I don't know where you are getting this from - do you have any personal experience to draw from?

It doesn't match my experience. In almost seven years at Google I've worked on amazingly interesting projects - from hardware to user-facing products.

I've never once, in my entire time, had any level of management tell me that I should be worrying about selling ads or monetizing my projects. The consistent message has been "build great products".

So the notion that 99% (or really any majority) of developers at Google "drive the ad hive" is completely untrue - at least in my experience.

I have the personal experience!

I'm a new hire, and I got assigned to somewhere that doesn't align with my interests, at all... other than the fact that it's "not front end."

Hoping switching is as easy as everyone says!

Former Googler here: After an epic blind allocation fail, my attempt to switch to a project that made use of my talents enraged my manager and he reported me to HR. I left for greener pastures shortly thereafter and HR has apparently banned me from ever returning now that there is relevant work for me.

Obviously I have no knowledge of the specifics of your situation, but when I worked at Google I freely moved projects many times without a problem, my first time about 3 months after I arrived. I haven't worked there for a while, but I have many friends there and they change projects with some regularity.

Oi. Hope I grow to love my assignment, or can at least switch "cleanly."

If you're a new college grad or just new to the industry, Google rocks. But, if you have "a very particular set of skills. Skills I^Hyou have acquired over a very long career" then Google will most likely arbitrarily assign you* to whatever arbitrary team needs seatwarmers at the moment. And FWIW, my skills were considered irrelevant to Google the year I joined, but suddenly very relevant barely a year after I left.

*Unless you're an acqui-hire, and then Google once again rocks because you get both the perks and the interesting work.

Please drop me an email internally. My username is the same as here. This conversation cannot be meaningfully had in a public forum.

It is! I was assigned to a team I was not particularly passionate about and around 8 months later made my way to exactly where I wanted to be. It can be done!

It certainly didn't happen that way for me. I'm doing exactly the kind of work that I love to do. You're afforded quite a bit of mobility inside the company.

That also has been my experience. I've moved three times in five years and every time it's been because I heard about what a team was doing and wanted to join them.

Dude, we're both in 2HS! I'm in the "UI Box" (Material).

If you're in the UI box, can you enforce the apps that have a Hamburger menu to map the physical menu button on devices (like last year's Samsung that I use) to the menu please? The button does nothing - popping up the menu would be welcome and much appreciated in all of Google's apps.

Drifting away from the topic, but this would be a big change from the expected behaviour of opening the overflow action menu.

What do you think should happen instead?

The standard behaviour for a while has been to open the action overflow (the "hidden" menu with three dots on the right hand side of the action bar) menu. This menu affordance was supposed to appear on devices that didn't have a hardware menu button.

Ah ok thanks. In that case, it does nothing for some apps! eg. if I am in the Google+ Android app and press the hardware menu button, it does nothing. Calendar does nothing. Hangouts does nothing.

If I am in Gmail, it pops up the menu (but at the bottom, and not where the hamburger is). Chrome pops the menu up. Maps opens the side bar. YouTube pops the menu up. Drive opens the menu.

So it works for some but not for others. Perhaps you could enforce consistency or follow your own guidelines etc.? Go crack the whip.

The main devices that Google devs use - Nexus devices - do not have a menu button.

And I guess they think that the three dot menu is ugly or something.

It is automatically created in the action bar when the action area is too small for buttons:

http://developer.android.com/design/patterns/actionbar.html

http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/actionbar.html

Cool! I've just joined the Polymer team. I'm off until the 21st, but drop by and say hi!

Hey, I was just going to mention how easy it was for me to move... to right next to your cube! (I'm in V8.)

Oh hey, me too! Well, the first part, at least.

Is switching really that easy?

I'm a new hire, and I've been given the choice of working on one of two teams, neither of which particularly align with my interests.

I suspect you won't hear as much from the ones that had a hard time switching:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

I don't think that applies here at all. Why would people who had a hard time switching be any less visible? I would think they would be a lot more likely to talk about it, like how people are more likely to write a review of a product they hated than one they were content with.

Pick the team with the lowest attrition rate. The team to which I was assigned was losing someone every month and I was allocated as cannon fodder to stop the bleeding. It didn't end well.

Yes. If you want to switch teams, and the team that you're switching to wants you, then it's basically a done deal. Feel free to send me an email if you've got more questions.

Positive PR is probably a side effect, not the main reason.