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Google used to hire the best and the brightest. While there are still a lot of smart people there, they have diluted that process in favor of other things and t

Google used to hire the best and the brightest. While there are still a lot of smart people there, they have diluted that process in favor of other things and the quality of their workforce has slipped. The truth is that outside of search most of the other business units do not bring in nearly as much profit and are not as critical, but they need to look like they have an encore after search or the stock price will tank. Max is one of the many who were passed over so that they can focus on the other politically motivated hiring criteria, vs actual merit. Truth be told they could generate the majority of their current profit (which is primarily from search) with a much smaller workforce. What started out as a scrappy search startup is now a boated corporation.

linkregister 9y ago
Google Cloud is experiencing extremely rapid growth and is on its way to significance in Google’s bottom line. YouTube, though mature, is still important for profit growth within the company. There is undoubtedly duplication within the company, but I don’t know of a simple solution for it. Max was passed over because of the engineering interview process at Google, which hasn’t changed for a decade. It is orthogonal to recent developments within the company. I agree with Max, but I don’t think there’s anything more to read into it other than the fact that Google is extremely risk-averse to making bad hires. Part of this is due to an almost government-employee-level of process related to performance-related firings. An employee could likely be idle for a year before being fired. So the hiring process is a rational response to a highly irrational retention policy.