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The Most Innovative Employees at Google Aren’t grads with Perfect SATs
- jaytaylor 13y agoI am quite familiar with the current engineering hiring practices at Google, and what the story claims is completely different than what I've heard from actual engineers who perform the interviews. The process is highly technical and if anyone marks you as a "B", you are unlikely to be hired.
- mdwrigh2 13y agoI don't this contradicts the article, as I'd fully agree with both the article and you. The article just says that SAT scores and GPAs don't matter so much -- technical chops still do.
- vanwaril 13y agoIf a candidate can be eliminated from consideration because an interviewer marked him/her as a "B", I don't think that's more strongly correlated with innovation than SAT scores and GPAs. It doesn't mean the interviewer is being a good judge of technical chops. And on top of that, the article doesn't say technical skill or ability correlates with innovation, but individual drive. So really, nothing adds up here.
- purplelobster 13y agoI'd say getting a high SAT score and GPA requires pretty much the same skill set as technical code-on-the-whiteboard interviews. Actually, technical interviews are even more narrow, and probably weed out very many highly creative, motivated people that "have a mission".
- Retric 13y agoThe top students often dont't have an overly high GPA because they take a difficult courslanded for them and go beyond there classes and end up prioritizing more than just a 4.0. Also I find highly technical interviews have limited value beyond a simple pass\fail because the poorly represent an actual working environment. If you really want the best have them walk you through a project they are proud of. It takes a lot more effort and you need to let go of the ego boost of knowing all the answers as you go over the same problems with everyone. However, you can dig a lot further into how they think. PS: It's important to reolise Google is way to large to be all that picky though. Lucky the vast majority of Google projects are not really that difficult or important. But, if you need the 'best' there are people out there that will blow your mind.
- pyre 13y ago| if anyone marks you as a "B", you are unlikely | to be hired. Then what's the point of not making it pass/fail?
- rscale 13y agoPerhaps that we're conditioned to give Bs more readily than we give Fs.
- mietek 13y agoWhat is this blog post based on?
- rhizome 13y agoBegging the question.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- grandalf 13y agoI'd estimate that a greater percentage of HN readers than Google employees have perfect SATs.
- ariwilson 13y agoWhy?
- intrazoo 13y agoBecause HN's account registration is darn right hidden. /s
- pavanky 13y agoNot going to lie, I didn't know where the signup button is when I was trying to sign up for a throwaway. I simply gave up after that.
- PhantomGremlin 13y agoI'm confused (HN newbie). Are you saying it's difficult to create an account here on HN? I just created one a few days ago to comment on a different topic. It couldn't be easier, I don't think I've ever created an account as easily as here. All I did was "reply" and it kicked me into a screen to choose a name and password. That's all. No email verification or anything complicated.
- w1ntermute 13y agoThe point is that there's no registration option if you click on the "Login" link in the top left. The idea is that a visitor can only register an account if they are planning on contributing a comment or post.
- Who828 13y agoI have been trying to use probability in real life occurrence like this whenever I can, so let's get started back of the envelop style according to this site http://research.collegeboard.org/content/sat-data-tables http://research.collegeboard.org/content/sat-data-tables Roughly 1.53 million students take up SAT every year and of which 10k students get perfect SAT score in Math (let's just focus on math for now) so that's 0.67% (rounded) people getting a perfect score out of the total. According to this data set, http://blog.rjmetrics.com/surprising-hacker-news-data-analysis/ http://blog.rjmetrics.com/surprising-hacker-news-data-analys... It says there are roughly 31k active users on HN, considering that I have personally seen many google employee's responding to a query/commenting on HN, let's assume a higher number of 2.5k. so, 2.5k * 0.0067 which is about 17 people, so there are 17 active google employees on HN which have perfect SAT score in Math. So that was my attempt, can someone provide a better probabilistic model? (maybe I will learn something new and exciting)
- smountcastle 13y agoSo how do you determine, during an interview, if the candidate has a strong sense of mission about their work and also feel that they have much personal autonomy? Perhaps the second piece happens after they're hired when you give them the autonomy, but it seems like a strong sense of mission isn't enough -- they need to be able to execute on it either through their own actions or by influencing others. And, of course, you need to find some whose mission aligns with the needs of your company.
- drewcoo 13y agoTry behavioral interview questions. One of the folks on my team liked to use most of his hour with a candidate finding out about a project the person had worked on and ideally led. He'd dig for technical depth, project impact, and clues about soft skills all while having a fun conversation about something the candidate was passionate about. Please excuse the HR speak above. I know geeks generally hate it but it helps explain to HR why we should really hire someone right now before someone else snaps 'em up.
- wsc981 13y agoCan any developer feel a strong sense of mission about a project when the project isn't their child? Personally, I don't think I can. If it's not my child project, then to me it's just a 9 to 5 job. At least I've decided it will be since last year, since any extra work I put in wasn't noticed / rewarded. So I'd say autonomy is great, but will probably only give great results if the project itself is a pet project by the developer.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- dougk16 13y agoSometimes you can determine it before the interview, just by googling them. Developers with a real passion for what they do will frequently have a significant personal web presence devoted to it, through open source projects, blogs, or what have you.
- michaelochurch 13y agoThis is nonsense. “All people decisions at Google are based on data and analytics,” according to Kathryn Dekas, a manager in Google’s “people analytics” team. Calibration scores are not fucking data, not any more than bathroom graffiti contains reliable information. Data-driven my ass. (She may have been only talking about hiring, but she said "all people decisions", and that's incorrect.) Google discovered that its most innovative workers “are those who have a strong sense of mission about their work and who also feel that they have much personal autonomy.” Bullshit. Take that attitude to work at a place like Google and you'll be on a PIP as soon as your boss catches wind that you have ambitions other than serving his specific career goals. Google hasn't valued "personal autonomy" since I was in high school.
- jmduke 13y agoMichael, I don't mean to be disrespectful -- I've enjoyed your comments a lot on HN, and find them to be incredibly insightful -- but I feel like you're beating a dead horse with your Google vitriol.
- michaelochurch 13y agoMy work isn't done yet. Our industry is still hellish and there are trillions of dollars of value to be added to society by fixing it. Programmer Autonomy is a $1 Trillion Issue: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/11/25/programmer-autonomy-is-a-1-trillion-issue/ http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/11/25/programmer-au... The cultural war on closed allocation is the only trillion-dollar problem in the world that I have any power whatsoever to influence (not much, but I have a voice). Attacking Google-- exposing its closed allocation as a catastrophe that destroyed what could have been an amazing company-- is part of the campaign. How to structure a software workplace properly is the only trillion-dollar issue on which I'm a world-class expert, and probably the only such one in my life. So yes, I do tend to be a bit overfocused on that problem domain.
- hkmurakami 13y ago>How to structure a software workplace properly is the only trillion-dollar issue on which I'm a world-class expert, and probably the only such one in my life. Kind of reminded me of Zuckerberg's quote: "I don't really need any money. And anyway, I don't think I'm ever going to have an idea this good again."
- clubhi 13y agoI have always considered SAT scores to be highly correlated with how good of parents you have.
- coloneltcb 13y agoThis post is really light on the references and methodology, but I'll take it at face value. I think it's great that they've let go of this obsession for Ivies. But what they don't even talk about in this post is how the Ivy-only policy poisoned their company culture. To quote a friend from mine from a top startup: "All the assholes at my company come from Google."
- ritchiea 13y agoWell the article didn't exactly say that. It said Google's most innovative employees aren't necessarily the Ivy, perfect SAT score types. At a company as large as Google not everyone is going to be an innovator. There are definitely tedious roles that need to be filled by someone who excels at working within the system. My guess is they learned a better idea of what to hire for given a specific type of need.
- michaelochurch 13y agoTo quote a friend from mine from a top startup: "All the assholes at my company come from Google." My personal experience is that the engineers at Google are really decent, capable people. I miss that crowd, actually. They were pretty solid. It's the rest of the company (including tech management) that's fucked up. When you have a company that believes engineering is for smart people and everything else (people management, product direction) is Dumb People Work, well... who ends up fulfilling those (actually important) duties? Exactly. However, my only gripe with Google engineers is that they tend to be closed-minded about "weird" programming languages like Haskell and Clojure.
- coloneltcb 13y agoYea, to be fair, I think she was referencing mostly middle management and upper management folks, not engineers.
- MisterBastahrd 13y agoImagine that creativity doesn't necessarily come from spending a few grand on test prep classes.
- trustfundbaby 13y agoI think that article is a bit content free, the real gold is in the article it links to by the NY Times http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/technology/big-data-trying-to-build-better-workers.html?pagewanted=all&_r=2& http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/technology/big-data-trying...;
- Kurinys 13y agoIt took analytics to show that people born into an elite status may not always be better employees than people who've had to work twice as hard to balance self-development and making ends meet?
- losvedir 13y agoI wonder about sampling bias. If Google has a preference towards MIT/Stanford with perfect SATs, then wouldn't the employees that don't meet that profile have to be a little bit more distinguished to begin with?