4 ms·

If it takes months to hire an employee, then it speaks volumes about their processes generally. But then I'm just a curmudgeony old fart with a decaying brain.

If it takes months to hire an employee, then it speaks volumes about their processes generally. But then I'm just a curmudgeony old fart with a decaying brain. Google is for bright young things in their 20's.

jethkl 4y ago
Agree that on behavioral front, there is not much new signal after a few hours of conversation. Some evidence for this is a well-known study [1]. Unsure if the study has been validated, but the idea has stuck with me. Regarding cognitive decay: I like to think time is simply pruning the weak and lazy neurons. At least that's what my remaining grey matter is telling itself. Your comment made me laugh. Thanks. [1] https://kevin.burke.dev/pdf/30_seconds_teacher_quality.pdf https://kevin.burke.dev/pdf/30_seconds_teacher_quality.pdf
- blippage 4y ago
  Thanks. I'm glad someone got a laugh, at least. I can't give citation, but someone was talking about an assessment unit in the army that tried to identify candidates to fast-track to more senior command positions. What they found was that there was no reliable way to determine such candidates. Unpromising candidates went on to great things, and the so-called promising ones didn't. The assessor wryly noted that despite the failure, enthusiasm for assessment didn't abate. One thing that struck me years (decades) ago was when I was working for a company as a programmer. I happened to see the CVs of the candidates. On the basis of less than 15 minutes, I came to the conclusion that they were all likely to be as good as the other. There was perhaps one lemon in the group. Some companies are very successful, and obviously employ bright people. There's a mindset of "manifest destiny", and of course a certain conceit. I think that there was a talk at Google about how companies rise and fall. He said that Google will eventually fall. Nothing lasts forever. (Although I will say that a company like Microsoft has beaten a lot of history as to how long the edge can last). One Google employee raised a hand and asked how it could be prevented. You could tell it in their eyes and manner of speech that they thought that the sheer brilliance of their minds would prevent such a thing from happening. I can't remember what the response was, but I think it was along the lines of "you can't". Time and tide happen to all men. I thought about this, and I did come to one interesting idea: spinoffs. Google may do better for their shareholders if they explored the idea of spinoffs. How so? Well, we've seen the sheer volume of projects that have been started and abandoned by Google. Presumably the logic behind this is that they'll encounter, by chance, another project that will propel them to the next level. The idea is good, but there's a snag: Google is too successful. This leads them a lot of dilettantism. They try this, they try that, they try the other. Then they get bored, and go back to their ad revenues. Let's take Google+. At one point, people speculated that it would usurp Facebook. There was even an animated gif where a bus with the Google logo above it smashes into a car with the Facebook logo above it. As we now know, Google+ disappeared and Facebook is still strong. Perhaps a better strategy would have been to spin off the Google+ division, retaining only a 20% stake. This has two effects: 1) it creates a smaller division with less diseconomies of scale, 2) the new division is pot-committed. Failure is not an option. Success is by no means guaranteed, of course, but success is more likely when there's a gun at your head.
scarface74 4y ago
I’m an old fart too (48). I stayed at one company for 9 years and by 2008 at 34, I was the epitome of an “expert beginner”. I changed jobs four times between 2008 and 2016 and I was just your regular old enterprise “full stack developer”. In 2016, I was the lead developer at a medium size non tech company and looking at where I wanted to be in four years after I my youngest (step)son graduated and we could move anywhere the money took us. I looked around at the landscape and saw that my salary was going to plateau with one more job hop locally unless I became a manager. I looked at what it would take to get into $BigTech as a software engineer and I was neither interested in “grinding leetCode” or even working as a software engineer at a large company with a bunch of 20 something’s. I kind of put the idea to the side and started working on the skills it would take to become a consultant (not a contractor doing staff augmentation who calls themselves a consultant). Out of the blue, while I was a working as a de facto “cloud architect” at a startup in 2020, BigTech cloud provider recruiter sent me a message about a role in the consulting department. So there I was at 46 with my first job in $BigTech - making about what a 26 year old who was promoted to a mid level engineer was making. But I do get to work remotely.
- jethkl 4y ago
  > working on the skills it would take to become a consultant Curious to know what you were doing to make this happen. Did you have a guide?
  - scarface74 4y ago
    I yada yada yada’d over a lot. I was first exposed to consultants when I was the newly hired lead at a company in 2016 brought in to design an on prem project. At the last minute, they decided to “move to the cloud”. They brought in two sets of consultants. One set that was suppose to know about AWS. But they ended up just treating AWS like an overpriced Colo and I didn’t know any better at the time and the other set who in hindsight were just following a cookie cutter script who were “helping” the business manage integrating a bunch of recent acquisitions. Once I started belated learning about all the services that AWS had to offer developers and for “DevOps”, I knew I wanted to specialize in consulting in that area and set myself apart from the old school network folks who got one certification and called themselves “cloud architects”. I figured I could bring more to the table from a software engineering standpoint. I changed jobs in 2018 where the then new CTO wanted to be “cloud native”. He was trying to build out an internal engineering department. He knew I had no hands on experience with AWS. But he liked my proposals. Two years and a lot of projects later, I had the technical side down pat. It took me a couple of years at AWS to get good enough at the soft skills/customer interaction side. My original plan was to get a job at one of the big consulting agencies to hone my craft. I got lucky to skip over that part.
aaomidi 4y ago
Google doesn't really hire great engineers. It hires people who had the time to cram leetcode. Source: me, crammed leetcode.

jethkl 4y ago

Agree that on behavioral front, there is not much new signal after a few hours of conversation. Some evidence for this is a well-known study [1]. Unsure if the study has been validated, but the idea has stuck with me. Regarding cognitive decay: I like to think time is simply pruning the weak and lazy neurons. At least that's what my remaining grey matter is telling itself. Your comment made me laugh. Thanks. [1] https://kevin.burke.dev/pdf/30_seconds_teacher_quality.pdf https://kevin.burke.dev/pdf/30_seconds_teacher_quality.pdf

blippage 4y ago
Thanks. I'm glad someone got a laugh, at least. I can't give citation, but someone was talking about an assessment unit in the army that tried to identify candidates to fast-track to more senior command positions. What they found was that there was no reliable way to determine such candidates. Unpromising candidates went on to great things, and the so-called promising ones didn't. The assessor wryly noted that despite the failure, enthusiasm for assessment didn't abate. One thing that struck me years (decades) ago was when I was working for a company as a programmer. I happened to see the CVs of the candidates. On the basis of less than 15 minutes, I came to the conclusion that they were all likely to be as good as the other. There was perhaps one lemon in the group. Some companies are very successful, and obviously employ bright people. There's a mindset of "manifest destiny", and of course a certain conceit. I think that there was a talk at Google about how companies rise and fall. He said that Google will eventually fall. Nothing lasts forever. (Although I will say that a company like Microsoft has beaten a lot of history as to how long the edge can last). One Google employee raised a hand and asked how it could be prevented. You could tell it in their eyes and manner of speech that they thought that the sheer brilliance of their minds would prevent such a thing from happening. I can't remember what the response was, but I think it was along the lines of "you can't". Time and tide happen to all men. I thought about this, and I did come to one interesting idea: spinoffs. Google may do better for their shareholders if they explored the idea of spinoffs. How so? Well, we've seen the sheer volume of projects that have been started and abandoned by Google. Presumably the logic behind this is that they'll encounter, by chance, another project that will propel them to the next level. The idea is good, but there's a snag: Google is too successful. This leads them a lot of dilettantism. They try this, they try that, they try the other. Then they get bored, and go back to their ad revenues. Let's take Google+. At one point, people speculated that it would usurp Facebook. There was even an animated gif where a bus with the Google logo above it smashes into a car with the Facebook logo above it. As we now know, Google+ disappeared and Facebook is still strong. Perhaps a better strategy would have been to spin off the Google+ division, retaining only a 20% stake. This has two effects: 1) it creates a smaller division with less diseconomies of scale, 2) the new division is pot-committed. Failure is not an option. Success is by no means guaranteed, of course, but success is more likely when there's a gun at your head.

scarface74 4y ago

I’m an old fart too (48). I stayed at one company for 9 years and by 2008 at 34, I was the epitome of an “expert beginner”. I changed jobs four times between 2008 and 2016 and I was just your regular old enterprise “full stack developer”. In 2016, I was the lead developer at a medium size non tech company and looking at where I wanted to be in four years after I my youngest (step)son graduated and we could move anywhere the money took us. I looked around at the landscape and saw that my salary was going to plateau with one more job hop locally unless I became a manager. I looked at what it would take to get into $BigTech as a software engineer and I was neither interested in “grinding leetCode” or even working as a software engineer at a large company with a bunch of 20 something’s. I kind of put the idea to the side and started working on the skills it would take to become a consultant (not a contractor doing staff augmentation who calls themselves a consultant). Out of the blue, while I was a working as a de facto “cloud architect” at a startup in 2020, BigTech cloud provider recruiter sent me a message about a role in the consulting department. So there I was at 46 with my first job in $BigTech - making about what a 26 year old who was promoted to a mid level engineer was making. But I do get to work remotely.

jethkl 4y ago
> working on the skills it would take to become a consultant Curious to know what you were doing to make this happen. Did you have a guide?
- scarface74 4y ago
  I yada yada yada’d over a lot. I was first exposed to consultants when I was the newly hired lead at a company in 2016 brought in to design an on prem project. At the last minute, they decided to “move to the cloud”. They brought in two sets of consultants. One set that was suppose to know about AWS. But they ended up just treating AWS like an overpriced Colo and I didn’t know any better at the time and the other set who in hindsight were just following a cookie cutter script who were “helping” the business manage integrating a bunch of recent acquisitions. Once I started belated learning about all the services that AWS had to offer developers and for “DevOps”, I knew I wanted to specialize in consulting in that area and set myself apart from the old school network folks who got one certification and called themselves “cloud architects”. I figured I could bring more to the table from a software engineering standpoint. I changed jobs in 2018 where the then new CTO wanted to be “cloud native”. He was trying to build out an internal engineering department. He knew I had no hands on experience with AWS. But he liked my proposals. Two years and a lot of projects later, I had the technical side down pat. It took me a couple of years at AWS to get good enough at the soft skills/customer interaction side. My original plan was to get a job at one of the big consulting agencies to hone my craft. I got lucky to skip over that part.

aaomidi 4y ago

Google doesn't really hire great engineers. It hires people who had the time to cram leetcode. Source: me, crammed leetcode.