Comment by seiji
11 years ago
People have previously mentioned hallway discussions at Google routinely devolve into bragging about SAT scores and GPAs.
Nothing says Google must accept sub-par technical people, but Google fails to realize you don't have to be the top 0.0001% in absolute algorithms intelligence to do great work.
Google's basic theme seems to be "you must be low latency ultra smart in our narrow interest areas" to pass an interview (or well-connected in other ways to lower scrutiny), but Google's main problem these days isn't lack of smart people — it's lack of projects with meaning and lack of how to organize smart people into anything resembling a coherent world-moving force.
In The Plex is great read for insight into their entire process. Basically, Google is run by people who have never been told "no" to anything in their lives, so they continue to think they are the best at everything until reality forces them to reconsider their delusional assumptions ("montessori naivety").
In The Plex is great read for insight into their entire process. Basically, Google is run by people who have never been told "no" to anything in their lives, so they continue to think they are the best at everything until reality forces them to reconsider their delusional assumptions ("montessori naivety").
Which is unfortunate, because objectively Google doesn't actually have a very impressive track record of creating successful products and services given its size and resources. It has a goose that lays golden eggs (the on-line advertising business), two strong on-line services (search and mail, both over a decade old) and two well-established platforms (Android and Chrome, both nearly seven years old). Other than those, most things Google tries seem to land somewhere between unremarkable and complete failure, with Google+ surely the most obvious example of the latter. They also seem to be developing an unenviable reputation for killing things off as a result, which is going to make it more difficult for them to succeed with future endeavours. Whatever workforce their hiring process is producing for them, it doesn't seem to be one that is very good at creating successful new projects.
Triple up-vote for this. That said, As said before, I would say if they get more applications than anyone else, their pool of possibilities is larger, so, even if their hiring process is sub par, it's still possible to get more better people. They have a lot of good people and quite a few really good people. And, likely more of those really good people. Someone has done the numbers. It's a question of efficiency and maybe one of those smart ones is optimising it. It's quite possible that the process that looks shit on the outside is producing the right numbers.
Wait, only two strong online services? I can think of like five other excellent services including a maps site that is years ahead of the competition.
It seems we have different definitions of "excellent".
Google Maps is certainly widespread, but it's hardly the only on-line mapping service available. They keep messing around with the UI, often not for the better. I often find the data itself and the live route planning/traffic news to be inaccurate.
Maybe it's better for those in the US, but here in the UK it's exactly what I meant by unremarkable. The local data from OpenStreetMap seems to be just as good for general mapping purposes and sometimes more accurate and/or current, and for car journey planning and real-time traffic news the dedicated satnav devices still seem to do a far better job.
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> People have previously mentioned hallway discussions at Google routinely devolve into bragging about SAT scores and GPAs.
I've been at Google for 3.5 years (in the NY office) and have never heard this. I don't think I've ever even seen anyone wear a college t-shirt/sweater.
It's probably a pathological case centered around the mountain view office: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3473308
From that second link:
> These aren't Googlers I'm talking about, except the boyfriend.... remember that most of these conversations happened when I was actually in college (a few even before then, while applying to schools), and I just have a really long memory
Sounds like someone who's just into remembering people's SAT scores?
I've never seen it in MTV either. But it's a big campus, so who knows?
I worked in one of the Mountain View offices for a year and a half with people who had never even been to college, and never heard that. Doesn't mean it never happened but the idea that it's even close to common is just laughable.
I do wear my college t-shirt though. My graduating CS class was three people, so have to have a little pride there!
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My friend worked at Google a few years ago (in a non-engineering role). After his in-person interviews, the recruiter called him back to ask him how many hours he worked during college (to pay his way), so as to excuse is less than 4.0 GPA to the hiring review board. He had completed his undergrad degree was 20 years in a subject not directly related to the Google position. He since had an relevant MS degree and real-world work experience, but that undergrad GPA was apparently still really important.
> Nothing says Google must accept sub-par technical people, but Google fails to realize you don't have to be the top 0.0001% in absolute algorithms intelligence to do great work.
But if you're Google, why wouldn't you aim for the top 0.0001%? It's not as though you have a shortage of candidates.
Because there's no such thing as "the top 0.0001%". Software development is a collection of talents with multiple basis vectors, not a single linear talent you can stack rank.
And even if there were such a thing, you're not going to find the top n% by asking questions from an undergraduate textbook.
And you're certainly not going to find them by pissing off people with proven practical achievements. Acting like that is evidence of anti-intelligence, not a sign of being smarter than everyone else.
Do the math: 0.0001% of 7 billion is: 7,000. How many employees does Google have? Not to mention the fact that of those 7 billion, probably at least 6.9 billion have no appreciable training in software development, which would leave you with 100 candidates.
What is "Montessori naivety"?
Primarily my inability to spell naiveté.
It's one of those "gift/curse" things. It's good they can challenge assumptions, but they don't realize how wrong they are when they are wrong.
There are some notes at http://www.amazon.com/In-The-Plex-Google-Thinks/product-revi... and it's also drawn up nicely in the book itself.
Naïveté