Re: - E04 - Leadership! Google, Guido van Rossum, PSF

Alex Martelli wrote:
Anton Vredegoor <anton.vredegoor@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: 
[...]

No insider information is necessary, the job requirements make it
absolutely clear (at least to me) that Google is a company with an
elitist culture,


Absolutely yes, in terms of who we want to work at Google:  we DO want
GREAT people.  And we don't keep this a secret, either: right up there
at <http://www.google.com/jobs/>, we say "our strategy is simple: we
hire great people".  Rather than hiring a LOT of people, we prefer to be
extremely, obsessively selective, and try to hire ONLY a few people,
ones who we can convince ourselves do deserve that adjective, "great".

This does mean that we definitely tend err on the side of caution, and
FAIL to hire some people who are also great, just because we can't
determine with sufficient certainty that they indeed are -- I've seen
this happen more than once, and deeply regret it (for both Google and
the person), but I have no idea how we could do better without relaxing
our extremely elitist standards (we do debate these issues internally
all of the time, trying to do better, but have found no magic wand yet).

[...] 
students), but I've met many people with advanced degrees from even the
best/most elitist universities, such as Stanford or MIT, where it sure
looked to me as if the university's attempts to only graduate the very
best have definitely failed.

[...] 
Requiring a certain title for a job is mostly a desperate attempt to
reduce the huge amount of work and effort it takes to hire great people,
whittling down the number of resumes to be considered divided by the
number of hires from the high thousands to the low hundreds.  If there
were available infinite resources for the job of hiring/selection, we
could easily interview, say, 6000 candidates for a post, giving each a
week or so of concentrated attention to probe their abilities; alas,
this would require about 120 person-years from our people for the
selection process.  So, if nobody at Google did ANYTHING BUT interview
candidates, given that we have a bit over 5000 employees now, we could
hire in the course of 2006 another 40 or so, without doing anything
else.  (The numbers are all off the top of my head, but I think they may
be roughly the right orders of magnitude).

This is just impractical: we need to hire many more than 40, AND cannot
afford to have all existing employees do nothing but select new ones.
So, we need to shrink the ratio drastically, on both factors: say 10
instead of 40 hours of selection per candidate, and 50 rather than 6000
candidates being considered per post.  So we perform selection in
stages, and most candidates out of those many thousands-per-job are
"weeded out" at the very first stage, e.g. by failing to meet specific
qualifications.

I wish that, as you say, "titles" were indeed strong indications of
excellence.  Unfortunately, they aren't, but in some cases they're
better than nothing.  Many of our job descriptions, as I pointed out in
another post on this thread, say "BS or equivalent experience" or words
to that effect; if you can show the "or equivalent", and can get past
the first hurdle, then that title is the least of the issues.  For
example, if we advertised a job requiring "PhD or equivalent", and among
the candidates were Bill Gates, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin, none of
whom has obtained a PhD to the best of my knowledge, they would surely
be able to display the "or equivalent" based on their accomplishments
and experience, and thus get past that first hurdle.

[...]

-

TAG.google.evolution.talent.detection

..


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http://lazaridis.com
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