Google has enormous resources and offices full of extremely smart people, but it nonetheless faces some big challenges. Governments are exploring antitrust lawsuits against the company; employees are increasingly willing to speak out over internal issues; and there’s always the pressing need to compete against deep-pocketed rivals such as Amazon and Microsoft.
Despite those headwinds, Google must maintain its growth. And to accomplish that, it needs technologists with a constellation of cutting-edge skills, from software engineering to artificial intelligence (A.I.) and machine learning. In order to figure out which skills the company wants the most, we turn to Burning Glass, which collects and analyzes millions of job postings from across the country. The following data is from the past quarter:
We’ve analyzed Google’s hiring practices at several points in the past, and these programming languages and skills have popped up again and again. That’s great, because it’s clear that Google is always on the hunt for a wide variety of skills, and you don’t necessarily need to specialize in something esoteric like quantum computing or A.I. in order to land a job there.
As you might expect, Google software developers are extremely well-compensated, with a combination of high salaries and sizable stock payouts:
For many technologists, though, it’s not wholly about the money: some Google employees have made it clear that they want to work from home full-time, as opposed to the hybrid-work schedule (i.e., a few days in the office per week) that the company is requiring. “This feeling that I can’t realistically leave the Bay Area and work for Google is enough for me to have decided to leave,” one site reliability engineer recently told CNet. “It’s the fact that Google doesn’t prioritize the needs of human beings. The fact that we have lives outside of work, that people actually have families.”
To be fair, Google isn’t the only company facing employee anger over remote- and hybrid-work policies; Facebook, Apple, VMware, and other tech giants are dealing with their own internal controversies. But how the search-engine giant handles its workforce’s scheduling concerns could have a big impact on its ability to retain talent at this crucial moment. In the meantime, if you’ve mastered skills such as Python and Android, you have a chance of becoming a Googler.