5 ms·

> I'd love to see a company literally just looking to snap up smart people and then have them come in and kind of define their own role, one where they can add

> I'd love to see a company literally just looking to snap up smart people and then have them come in and kind of define their own role, one where they can add the most value. Nobody does this! I don't know about letting people "define their own role", but a lot of the biggest companies are constantly hiring without a specific role in mind. If you've got thousands of employees then your best strategy is just hire the smartest people you can find, and figure out how to use them effectively - you have enough roles available that you'll find something for anyone to do, and while not every role you need filled is someone's dream job, a combination of internal mobility between teams and great benefits and pay will attract a lot of good candidates.

vonmoltke 10y ago
The problem, from my perspective, is that I (as a candidate) have certain things I want to work on. You might have something I can do, but is it something I want to do? I don't want to be hired into a general pool; I want to be hired for one of the specialties I am interested in.
- fixermark 10y ago
  The problem is that what interests you now may not be economically valuable next year. They want you there past one project, because the future is too murky to guarantee your current role will continue to be needed. Google et. al. are hiring generalists because they want people of a mindset such that when the entire special-purpose they hired them for dissolves, they're willing and eager to ramp up on a new project and new challenges instead of saying "Well, the foo project is closing down and foo's pretty much what I wanted to do, so I guess I'm going to quit (and take all the knowledge and skills Google spent time and money to train me up on with me)."
  - vonmoltke 10y ago
    You are taking a much too narrow view of "specialization". If project foo is really the only project at Google that uses the skills I like and know best, I am probably not going to apply there. I get that there are people who don't care (much) what kind of code they are working on. If those are the people Google exclusively wants, that's fine. I just won't have a place there. I do not think this is a generally-advisable strategy, though, as the GGP I was responding to indicated. In fact, I'd argue that well-crafted teams of specialists are superior to, but harder to staff than, teams of generalists.
    - fixermark 10y ago
      Ah, I see what you mean and I think I agree; "well-crafted teams of specialists" are, hypothetically, one of the advantages of attempting to tackle a problem as a startup company as opposed to pulling the resources together within a large corporation to skunkworks the problem (though in terms of eventual success or failure, I don't know where to place that advantage relative to, say, having the luck / foresight to choose a problem that the market needs to solve and doesn't have a good solution already in the pipeline somewhere [and will need to solve long enough for a startup to reach minimum viable product] and the startup's capacity to trade equity for a staff that will work their bloody asses off).
    - nolemurs 10y ago
      I definitely don't think that the generalist hiring practice is the best for all purposes - just that it makes a lot of sense for the bulk of the hiring at a large company, and that most the big tech companies do it. The big tech companies do also build well-crafted teams of specialists where appropriate (for instance, Google's Deep Mind team is all AI specialists). I don't know what sort of hiring process they use for those roles, but I would wager the process is a little more personalized, and also substantially more selective.
    - marssaxman 10y ago
      The funny part is that for all the work Google has done building a hiring process that searches for talented generalists, the actual work they have to offer is really boringly specialized. Most of what's going on in there is just stacks upon stacks of web-service middleware, endlessly slinging RPCs back and forth at each other. If that's your bag, then yay, Google is a great place to work! - but for me it was really discouraging to realize, four months in, that no more than ten per cent of Google was doing anything I was ever likely to care about. I didn't last long, and wouldn't go back (not that they'd be likely to want me).
DesiLurker 10y ago
I have seen this 'fungible bricklayer' approach at amazon & have to tell you it cant be any more misguided. It may work for generic web software where learning curve is not as steep but any point you are dealing with vertical technologies like wireless or multimedia it just falls flat on its face. And the byproduct is poorly thought out software full of band-aids. unfortunately this kind of nonsense often becomes pervasive where management itself is very non-technical (google may be an exception though).

vonmoltke 10y ago

The problem, from my perspective, is that I (as a candidate) have certain things I want to work on. You might have something I can do, but is it something I want to do? I don't want to be hired into a general pool; I want to be hired for one of the specialties I am interested in.

fixermark 10y ago
The problem is that what interests you now may not be economically valuable next year. They want you there past one project, because the future is too murky to guarantee your current role will continue to be needed. Google et. al. are hiring generalists because they want people of a mindset such that when the entire special-purpose they hired them for dissolves, they're willing and eager to ramp up on a new project and new challenges instead of saying "Well, the foo project is closing down and foo's pretty much what I wanted to do, so I guess I'm going to quit (and take all the knowledge and skills Google spent time and money to train me up on with me)."
- vonmoltke 10y ago
  You are taking a much too narrow view of "specialization". If project foo is really the only project at Google that uses the skills I like and know best, I am probably not going to apply there. I get that there are people who don't care (much) what kind of code they are working on. If those are the people Google exclusively wants, that's fine. I just won't have a place there. I do not think this is a generally-advisable strategy, though, as the GGP I was responding to indicated. In fact, I'd argue that well-crafted teams of specialists are superior to, but harder to staff than, teams of generalists.
  - fixermark 10y ago
    Ah, I see what you mean and I think I agree; "well-crafted teams of specialists" are, hypothetically, one of the advantages of attempting to tackle a problem as a startup company as opposed to pulling the resources together within a large corporation to skunkworks the problem (though in terms of eventual success or failure, I don't know where to place that advantage relative to, say, having the luck / foresight to choose a problem that the market needs to solve and doesn't have a good solution already in the pipeline somewhere [and will need to solve long enough for a startup to reach minimum viable product] and the startup's capacity to trade equity for a staff that will work their bloody asses off).
  - nolemurs 10y ago
    I definitely don't think that the generalist hiring practice is the best for all purposes - just that it makes a lot of sense for the bulk of the hiring at a large company, and that most the big tech companies do it. The big tech companies do also build well-crafted teams of specialists where appropriate (for instance, Google's Deep Mind team is all AI specialists). I don't know what sort of hiring process they use for those roles, but I would wager the process is a little more personalized, and also substantially more selective.
  - marssaxman 10y ago
    The funny part is that for all the work Google has done building a hiring process that searches for talented generalists, the actual work they have to offer is really boringly specialized. Most of what's going on in there is just stacks upon stacks of web-service middleware, endlessly slinging RPCs back and forth at each other. If that's your bag, then yay, Google is a great place to work! - but for me it was really discouraging to realize, four months in, that no more than ten per cent of Google was doing anything I was ever likely to care about. I didn't last long, and wouldn't go back (not that they'd be likely to want me).

DesiLurker 10y ago

I have seen this 'fungible bricklayer' approach at amazon & have to tell you it cant be any more misguided. It may work for generic web software where learning curve is not as steep but any point you are dealing with vertical technologies like wireless or multimedia it just falls flat on its face. And the byproduct is poorly thought out software full of band-aids. unfortunately this kind of nonsense often becomes pervasive where management itself is very non-technical (google may be an exception though).