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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 billio

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.
  - ubernostrum 10y ago
    It's still the case that other than search and ads, most of Google's biggest hits were acquired rather than the result of in-house initiatives (even Google Analytics, which is probably one of their more heavily-relied-on products, was acquired). Google doesn't hire people who will create stuff like Android; they hire people who can pass their interview process, and get new product and service lines mostly through acquiring teams of people who probably can't pass their interviews. It's also the case that Google is acquiring a reputation for bad interview/hiring processes, and for hiring people who have a Ph.D. in CS and putting them to work on CRUD web apps that any random coding-bootcamp grad could build, since there's just not enough interesting in-house work to keep all those top talents occupied.
    - 10y ago
crdoconnor 10y ago
And Comcast has some of the best customer service and engineering because they don't seem to be losing any customers. 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.
- ubernostrum 10y ago
  It's still the case that other than search and ads, most of Google's biggest hits were acquired rather than the result of in-house initiatives (even Google Analytics, which is probably one of their more heavily-relied-on products, was acquired). Google doesn't hire people who will create stuff like Android; they hire people who can pass their interview process, and get new product and service lines mostly through acquiring teams of people who probably can't pass their interviews. It's also the case that Google is acquiring a reputation for bad interview/hiring processes, and for hiring people who have a Ph.D. in CS and putting them to work on CRUD web apps that any random coding-bootcamp grad could build, since there's just not enough interesting in-house work to keep all those top talents occupied.
  - 10y ago

crdoconnor 10y ago

And Comcast has some of the best customer service and engineering because they don't seem to be losing any customers. Right?