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CS183C Session 8: Eric Schmidt
- wodenokoto 11y agoDoes anybody know why the playboy interview put the IPO in jeopardy?
- marcus 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet_period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet_period
- desdiv 11y agoTo add to that, here's an article about this particular case: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/will-playboy-article-delay-google-ipo http://www.marketwatch.com/story/will-playboy-article-delay-...
- krat0sprakhar 11y ago> Q: Hiring? > A: One of our rules was, we don’t want to hire your friends. Another rule was not to hire people from “lesser” universities. Another rule was to only hire people with good GPAs. It was frustrating, but it meant that we ended up with a lot of really smart people from great universities, and that served us well. I wonder what led to Google changing their minds and not considering the GPA as a part of hiring decisions.
- srtjstjsj 11y agoThey ran out of perfectly pedigreed people to hire, when they got big and competitors offered better prospects.
- bordercases 11y agoThis is my guess. Recently Google began to aggressively recruit at my university over the last two years or so. The cynical question is, of course, "why only in the last two years?" when our particular CS program has been around since the 80s. The recruiter claimed that it was because more people started to be hired out of my school. But that still isn't sufficient to discount this possibility. Granted I'm living in a country that isn't the U.S., that could have played a role. But I'm not confident either way.
- 5hank3rat0r 11y agoI believe this was done after taking a look at GPA and post-hiring performance at Google. This was not mentioned in the OP, but I guess they realized that there wasn't any or, maybe in certain positions (non-research/entry devs/etc), a negative correlation between the GPA and performance.
- quentinp 11y agoThey looked at the data. In Work Rules!, Laszlo Bock (head of People Operations at Google) writes: « So in 2007 we started looking for themes across the ten thousand or so people we had hired, as well as the millions we didn’t. In addition to testing technical hires on their engineering ability, we realized that there were four distinct attributes that predicted whether someone would be successful at Google: 1. General Cognitive Ability. Not surprisingly, we want smart people who can learn and adapt to new situations. Remember that this is about understanding how candidates have solved hard problems in real life and how they learn, not checking GPAs and SATs. » The three others are Leadership, "Googleyness" and Role-Related Knowledge.
- wyclif 11y agoThis is filled with punctuation errors. When I saw the first one, I just regarded it as a typo and kept reading. But it wasn't a typo, which is annoying—it's as if this interview was done by someone allergic to question marks.
- shuzchen 11y agoI think what happened is these are notes some person took during a class in which Eric Schmidt was being interviewed. So the questions and answers are whatever the notetaker was able to get down in real time. The entire content likely paraphrases only the most salient things being said.
- wyclif 11y agoSo this material was valuable enough to blog, but not valuable enough to proofread? I don't follow that logic. I can't imagine posting writing or an interview that hasn't been proofed. I think an interview with Schmidt would demand at least a first-pass edit.
- srtjstjsj 11y agoSo proofread it yourself, or stop complaining about stuff people give you for free.
- teddyh 11y agoYou got wyclif’s comments for free, stop complaining about them.
- wyclif 11y agoYour logic fails. I should proofread someone else's blog post because they didn't, or else I shouldn't complain? Mmmmm. Got it. You obviously don't even understand what writing is, on the internet or anywhere else. Writing is done as a service to the reader. If you can't be bothered to do an edit and correct obvious spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors, you're telling your readers that what you've written isn't very important, interesting, or worth reading.
- srtjstjsj 11y ago"Gnome" is actually Noam Shazeer
- dekhn 11y agoThanks, I was wondering about this. Noam was a very successful early googler. He was one of the feel people at early Google who actually did fundamental work in machine learning (George Harik was the other).
- viahartdotcom 11y agoDefinitely looking forward to watching the video.
- weinzierl 11y ago"I went to Novell under the mistaken goal of being a CEO. I didn’t do the due diligence, and if I had, I wouldn’t have gone. Our basic goal was to get out with our professional reputations intact and not end up in jail. The books were cooked, and people were frauds. But it turns out you can overcome that, and the skills I developed helped at Google." I'm quite surprised that he would say something like that in public. I understand that this is a transcript made in a class in which Eric Schmidt was being interviewed. I know the chances are slim, but can anyone confirm that he really said this?
- firasd 11y agoAs far as his reference to Google, it seems the next sentence is what he means: “I understood the rule of cash, so we did everything we could to manage for revenue, and the rest is history.”
- weinzierl 11y agoThat's how I understand it. I just think what he said in the sentences before is potentially slanderous. Doesn't he basically accuse Novel's management at the time of fraud?
- kelukelugames 11y agoIt's not slander if it's true. "the books" is a permanent record and can be easily verified if it goes to litigation.
- rancur 11y ago> not slander if it's true but that's trade secret! no seriously, I wonder if that's been tried.
- kelukelugames 11y agoIt's literally the law. At least that's what my lawyer told me. I hope she's not lying?
- johansch 11y agoThat last part about antitrust is weird. European (antitrust) law is biased against large companies? Huh.
- icebraining 11y agoWell, the point of antitrust law is to prevent cartels and monopoly abuses; companies of all sizes can be guilty of such. My guess is that he's saying that EU law tends to crack down on large companies even if they are only the largest (not single) player in a competitive market, while leaving alone the SMBs that collude to corner a small market.
- digi_owl 11y agoWhile IANAL, the monopoly part is a misnomer. It is really about abuse of market position. When Microsoft got into hot water during the browser war with Netscape, it was about abusing their position in one market (computer OS) to gain a position in another (web browser and web server). This by bundling Internet Explorer for free with Windows, that in turn had special binding to their IIS web server. So when EU is looking into Google, they are looking into how their position in one market gets used to affect other markets (like say when they re-jig their search algorithms).
- Pyxl101 11y ago> 6 months after we went to auctions, we had to merge three different databases. I asked if I should be in the datacenter, and the engineers said, what are you talking about, we never go to the datacenter. Hah! Good one. The best datacenter is one you never see, and never have to see. However it does make me wonder if Schmidt knows less about software than I thought he might. The random scattered mentions of machine learning present the same image. Then again, I assume this is a person taking notes which are snippets of conversation potentially out of context.
- dekhn 11y agoEric Schmidt was one of the authors of Lex (not the original version) when he was an intern at Bell Labs. He has a deep understanding of software. I've met him, he asked about my project, and his level of detailed questions showed he understood a great deal about software.
- digi_owl 11y ago> Hah! Good one. The best datacenter is one you never see, and never have to see. Maybe i am being snarky, but that seem like wishful thinking.
- jzwinck 11y ago> The teams are far larger than they should be. It’s a failure of architecture — the programmers don’t have the right libraries. I hope that machine learning will fix that problem. This may have been a transcription error, but as written I can't make sense of it. Can anyone else?
- dekhn 11y agoIt is now understood that products can be built with far fewer developers, who leverage machine learning on large data sets. Much less code has to be written, and the ML does most of the work in tuning the product behavior.
- codecamper 11y agoSounds good to me! Where can I learn about these techniques. I've got a 4 CPU Ghz machine sitting waiting for my keystrokes. Please tell me how I can get this thing to help me write software.
- dekhn 11y agoIt is best learned by working at companies who are practicing this art.
- codecamper 11y agoHrm. So the revolution will be closed source? No, seriously... are there books on the subject? Open source libraries? Which companies are developing such tools? Googling is not turning up a whole lot.
- dekhn 11y agoI'd say that Facebook, Google, Twitter, and a few others are really good at this. Many of them release a fair amount of their code as open source, but these sorts of capabilities are generally dependent on having absurd amounts of data, which is prohibitively challenging for anybody who doesn't run a website that sees massive traffic.
- ilurk 11y ago> At Novell, we had what I called “glue” people. They sit at the boundaries, and help everyone work together. What does he mean by this? Social people that make a good environment? Or generalist that know a bit of everything? > You don’t hire generic people — you hire people who have had stress and achievement. Isn't this bias inducing towards good storytellers? > Once we decided to review all the tactics, we put in a scoring system. Sergey said, the problem is, these scores are biased. How does google evaluate performance?
- reagency 11y agoI think you have as fine a point it as they do.
- kelukelugames 11y agoThe world is biased towards good storytellers. I highly recommend reading Lauren Rivera's Pedigree. It's published in 2015 and resonates with my friends in consulting and finance. http://www.amazon.com/Pedigree-How-Elite-Students-Jobs/dp/0691155623/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1445190973&sr=8-2&keywords=pedigree http://www.amazon.com/Pedigree-How-Elite-Students-Jobs/dp/06...
- ilurk 11y agoDoes the book teach you how to be a good storyteller? BTW, thanks for this one [1]. I'll be reading it, and similar material, really soon (had it bookmarked here.) Regarding my comment, I should have explained myself better in any case. I suspect all software developers have experienced some amounts of stress in getting things done on time. My problem is that I don't keep a track record of it. Just a few days ago on a phone interview they asked me of any interesting problem I had solved. My honest non-impressive answer was "nothing in particular, I just go at it and keep going". I have faced countless problems and when I do: I fix them. I don't write them on my diary. But now I know I should have. One thing I do keep track are my programming and linux notes because I've dealt with so many different technologies. And will be moving those to github and blogs since nowadays you need to be a social coder. [1] http://kelukelu.me/interview/ http://kelukelu.me/interview/