5 ms·

>Judging an entire recruitment process based on one side of a story from a person who's clearly upset about an interview, It's not just this guy. There have be

>Judging an entire recruitment process based on one side of a story from a person who's clearly upset about an interview, It's not just this guy. There have been others: https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768 https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768 There's another measure I use to measure the quality of their hiring process. The output. Namely the track record of products Google has developed in house in the last 10 years. I've also heard a few stories about friends applying for a position and being shunted by the hiring process into the hiring funnel for other (plainly unsuitable) positions. When I hear a very specific criticism from two separate places it's hard to stay skeptical.

serge2k 10y ago
> There's another measure I use to measure the quality of their hiring process. The output. Namely the track record of products Google has developed in house in the last 10 years. That's a poor metric to evaluate the rampant complaints about a high false negative rate. I don't think that many people are disputing that the people who do get hired are qualified most of the time.
- crdoconnor 10y ago
  When the in house engineers come out with products like Wave and Glass while things like Maps and Android are purchased you have to wonder.
  - jpatokal 10y ago
    Psst: the Rasmussen brothers were behind both Maps and Wave. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Rasmussen_(software_developer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Rasmussen_(software_devel...
  - fphhotchips 10y ago
    Not sure what you're saying here. Wave was great technically; the market fit just wasn't there.
  - jrockway 10y ago
    I think you're neglecting the continuous improvement of successful projects, which take quite a bit of engineering effort. Was it software quality that killed Wave and Glass, or was it more of the market not wanting either of those things? (To digress, it seems like both of those products came too early. Do you think that wearable computers will _never_ exist? And Slack seems to be the Wave-like thing that the market wanted.)
    - esturk 10y ago
      Slack is in no way like Wave. Now you're just over reaching with your comparisons. Wave's flaw was showing you what the other person was typing as they were typing it. You try to separate quality from functionality and stick that to market's fault because it doesn't want Wave's functionality. That is not mutually exclusive. Wave's quality was egregious.
    - crdoconnor 10y ago
      Funny you should mention that. I was just using maps and thinking "this is worse than it used to be". From what I've heard from insiders, the adwords code base is an enormous mess. Not surprising for a product that old perhaps, but this points to their engineering practises being about as mediocre as the industry average. I don't honestly know why people want slack. It seems to just be in vogue - one of those weird network effect things. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with their feature-set or engineering quality because it's not noticeably better than, say, hipchat. >To digress, it seems like both of those products came too early. Do you think that wearable computers will _never_ exist? They already exist.
- morgante 10y ago
  Why is it a poor metric? Isn't the point of hiring employees to ideally build and launch successful products? I think Google is pretty good at hiring "qualified" engineers who are very good at maintaining and scaling existing systems, but the process definitely selects against entrepreneurial product-focused engineers. Maybe Google thinks that's fine though: they can always pick them up through an acquisition later, albeit at 100x the price.
jameshart 10y ago
Yep, those engineers they took on in the last ten years must suck, they've only managed to develop technologies that grew Google's annual revenue from 10 billion dollars in 2006 to 75 billion in 2015. That's the kind of track record that has to make you question the hiring process, right?
- panic 10y ago
  There are a lot of assumptions being made here. Sometimes companies grow despite poor hiring decisions. I think you need a finer-grained view than just revenue to really tell whether you're doing a good job or not. Lots of terrible decisions have been justified by this "the revenue went up so we must be doing a good job" line of reasoning.
- ubernostrum 10y ago
  You seem to be confusing "I have a smug twitter-sized sound-bite response" for "I have a worthwhile counter-argument". It's a common failing these days, but you should probably look into getting it fixed. That said, yes, Google's hiring process is questionable. The Web is full of horror stories from obviously-qualified people who Google passed on, often very early in the process when no engineer had talked to them, and this suggests Google's success is not sustainable so long as that continues. They'll be able to hire fresh CS grads out of Stanford forever with this process, but the experienced/unconventional people they flunk out on the early screens are not going to come to them, and when their current crop of experienced/unconventional engineers retire or take jobs elsewhere, Google's finally going to have to fix this problem and stop pretending that it's better to pass on a thousand highly-qualified candidates than to give one unqualified candidate an on-site. That, or tumble back down into mediocrity. (which, to be fair, is already mostly the case; Google is largely a mediocre company, with only a couple of externally-visible brights spots of talent or innovation clustered in a couple of particular teams, and otherwise Google runs on inertia and the hope that the 0.1% of interesting stuff they come up with will keep the 99.9% of mediocrity afloat)
  - jameshart 10y ago
    I can expand beyond 140 characters if you like. The OP claimed that in the past ten years, as a result of their hiring practices, Google's product output quality has noticeably declined, presumably as compared to the search product on which their name was made, and gmail, which they launched in 2004. And it's easy and fashionable to knock Google because maps is not as good as you remember it used to be, or because they shut down reader, or because plus didn't manage to unseat facebook. Well, in 2006 Google was a 10 billion dollar search and ad company with a fledgeling email business without a revenue model, who had just bought youtube. In 2008 they shipped a mobile phone operating system. That's now a thirty billion dollar business which has been built up through talent within google. They undermined Microsoft's office monopoly with an online office suite (okay, some acquisitions underpinning that). They have a credible seat at the top table in the cloud market. And they continued to develop their core ad platform to drive more revenue growth. I've got no particular reason to stand up for Google, they're quite big enough to look after themselves, but the idea that their product flops in the last decade outweigh those product successes, and can be held up as evidence that there is something deeply rotten in their hiring model, seems to be cherrypicking to me. 70% mobile OS share, 70% search share, and 50% of global online ad revenue... that's a pretty good kind of mediocrity.

serge2k 10y ago

> There's another measure I use to measure the quality of their hiring process. The output. Namely the track record of products Google has developed in house in the last 10 years. That's a poor metric to evaluate the rampant complaints about a high false negative rate. I don't think that many people are disputing that the people who do get hired are qualified most of the time.

crdoconnor 10y ago
When the in house engineers come out with products like Wave and Glass while things like Maps and Android are purchased you have to wonder.
- jpatokal 10y ago
  Psst: the Rasmussen brothers were behind both Maps and Wave. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Rasmussen_(software_developer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Rasmussen_(software_devel...
- fphhotchips 10y ago
  Not sure what you're saying here. Wave was great technically; the market fit just wasn't there.
- jrockway 10y ago
  I think you're neglecting the continuous improvement of successful projects, which take quite a bit of engineering effort. Was it software quality that killed Wave and Glass, or was it more of the market not wanting either of those things? (To digress, it seems like both of those products came too early. Do you think that wearable computers will _never_ exist? And Slack seems to be the Wave-like thing that the market wanted.)
  - esturk 10y ago
    Slack is in no way like Wave. Now you're just over reaching with your comparisons. Wave's flaw was showing you what the other person was typing as they were typing it. You try to separate quality from functionality and stick that to market's fault because it doesn't want Wave's functionality. That is not mutually exclusive. Wave's quality was egregious.
  - crdoconnor 10y ago
    Funny you should mention that. I was just using maps and thinking "this is worse than it used to be". From what I've heard from insiders, the adwords code base is an enormous mess. Not surprising for a product that old perhaps, but this points to their engineering practises being about as mediocre as the industry average. I don't honestly know why people want slack. It seems to just be in vogue - one of those weird network effect things. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with their feature-set or engineering quality because it's not noticeably better than, say, hipchat. >To digress, it seems like both of those products came too early. Do you think that wearable computers will _never_ exist? They already exist.
morgante 10y ago
Why is it a poor metric? Isn't the point of hiring employees to ideally build and launch successful products? I think Google is pretty good at hiring "qualified" engineers who are very good at maintaining and scaling existing systems, but the process definitely selects against entrepreneurial product-focused engineers. Maybe Google thinks that's fine though: they can always pick them up through an acquisition later, albeit at 100x the price.

jameshart 10y ago

Yep, those engineers they took on in the last ten years must suck, they've only managed to develop technologies that grew Google's annual revenue from 10 billion dollars in 2006 to 75 billion in 2015. That's the kind of track record that has to make you question the hiring process, right?

panic 10y ago
There are a lot of assumptions being made here. Sometimes companies grow despite poor hiring decisions. I think you need a finer-grained view than just revenue to really tell whether you're doing a good job or not. Lots of terrible decisions have been justified by this "the revenue went up so we must be doing a good job" line of reasoning.
ubernostrum 10y ago
You seem to be confusing "I have a smug twitter-sized sound-bite response" for "I have a worthwhile counter-argument". It's a common failing these days, but you should probably look into getting it fixed. That said, yes, Google's hiring process is questionable. The Web is full of horror stories from obviously-qualified people who Google passed on, often very early in the process when no engineer had talked to them, and this suggests Google's success is not sustainable so long as that continues. They'll be able to hire fresh CS grads out of Stanford forever with this process, but the experienced/unconventional people they flunk out on the early screens are not going to come to them, and when their current crop of experienced/unconventional engineers retire or take jobs elsewhere, Google's finally going to have to fix this problem and stop pretending that it's better to pass on a thousand highly-qualified candidates than to give one unqualified candidate an on-site. That, or tumble back down into mediocrity. (which, to be fair, is already mostly the case; Google is largely a mediocre company, with only a couple of externally-visible brights spots of talent or innovation clustered in a couple of particular teams, and otherwise Google runs on inertia and the hope that the 0.1% of interesting stuff they come up with will keep the 99.9% of mediocrity afloat)
- jameshart 10y ago
  I can expand beyond 140 characters if you like. The OP claimed that in the past ten years, as a result of their hiring practices, Google's product output quality has noticeably declined, presumably as compared to the search product on which their name was made, and gmail, which they launched in 2004. And it's easy and fashionable to knock Google because maps is not as good as you remember it used to be, or because they shut down reader, or because plus didn't manage to unseat facebook. Well, in 2006 Google was a 10 billion dollar search and ad company with a fledgeling email business without a revenue model, who had just bought youtube. In 2008 they shipped a mobile phone operating system. That's now a thirty billion dollar business which has been built up through talent within google. They undermined Microsoft's office monopoly with an online office suite (okay, some acquisitions underpinning that). They have a credible seat at the top table in the cloud market. And they continued to develop their core ad platform to drive more revenue growth. I've got no particular reason to stand up for Google, they're quite big enough to look after themselves, but the idea that their product flops in the last decade outweigh those product successes, and can be held up as evidence that there is something deeply rotten in their hiring model, seems to be cherrypicking to me. 70% mobile OS share, 70% search share, and 50% of global online ad revenue... that's a pretty good kind of mediocrity.