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I left Google in 2015, and I started to notice the flip from liberalism to illiberalism around 2012-2013. I still remember how weird it was the first time I he

I left Google in 2015, and I started to notice the flip from liberalism to illiberalism around 2012-2013. I still remember how weird it was the first time I heard someone on Memegen say that due process (ie, trying to understand whether a complaint occurred) was a legal constraint that Google didn't need to adhere to when adjudicating intra-employee complaints (eg harassing comments). IMO it's pretty straightforward, in Google's case at least. They scaled wildly in terms of headcount (I think they have a bit under 10x the headcount they had when I joined), right when competition for the best tech employees exploded. They obviously had to lower their bar[1] significantly to keep growing, and they ended up scooping up masses of coastal urban[2] midwits, precisely the population that was most susceptible to and hit hardest by the religious awakening that occurred in the early 2010s. A bit more speculatively, there's some evidence that higher cognitive ability is correlated with support for free speech[3] and other tenets of liberalism, so any company going from a highly-selected-for-intelligence employee base to a dumber one has a built-in backlash against liberalism/pluralism/open-mindedness/etc. [1] I'm not suggesting that a binary switch was flipped, and that I personally made it in right before they started dumbing down their hiring. I wouldn't be surprised if the bar was higher a few years before I joined, and I can't say whether I would've met that bar. It's an iterative process that sped up over time and the company started to suffer the cumulative effect in the quality of their employee body. [2] This isn't implying that being coastal and urban makes you stupid. I myself am very much coastal and urban and have been my entire life. These are just the areas that were hit hardest by these ideologies, and "midwits" (to borrow a term from Taleb) are fertile ground for new mass movements. [3] https://www.psypost.org/2020/05/higher-levels-of-cognitive-ability-linked-to-stronger-support-for-freedom-of-speech-56812 https://www.psypost.org/2020/05/higher-levels-of-cognitive-a...

cnvml 5y ago
Truth is downvoted. There are tons of people hired after 2012 who aren't that great and survive on being political losers. The politician needs a framework to control other people and fake enforced wokeness serves that purpose quite well.
- wutbrodo 5y ago
  It's not worth paying attention to vote counts on HN; it's been years since I've taken them seriously. It's worth hanging out here for the smart people that remain, but there are a lot of dumb people with aspirations to the "magic" of success in SV that don't realize that being aggressively narrow-minded is explicitly counterproductive. I think this is just the lifecycle of any space with low barriers to entry full of smart people. There are positive effects from smart people interacting openly, dumb people notice the effects and want a piece, and they flood the zone with their dumbness without realizing how anathema it is to what attracted them there in the first place.
logicchains 5y ago
> A bit more speculatively, there's some evidence that higher cognitive ability is correlated with support for free speech[3] and other tenets of liberalism, so any company going from a highly-selected-for-intelligence employee base to a dumber one has a built-in backlash against liberalism/pluralism/open-mindedness/etc. I wonder if their focus on mind-numbing algo questions in interviews also contributed to this? Somebody willing to spend months grinding Hackerrank, Leetcode or the like to get a job probably isn't a bastion of criticial thinking.
- wutbrodo 5y ago
  > I wonder if their focus on mind-numbing algo questions in interviews also contributed to this? Somebody willing to spend months grinding Hackerrank, Leetcode or the like to get a job probably isn't a bastion of criticial thinking. Fwiw, I didn't practice for my tech interviews and found my Google new-grad interviews pretty easy. IIRC, the questions were "implement a cache" and "turn a sorted array into a binary tree". I haven't done work similar to algorithm problems for a decade now, and I'm pretty sure I could ace that interview again with my eyes closed, using skills that are relatively useful for a general SWE job. Though obviously I was much closer in time to the algo questions of my CS education, and most of the complaints I've heard about the process are not centered around new-grad interviews. Though perhaps that's your point? As the size of the organization scaled, perhaps they moved away from the type of interview I got, towards interviews that more closely match your complaint. Conducting an interview that accurately predicts job performance is basically an impossible task, so I wouldn't be surprised if, speaking generally, the quality of their interviews suffered from their scaling just as much as their candidate pool did.
  - logicchains 5y ago
    I've never interviewed at Google personally, but I've heard lots of people complain about the needless difficulty of the questions so I assume they're something harder than just turning a sorted array into a binary tree.

cnvml 5y ago

Truth is downvoted. There are tons of people hired after 2012 who aren't that great and survive on being political losers. The politician needs a framework to control other people and fake enforced wokeness serves that purpose quite well.

wutbrodo 5y ago
It's not worth paying attention to vote counts on HN; it's been years since I've taken them seriously. It's worth hanging out here for the smart people that remain, but there are a lot of dumb people with aspirations to the "magic" of success in SV that don't realize that being aggressively narrow-minded is explicitly counterproductive. I think this is just the lifecycle of any space with low barriers to entry full of smart people. There are positive effects from smart people interacting openly, dumb people notice the effects and want a piece, and they flood the zone with their dumbness without realizing how anathema it is to what attracted them there in the first place.

logicchains 5y ago

> A bit more speculatively, there's some evidence that higher cognitive ability is correlated with support for free speech[3] and other tenets of liberalism, so any company going from a highly-selected-for-intelligence employee base to a dumber one has a built-in backlash against liberalism/pluralism/open-mindedness/etc. I wonder if their focus on mind-numbing algo questions in interviews also contributed to this? Somebody willing to spend months grinding Hackerrank, Leetcode or the like to get a job probably isn't a bastion of criticial thinking.

wutbrodo 5y ago
> I wonder if their focus on mind-numbing algo questions in interviews also contributed to this? Somebody willing to spend months grinding Hackerrank, Leetcode or the like to get a job probably isn't a bastion of criticial thinking. Fwiw, I didn't practice for my tech interviews and found my Google new-grad interviews pretty easy. IIRC, the questions were "implement a cache" and "turn a sorted array into a binary tree". I haven't done work similar to algorithm problems for a decade now, and I'm pretty sure I could ace that interview again with my eyes closed, using skills that are relatively useful for a general SWE job. Though obviously I was much closer in time to the algo questions of my CS education, and most of the complaints I've heard about the process are not centered around new-grad interviews. Though perhaps that's your point? As the size of the organization scaled, perhaps they moved away from the type of interview I got, towards interviews that more closely match your complaint. Conducting an interview that accurately predicts job performance is basically an impossible task, so I wouldn't be surprised if, speaking generally, the quality of their interviews suffered from their scaling just as much as their candidate pool did.
- logicchains 5y ago
  I've never interviewed at Google personally, but I've heard lots of people complain about the needless difficulty of the questions so I assume they're something harder than just turning a sorted array into a binary tree.