But the Lisp culture at MIT was quite in their own world. It is interesting to read some of the years later Scheme design documents to see the “rediscovery” in the 70s of some of the Algol mechanisms (some through the work of Peter Landin in the 60s).Still, even with kludges, there is a lot to think about here, and in compact forms that leave some brain-cells left for actually pondering programming semantics.All this “understandable kernel” lore should lead to variant thoughts — especially these days when there is much experience that can be brought to bear.Here’s my favorite “most important unknown thesis in programming language thinking” Dave Fisher’s 1970 CMU thesis Control Structures For Programming Languages. He uses the “Lisp approach” in a very sophisticated way to make a deeply meta extensible language. Much can be learned about many important things from grokking the first 100 pages of this work.The other quite wonderful much more recent piece of work that needs to be mentioned here is “The Art of the Metaobject Protocol” by Kiczales et al. (MIT Press). This is deep deep “Lisp thinking” in the service of objects, and vice versa.Just to mention one interesting “variant thought” to close off this too long answer: it’s worth pondering the split of “eval” and “apply” in McCarthy’s interpreter. “Apply” is tantamount to sending a message to an object, especially if parameter evaluation can be controlled on the receiving end by the object itself, and especially if the receiver is a closure. Now just make this whole mechanism as loosely bound as the rest of the ideas in Lisp, and you have a very simple basis for a different look at computation and programming. (And don’t forget to note the implications if everything were actually in the form of property lists, not just raw storage cells … .)

Put yourself in the role of a symbolic calculation system. :)You have a rule (or set of rules) that works forlim Y as Y->{blah}it just evalutes as {blah}.Now,lim X as X->X+1can be viewed as an instance of that rule. Maybe it doesn't check that the variable in {blah} is not already bound elsewhere in the expression. Why bother? As you state, the question is sort of bogus. But if you accept that in an expression of the formlim A as X->Bthat the scope of the variable 'X' is just A, but not B, then the answer makes sense. Or, you could view the order of evaluation as requiring B to be evaluated first (giving "X+1") and not re-evaluated later, like an eager programming language.