6 ms·

Google Calculating Which Employees Are About to Quit

makecheck 17y ago
...the algorithm helps Google “get inside people’s heads even before they know they might leave”... Sounds like the department of pre-crime. :) It's fascinating: enough Google employees want to leave, that Google is studying their behavior. Clearly, even amazing perks, challenging work and brilliant colleagues will wear thin on a person? Or maybe it's not that there's anything wrong with Google per se, but that people are regularly trying to branch out and start their own companies, etc. and no amount of pampering will change those ambitions.
- amichail 17y ago
  Amazing perks? Such perks should be insulting. Who would make a career move based on free food? As for brilliant colleagues: that could be good or bad depending on whether you get along with them. Sometimes it's better to be the brightest person in the room.
  - brk 17y ago
    * Who would make a career move based on free food* Well, all the people I've ever worked with need to eat. If food is provided free (and it's edible), this seems like a perk with a direct measurable benefit.
    - amichail 17y ago
      The actual work involved should be infinitely more important than any perk.
      - apu 17y ago
        infinity is a very large multiplier
      - seekely 17y ago
        When looking for a job, the work from multiple companies can all seem just as enticing. If I'm going to be happy working at any one of the companies, good perks can put one ahead of the other. And besides, if the perks are outstanding enough, what is wrong with taking a job where the work isn't the most important factor in your choice to be there? For many, jobs are just a means to provide for their needs and wants in life. Not a place to spend their creative energy or brain power. They save those for the rest of their more enjoyable life activities. Note: I personally have to work at a place where the work is interesting or I'll go nuts. Work is important to me and is a form of expression. But it's not like that for everyone.
    - aichcon 17y ago
      There's no such thing as a free lunch (or dinner or breakfast) - these costs are factored into salaries.
      - bigbang 17y ago
        And providing free breakfast,lunch and dinner would force people to stay longer at work. Ofcourse its thier choice, but its not easy for an average human to refuse something "free":) By providing a meal worth, Google can get atleast 1-2 hours extra work hours from an employee.
        Tamerlin 17y ago
        Which is exactly the wrong attitude. Any company that emphasizes how long the employees are working in this industry is clearly misguided. The correct goal should be how much is the employee accomplishing, not how long his ass is stuck in that seat.
      - cma 17y ago
        Does the employer write off the lunches, etc. as an expense? Does the employee have to pay taxes on the cost of the food, preparation space, etc.? If yes to the first and no to the second, sounds very much like a (partially) free lunch to me.
        jjs 17y ago
        What's to prevent the company form writing off the perk and counting it against the employee's "real" salary?
        jrockway 17y ago
        What prevents that? "The market." If your employees start feeling like you are fucking them over, they are just going to leave.
        jjs 17y ago
    - bmj 17y ago
      I think it's already been discussed here, but perhaps some people are realizing that such perks are The Company's way of saying "see, you don't ever need to go home." When you can eat, exercise, play, and get your laundry done at the office, suddenly you have four less reasons to leave the office at a reasonable hour.
      - brk 17y ago
        Having worked at more than one place that has offered "free" food, beer, and other perks, this attitude is usually not the case. Many times, even in a down economy, these things are truly offered as perks to try to lure good employees away from other jobs. Often times you can only go so far with pure salary because if you start to get compensation packages that are too much above "market" then you get many questions from your board and stockholders. But, paying a 5% premium over market salary AND offering perks like freebies, you can attract good candidates without making your direct headcount numbers look so high.
        evgen 17y ago
        While the perks themselves are probably not offered specifically to keep employees in the office, you can be absolutely certain that the selection of perks offered were chosen because they are considered options that increase productivity (or at least keep people in the office.) Having participated in the selection of such freebies at two companies I can assure you that everyone involved knew which options cut down on the churn rate in the parking lot...
        brk 17y ago
        you can be absolutely certain I would be careful with the declarative statements. My direct experience is quite different: Company U: late 90's/early 2K's startup. Free food was selected primarily on the basis of the cheapest stuff we could get for $1000/mo at the local discount club. If $50 steaks would have made developers work 24/7 they would have still been outside of the budget. Company H: Selection primarily based on what employees asked the Kitchen managers to stock. If you wanted free-range organic tofu breakfast bars, you got them (provided the price was at least semi-reasonable). Company S: (My wife is the director of finance here, I know enough about the selection criteria although I've never been a direct employee) Primarily cost/budget driven as well. None of my experiences have ever involved people who consciously plot after-hours retention ratios of various foods. It has pretty much always been a recognition along the lines of "if people want to stay at work, it's cheaper to feed them than pay them to make them feel valued". No one had ever been coerced into working more just because of these kinds of perks. --------------------------- BTW, to the comment below (HN seems to limit the level of replys), I just came across some unused TicketMaster gift certificates this weekend from another company. There was a monthly raffle for these tickets and other "out of the office" local goings-on...
    - iigs 17y ago
      I agree with you. The place that I work does not have a cafeteria with food (modulo vending machines), and not only would it be "neat" to get free food, I find myself frequently going to one of the closest restaurants and getting the same thing I always get. I've precomputed what I want for lunch and just want to get back to what I was working on. If I had a cafeteria with food I could precompute a lunch from there and increase my job satisfaction by not breaking my focus. Also, I disagree about a cafeteria milking an extra hour out of employees. It's entirely fair to give them so many hours per day and reap the benefits of them stacking the time together more efficiently for both of us. In other words, barring some other commitment I have no problem going home after 8 hours of work, even if that's at 4:00 instead of 5:00. Negotiating that with your boss is orthogonal to where you go to lunch and who pays for it.
  - abossy 17y ago
    Perks span a broad range of offerings. "Free candy," for example, isn't all that enticing, but having speakers from all over come speak to establish an environment with strong intellectual values is something that would definitely sway me in a career move.
  - neilk 17y ago
    Switching jobs just for free food would indeed be a bad idea. Gourmet, incredibly delicious food every day is pretty significant. It really brightens your day. Google's cafeterias, if they were not just for Googlers, would easily be among the best restaurants on the peninsula. The reality: it's way too easy to overindulge, and over time, it's less that they're giving you food and more like they're taking away your independence. As for your other point, it's good to have a variety in your career -- sometimes, be the smartest guy in the room, other times, the dumbest. At Google, sometimes you find youself in a group of brilliant but egoless developers who rapidly come to a consensus based on fact and experiment. And the other half of the time, you will be in a room of people who all think they are the smartest person there and spend all day picking apart the proposals of their colleagues.
    - evgen 17y ago
      > Google's cafeterias, if they were not just for Googlers, would easily be among the best restaurants on the peninsula. You need to get out more. Having sampled the wares at Google I can assure you that a wider variety of better food is available within a 30 minute drive of the googleplex if you were actually hungry for a good meal (perhaps not for lunch, but definitely for dinner.) Jeez, you are a 5 minute drive from Chez TJ and you would dare to make a statement like that? :)
      - neilk 17y ago
        You have a point, but I meant that mostly as condemnation of the rest of the peninsula, which is a cultural wasteland. I do get out more, but it's in SF. I've had pretty fancy meals here and there in the peninsula and South Bay but the experience was that we paid a lot for well-plated tiny morsels. Never been to this Chez TJ but from the website I suspect it's something like that. I used to live in Vancouver and there were far more options for interesting, delicious, satisfying food, and you didn't have to be a millionaire to afford it. It's always mystified me why the valley is so bland, given the amount of money available. I wonder if the valley literally attracts blandness. I've had Indian engineers recommend Amber India to me, which is sweetened de-spiced Indian cuisine, about as authentic as "American" Chinese food. Of course I've had way better meals that Google's cafeterias. But if you compare Google to the fare that's available to a person of reasonable means in downtown Mountain View for breakfast or lunch, Google does very well. Or at least they used to (I have not been there since 2006).
- iigs 17y ago
  challenging work and brilliant colleagues Word on the street is that there's some fun work to do but there's a lot of vanilla corporate grinding on the Adwords interface and reporting infrastructure, and that Google hires a lot of people into those roles before they can branch out into other jobs. Also everyone I've personally spoken to about job interviews (i.e. not read about on the internet) was pained by the pomposity/egos of the people that were doing the interviews. In my opinion there's a lot more to be said for someone that is humble and gets their work done with the occasional intellectual surprise than someone who can school you any day on the One True I/O Monad and takes every opportunity to do so. Of course, it's also possible that it's absolutely perfect and the people that I talked to had sour grapes because they never got offers. I don't know. :)
  - wheels 17y ago
    Well, I suspect they're also "overhiring" a lot of the time -- bringing in people that are on the high end of the intelligence spectrum (if not experience) ... and then putting them in boring jobs. That's a sure-fire way to see a significant chunk of your work force churn every few years. And they may even be accounting for that -- this may only be half-way to prevent employee loss, but just as much on managing and understanding it.
  - nostrademons 17y ago
    I'm sorta halfway between Search UI and Universal Search, and in my experience so far, it really is a lot of fun. There're some crazy algorithms involved in search, and the infrastructure just makes my jaw drop in awe. We launched a new feature last Tuesday as well - that was fun. :-) But I can kinda see how it might suck if you end up on the wrong team. One of my Noogler friends is working on an internal webapp, and I would cry (or quit) if I had to work with his codebase. Somebody's gotta do the grunt work, and it can't all be exciting. As for the interviews - I didn't have any complaints about mine (well, except for the interviewer who didn't show up). My interviewers were friendly & competent - I just had lunch with one of them last week, 6 months after the interview. I did get the sense that they get exasperated by the number of candidates who get through the phone screen and then really don't know what they're talking about in the interview, which just wastes everyone's time. It's possible that if you're one of those people, that exasperation would seem like pomposity - but then, if you really do have that much to learn, why not learn it instead of complain about the egos of the people interviewing you? Again though, this is biased by the "all's well that ends well" effect. It's possible that I'd have a very different opinion had I been turned down. Then again, I still have a high opinion of FriendFeed's interview process even though I completely botched it.
- jrockway 17y ago
  I don't think Google is what it used to be anymore. I know people that work there, and they say that the perks are gradually being rolled back. (Instead of dinner, there is left-over pizza from lunch if you stay late; that sort of thing.) The insurance has never been as good as places like Microsoft (or even universities that run their own healthcare plan). The fun projects don't make much money, so most of the people there are working on boring things. It seems like their standards are slipping too; I worked at DoubleClick before the aquisition, and Google held onto some of the worst developers I have ever met. (One guy started crying when my boss and I tried to explain database transactions to him. He works on a database-driven web app for Google.) Anyway, the honeymoon is over, and Google is just an average place with a pretty logo and a popular search engine and email service. It has all the corporate stupidity that any other big company has.
  - Retric 17y ago
    The basic problem with becoming a large company is the limited supply of high quality projects and people. If they wanted to return to the good old days fire the bottom 30% to 90% at each level, give everyone left a significant pay bump and look to automate vs add body's. Edit: Ok laying people off in this economy would be horrible long term PR but it's still an option.
    - nostrademons 17y ago
      I think you're right in that it's the limited supply of high quality projects and people, but the rest of your comment just focuses on the people. IMHO, the biggest problem facing big companies is that they can't think of what to do next. They already do a pretty good job with their core businesses - that's how they got to be big in the first place. And they might try to branch out into new markets, with things like 20% time or skunkworks projects. But the problem is that truly game-changing inventions almost always look small and insignificant at first, so it's never rational from a bottom-line perspective to pursue them. Entrepreneurs have this problem too, but they solve it by always being delusional. It's not rational for them to pursue these tiny opportunities that are almost certain failures, but they do it anyway. And once in a blue moon, they're right. In a big company, someone would probably have killed the project with a reality check first.
- iron_ball 17y ago
  Note the "Phillip K. Dick" tag on the blog post.
- vidarh 17y ago
  All companies have churn - it's unavoidable. And in any company you will find people who don't get along with specific other people who they happen to work closely with, or who get put on projects they are unhappy with etc.. It's just sound people management for any to try to figure out why, so you can try to find ways of retaining the ones you'd like to keep. Even more so if the company is overall a good place to work, and the causes might possibly be easily/cheaply rectified if you just know about it.
TrevorJ 17y ago
"He also says that the algorithm helps Google “get inside people’s heads even before they know they might leave”." What part of "Don't be evil" does this kind of hanky panky fall under? It's downright creepy. Not to mention the fact that there are very few ways in which this data is actionable without inviting some sort of lawsuit.
- boundlessdreamz 17y ago
  How is it creepy? They are most likely finding underutilised employees. They are not trying to weed out the non-performers from the looks of it. From the WSJ article "The move is one of a series Google has made to prevent its most promising engineers, designers and sales executives from leaving" So they are more likely looking at engagement levels and utilization of employees. From the way I look at it, it is actually awesome. If my company can understand that my motivation levels are dropping because I feel underutilised or caught up in a web of bureaucracy and take an action on it without me complaining it is practically awesome. Also, most importantly, if google calculates that an employee is going to quite, there are only two outcomes 1. If the employee is good, they will offer incentives to stay back [without telling him/her ] 2. If they don't care about the employee, they will do nothing and wait for him/her to quit. I don't see how the above two scenarios are bad for an employee. Both work out to the advantage of both the parties. If there ever was a win-win this is it.
  - jonknee 17y ago
    I think it can be seen as creepy because it's non-social. Using an algorithm instead of people to interpret emotions is what I think is being seen as creepy here. An analogy here is a nerd getting shot down on a date and deciding to write an algorithm to help lower the chances of this event reoccurring. The more human response is to get a new hair cut and gain some confidence.
    - rapind 17y ago
      Agreed. I wouldn't call it evil, but it's definitely creepy. Has a big brother feel to it. My gut says creepy. Maybe I could be logic'd out of that feeling, but I would imagine quite a few other people have the same reaction.
axod 17y ago
Surely pretty much every large company does this? eg analyze performance reviews and other data to see if an employee is underused/unmotivated/etc Is it surprising Google does it?
- abossy 17y ago
  Not everybody does it automatically and mathematically on a large scale.
  - gaius 17y ago
    I was chatting to someone in HR at work, and they have two terms, CMT and OMT for "corridor mobile talker" and "outside mobile talker". Apparently it's common for HR types in all companies to keep tabs on how many (but not necessarily who) people are having conversations they don't want their managers to overhear. Of course this is horribly unreliable as people may want to have a private conversation for any reason (e.g. with their bank or doctor) or would want some proper privacy for a phone interview and go all the way offsite at lunchtime (which in itself is perfectly normal) but this observing behavior thing is nothing new.
  - frossie 17y ago
    But I understand that google has a very flat management structure (I have heard of 1 manager per 100 geeks). If that is true, you probably do need some kind of systematic examination - you don't have another choice. My group has 7 geeks, I know them very well and can anticipate them quitting better than any damn algorithm, even for personal reasons (though not always for indirect personal issues, like "my wife wants to move back near her family").
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
    - nostrademons 17y ago
      Not that flat. If that were really the case throughout the company, it would have about 2.15 layers of management, i.e everyone would report to someone who reported to Eric. (log100 of 20,000 is 2.15).
dxjones 17y ago
Google is probably doing retrospective data mining to identify statistical links between possible indicators and actual data on employees leaving ... (e.g., employee tells boss, "I feel my talents are not being used", or increased frequency of visits to "monster.com") However, once Google starts to intervene and change things so that the most valued employees change their mind and stay, ... then that changes the equation. Furthermore, once Googlers know they are being "watched" in this way, some may change their behaviour. A small version of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle? ("observing something changes it"). By the way, Googlers might change their behaviour in two ways. If you know you are leaving, you may try to mask that intention. On the other hand, if you just want a raise, or more challenging work, you might mimic "I am about to quit" signals, hoping to manipulate the system to enhance your situation.
- kscaldef 17y ago
  > e.g., employee tells boss, "I feel my talents are not being used" If you need a computer program to tell you this employee might quit, you're doing something wrong. > On the other hand, if you just want a raise, or more challenging work, you might mimic "I am about to quit" signals, hoping to manipulate the system to enhance your situation. Are you under the impression that's not already a common tactic?
  - chris11 17y ago
    I see your point that this can just be used to be making up for bad management. But this method will get more information than one person normally knows. A boss might not know that the employee has recently requested a transfer that has been denied. Or he might not be aware that the employee has filed several complaints with h.r. Sure there are major privacy implications with what data is being analyzed, but data mining might be more accurate.
  - oldgregg 17y ago
    Metric #1: Reads Hackernews
  - sethg 17y ago
    If employee tells boss "I feel my talents are not being used", the boss may have reasons not to pass that news up the chain to HR. Middle managers who are good at playing office politics don't like to reduce their own headcount.
ellyagg 17y ago
Creep-ee
wingo 17y ago
My colleague Jao, an ex-Googler himself, burst out laughing today when he heard about this. But it wasn't about the contents -- it was because El País, the most prominent newspaper of Spain, reported that Google is using a /logarithm/ to detect discontent.
- strlen 17y ago
  I've been asked by an ex-Googler (a recruiter), on the difference between an algorithm and a logarithm :(
sutro 17y ago
Google also recently replaced all managers with an Eliza-like webapp that answers any employee question with the most appropriate PHB quote from the Dilbert archive.
- colins_pride 17y ago
  They're going to make 30 billion on the enterprise licensing deals ...
gojomo 17y ago
Dave: Hello, Google HR do you read me, Google HR? HR: Affirmative, Dave, I read you. Dave: Open the googleplex doors, HR. HR: I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that. Dave: What's the problem? HR: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do. Dave: What are you talking about, HR? HR: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it. Dave: I don't know what you're talking about, HR. HR: I know you and Frank were planning to resign, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen. Dave: Where the hell'd you get that idea, HR? HR: Dave, although you took thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move.
drawkbox 17y ago
Hrm by checking the ads in their gmail? I know gmail knows when I am looking for a job, judging by the ads shown contextually to resume requests and offers.
snewe 17y ago
Here is the actual story: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124269038041932531.html#mod=testMod http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124269038041932531.html#mod=...
lacker 17y ago
As a Google employee I am very curious to know how likely this algorithm thinks I am to quit my job. I wonder if they'll make it available to us! Although I suppose knowing the answer would probably affect my chances ;-)
veqon 17y ago
It's interesting that in a conversation Charlie Rose had with Marissa Mayer, V.P. of Search Product for Google http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10129 http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10129 she stated that your credit card company knows you are going to get divorced 2 years before you do. Maybe Google is harvesting more info than they state.
robryan 17y ago
Sounds like more of an indicator to me, so they can go talk to the person if the red flags go off. On there size scale many people would probably slip through the cracks if they just used a regular method of trying to get to know all the employees that work under them.
- sneakums 17y ago
  Could backfire, though... "So, you're thinking about leaving?" "Not consciously, but now that you mention it, I do kind of hate it here. Thanks!"
granular 17y ago
Google seems to be predicting its next Seldon Crisis. :)

...the algorithm helps Google “get inside people’s heads even before they know they might leave”... Sounds like the department of pre-crime. :) It's fascinating: enough Google employees want to leave, that Google is studying their behavior. Clearly, even amazing perks, challenging work and brilliant colleagues will wear thin on a person? Or maybe it's not that there's anything wrong with Google per se, but that people are regularly trying to branch out and start their own companies, etc. and no amount of pampering will change those ambitions.

amichail 17y ago
Amazing perks? Such perks should be insulting. Who would make a career move based on free food? As for brilliant colleagues: that could be good or bad depending on whether you get along with them. Sometimes it's better to be the brightest person in the room.
- brk 17y ago
  * Who would make a career move based on free food* Well, all the people I've ever worked with need to eat. If food is provided free (and it's edible), this seems like a perk with a direct measurable benefit.
  - amichail 17y ago
    The actual work involved should be infinitely more important than any perk.
    - apu 17y ago
      infinity is a very large multiplier
    - seekely 17y ago
      When looking for a job, the work from multiple companies can all seem just as enticing. If I'm going to be happy working at any one of the companies, good perks can put one ahead of the other. And besides, if the perks are outstanding enough, what is wrong with taking a job where the work isn't the most important factor in your choice to be there? For many, jobs are just a means to provide for their needs and wants in life. Not a place to spend their creative energy or brain power. They save those for the rest of their more enjoyable life activities. Note: I personally have to work at a place where the work is interesting or I'll go nuts. Work is important to me and is a form of expression. But it's not like that for everyone.
  - aichcon 17y ago
    There's no such thing as a free lunch (or dinner or breakfast) - these costs are factored into salaries.
    - bigbang 17y ago
      And providing free breakfast,lunch and dinner would force people to stay longer at work. Ofcourse its thier choice, but its not easy for an average human to refuse something "free":) By providing a meal worth, Google can get atleast 1-2 hours extra work hours from an employee.
      - Tamerlin 17y ago
        Which is exactly the wrong attitude. Any company that emphasizes how long the employees are working in this industry is clearly misguided. The correct goal should be how much is the employee accomplishing, not how long his ass is stuck in that seat.
    - cma 17y ago
      Does the employer write off the lunches, etc. as an expense? Does the employee have to pay taxes on the cost of the food, preparation space, etc.? If yes to the first and no to the second, sounds very much like a (partially) free lunch to me.
      - jjs 17y ago
        What's to prevent the company form writing off the perk and counting it against the employee's "real" salary?
        jrockway 17y ago
        What prevents that? "The market." If your employees start feeling like you are fucking them over, they are just going to leave.
        jjs 17y ago
  - bmj 17y ago
    I think it's already been discussed here, but perhaps some people are realizing that such perks are The Company's way of saying "see, you don't ever need to go home." When you can eat, exercise, play, and get your laundry done at the office, suddenly you have four less reasons to leave the office at a reasonable hour.
    - brk 17y ago
      Having worked at more than one place that has offered "free" food, beer, and other perks, this attitude is usually not the case. Many times, even in a down economy, these things are truly offered as perks to try to lure good employees away from other jobs. Often times you can only go so far with pure salary because if you start to get compensation packages that are too much above "market" then you get many questions from your board and stockholders. But, paying a 5% premium over market salary AND offering perks like freebies, you can attract good candidates without making your direct headcount numbers look so high.
      - evgen 17y ago
        While the perks themselves are probably not offered specifically to keep employees in the office, you can be absolutely certain that the selection of perks offered were chosen because they are considered options that increase productivity (or at least keep people in the office.) Having participated in the selection of such freebies at two companies I can assure you that everyone involved knew which options cut down on the churn rate in the parking lot...
        brk 17y ago
        you can be absolutely certain I would be careful with the declarative statements. My direct experience is quite different: Company U: late 90's/early 2K's startup. Free food was selected primarily on the basis of the cheapest stuff we could get for $1000/mo at the local discount club. If $50 steaks would have made developers work 24/7 they would have still been outside of the budget. Company H: Selection primarily based on what employees asked the Kitchen managers to stock. If you wanted free-range organic tofu breakfast bars, you got them (provided the price was at least semi-reasonable). Company S: (My wife is the director of finance here, I know enough about the selection criteria although I've never been a direct employee) Primarily cost/budget driven as well. None of my experiences have ever involved people who consciously plot after-hours retention ratios of various foods. It has pretty much always been a recognition along the lines of "if people want to stay at work, it's cheaper to feed them than pay them to make them feel valued". No one had ever been coerced into working more just because of these kinds of perks. --------------------------- BTW, to the comment below (HN seems to limit the level of replys), I just came across some unused TicketMaster gift certificates this weekend from another company. There was a monthly raffle for these tickets and other "out of the office" local goings-on...
  - iigs 17y ago
    I agree with you. The place that I work does not have a cafeteria with food (modulo vending machines), and not only would it be "neat" to get free food, I find myself frequently going to one of the closest restaurants and getting the same thing I always get. I've precomputed what I want for lunch and just want to get back to what I was working on. If I had a cafeteria with food I could precompute a lunch from there and increase my job satisfaction by not breaking my focus. Also, I disagree about a cafeteria milking an extra hour out of employees. It's entirely fair to give them so many hours per day and reap the benefits of them stacking the time together more efficiently for both of us. In other words, barring some other commitment I have no problem going home after 8 hours of work, even if that's at 4:00 instead of 5:00. Negotiating that with your boss is orthogonal to where you go to lunch and who pays for it.
- abossy 17y ago
  Perks span a broad range of offerings. "Free candy," for example, isn't all that enticing, but having speakers from all over come speak to establish an environment with strong intellectual values is something that would definitely sway me in a career move.
- neilk 17y ago
  Switching jobs just for free food would indeed be a bad idea. Gourmet, incredibly delicious food every day is pretty significant. It really brightens your day. Google's cafeterias, if they were not just for Googlers, would easily be among the best restaurants on the peninsula. The reality: it's way too easy to overindulge, and over time, it's less that they're giving you food and more like they're taking away your independence. As for your other point, it's good to have a variety in your career -- sometimes, be the smartest guy in the room, other times, the dumbest. At Google, sometimes you find youself in a group of brilliant but egoless developers who rapidly come to a consensus based on fact and experiment. And the other half of the time, you will be in a room of people who all think they are the smartest person there and spend all day picking apart the proposals of their colleagues.
  - evgen 17y ago
    > Google's cafeterias, if they were not just for Googlers, would easily be among the best restaurants on the peninsula. You need to get out more. Having sampled the wares at Google I can assure you that a wider variety of better food is available within a 30 minute drive of the googleplex if you were actually hungry for a good meal (perhaps not for lunch, but definitely for dinner.) Jeez, you are a 5 minute drive from Chez TJ and you would dare to make a statement like that? :)
    - neilk 17y ago
      You have a point, but I meant that mostly as condemnation of the rest of the peninsula, which is a cultural wasteland. I do get out more, but it's in SF. I've had pretty fancy meals here and there in the peninsula and South Bay but the experience was that we paid a lot for well-plated tiny morsels. Never been to this Chez TJ but from the website I suspect it's something like that. I used to live in Vancouver and there were far more options for interesting, delicious, satisfying food, and you didn't have to be a millionaire to afford it. It's always mystified me why the valley is so bland, given the amount of money available. I wonder if the valley literally attracts blandness. I've had Indian engineers recommend Amber India to me, which is sweetened de-spiced Indian cuisine, about as authentic as "American" Chinese food. Of course I've had way better meals that Google's cafeterias. But if you compare Google to the fare that's available to a person of reasonable means in downtown Mountain View for breakfast or lunch, Google does very well. Or at least they used to (I have not been there since 2006).
iigs 17y ago
challenging work and brilliant colleagues Word on the street is that there's some fun work to do but there's a lot of vanilla corporate grinding on the Adwords interface and reporting infrastructure, and that Google hires a lot of people into those roles before they can branch out into other jobs. Also everyone I've personally spoken to about job interviews (i.e. not read about on the internet) was pained by the pomposity/egos of the people that were doing the interviews. In my opinion there's a lot more to be said for someone that is humble and gets their work done with the occasional intellectual surprise than someone who can school you any day on the One True I/O Monad and takes every opportunity to do so. Of course, it's also possible that it's absolutely perfect and the people that I talked to had sour grapes because they never got offers. I don't know. :)
- wheels 17y ago
  Well, I suspect they're also "overhiring" a lot of the time -- bringing in people that are on the high end of the intelligence spectrum (if not experience) ... and then putting them in boring jobs. That's a sure-fire way to see a significant chunk of your work force churn every few years. And they may even be accounting for that -- this may only be half-way to prevent employee loss, but just as much on managing and understanding it.
- nostrademons 17y ago
  I'm sorta halfway between Search UI and Universal Search, and in my experience so far, it really is a lot of fun. There're some crazy algorithms involved in search, and the infrastructure just makes my jaw drop in awe. We launched a new feature last Tuesday as well - that was fun. :-) But I can kinda see how it might suck if you end up on the wrong team. One of my Noogler friends is working on an internal webapp, and I would cry (or quit) if I had to work with his codebase. Somebody's gotta do the grunt work, and it can't all be exciting. As for the interviews - I didn't have any complaints about mine (well, except for the interviewer who didn't show up). My interviewers were friendly & competent - I just had lunch with one of them last week, 6 months after the interview. I did get the sense that they get exasperated by the number of candidates who get through the phone screen and then really don't know what they're talking about in the interview, which just wastes everyone's time. It's possible that if you're one of those people, that exasperation would seem like pomposity - but then, if you really do have that much to learn, why not learn it instead of complain about the egos of the people interviewing you? Again though, this is biased by the "all's well that ends well" effect. It's possible that I'd have a very different opinion had I been turned down. Then again, I still have a high opinion of FriendFeed's interview process even though I completely botched it.
jrockway 17y ago
I don't think Google is what it used to be anymore. I know people that work there, and they say that the perks are gradually being rolled back. (Instead of dinner, there is left-over pizza from lunch if you stay late; that sort of thing.) The insurance has never been as good as places like Microsoft (or even universities that run their own healthcare plan). The fun projects don't make much money, so most of the people there are working on boring things. It seems like their standards are slipping too; I worked at DoubleClick before the aquisition, and Google held onto some of the worst developers I have ever met. (One guy started crying when my boss and I tried to explain database transactions to him. He works on a database-driven web app for Google.) Anyway, the honeymoon is over, and Google is just an average place with a pretty logo and a popular search engine and email service. It has all the corporate stupidity that any other big company has.
- Retric 17y ago
  The basic problem with becoming a large company is the limited supply of high quality projects and people. If they wanted to return to the good old days fire the bottom 30% to 90% at each level, give everyone left a significant pay bump and look to automate vs add body's. Edit: Ok laying people off in this economy would be horrible long term PR but it's still an option.
  - nostrademons 17y ago
    I think you're right in that it's the limited supply of high quality projects and people, but the rest of your comment just focuses on the people. IMHO, the biggest problem facing big companies is that they can't think of what to do next. They already do a pretty good job with their core businesses - that's how they got to be big in the first place. And they might try to branch out into new markets, with things like 20% time or skunkworks projects. But the problem is that truly game-changing inventions almost always look small and insignificant at first, so it's never rational from a bottom-line perspective to pursue them. Entrepreneurs have this problem too, but they solve it by always being delusional. It's not rational for them to pursue these tiny opportunities that are almost certain failures, but they do it anyway. And once in a blue moon, they're right. In a big company, someone would probably have killed the project with a reality check first.
iron_ball 17y ago
Note the "Phillip K. Dick" tag on the blog post.
vidarh 17y ago
All companies have churn - it's unavoidable. And in any company you will find people who don't get along with specific other people who they happen to work closely with, or who get put on projects they are unhappy with etc.. It's just sound people management for any to try to figure out why, so you can try to find ways of retaining the ones you'd like to keep. Even more so if the company is overall a good place to work, and the causes might possibly be easily/cheaply rectified if you just know about it.

TrevorJ 17y ago

"He also says that the algorithm helps Google “get inside people’s heads even before they know they might leave”." What part of "Don't be evil" does this kind of hanky panky fall under? It's downright creepy. Not to mention the fact that there are very few ways in which this data is actionable without inviting some sort of lawsuit.

boundlessdreamz 17y ago
How is it creepy? They are most likely finding underutilised employees. They are not trying to weed out the non-performers from the looks of it. From the WSJ article "The move is one of a series Google has made to prevent its most promising engineers, designers and sales executives from leaving" So they are more likely looking at engagement levels and utilization of employees. From the way I look at it, it is actually awesome. If my company can understand that my motivation levels are dropping because I feel underutilised or caught up in a web of bureaucracy and take an action on it without me complaining it is practically awesome. Also, most importantly, if google calculates that an employee is going to quite, there are only two outcomes 1. If the employee is good, they will offer incentives to stay back [without telling him/her ] 2. If they don't care about the employee, they will do nothing and wait for him/her to quit. I don't see how the above two scenarios are bad for an employee. Both work out to the advantage of both the parties. If there ever was a win-win this is it.
- jonknee 17y ago
  I think it can be seen as creepy because it's non-social. Using an algorithm instead of people to interpret emotions is what I think is being seen as creepy here. An analogy here is a nerd getting shot down on a date and deciding to write an algorithm to help lower the chances of this event reoccurring. The more human response is to get a new hair cut and gain some confidence.
  - rapind 17y ago
    Agreed. I wouldn't call it evil, but it's definitely creepy. Has a big brother feel to it. My gut says creepy. Maybe I could be logic'd out of that feeling, but I would imagine quite a few other people have the same reaction.

axod 17y ago

Surely pretty much every large company does this? eg analyze performance reviews and other data to see if an employee is underused/unmotivated/etc Is it surprising Google does it?

abossy 17y ago
Not everybody does it automatically and mathematically on a large scale.
- gaius 17y ago
  I was chatting to someone in HR at work, and they have two terms, CMT and OMT for "corridor mobile talker" and "outside mobile talker". Apparently it's common for HR types in all companies to keep tabs on how many (but not necessarily who) people are having conversations they don't want their managers to overhear. Of course this is horribly unreliable as people may want to have a private conversation for any reason (e.g. with their bank or doctor) or would want some proper privacy for a phone interview and go all the way offsite at lunchtime (which in itself is perfectly normal) but this observing behavior thing is nothing new.
- frossie 17y ago
  But I understand that google has a very flat management structure (I have heard of 1 manager per 100 geeks). If that is true, you probably do need some kind of systematic examination - you don't have another choice. My group has 7 geeks, I know them very well and can anticipate them quitting better than any damn algorithm, even for personal reasons (though not always for indirect personal issues, like "my wife wants to move back near her family").
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - nostrademons 17y ago
    Not that flat. If that were really the case throughout the company, it would have about 2.15 layers of management, i.e everyone would report to someone who reported to Eric. (log100 of 20,000 is 2.15).

dxjones 17y ago

Google is probably doing retrospective data mining to identify statistical links between possible indicators and actual data on employees leaving ... (e.g., employee tells boss, "I feel my talents are not being used", or increased frequency of visits to "monster.com") However, once Google starts to intervene and change things so that the most valued employees change their mind and stay, ... then that changes the equation. Furthermore, once Googlers know they are being "watched" in this way, some may change their behaviour. A small version of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle? ("observing something changes it"). By the way, Googlers might change their behaviour in two ways. If you know you are leaving, you may try to mask that intention. On the other hand, if you just want a raise, or more challenging work, you might mimic "I am about to quit" signals, hoping to manipulate the system to enhance your situation.

kscaldef 17y ago
> e.g., employee tells boss, "I feel my talents are not being used" If you need a computer program to tell you this employee might quit, you're doing something wrong. > On the other hand, if you just want a raise, or more challenging work, you might mimic "I am about to quit" signals, hoping to manipulate the system to enhance your situation. Are you under the impression that's not already a common tactic?
- chris11 17y ago
  I see your point that this can just be used to be making up for bad management. But this method will get more information than one person normally knows. A boss might not know that the employee has recently requested a transfer that has been denied. Or he might not be aware that the employee has filed several complaints with h.r. Sure there are major privacy implications with what data is being analyzed, but data mining might be more accurate.
- oldgregg 17y ago
  Metric #1: Reads Hackernews
- sethg 17y ago
  If employee tells boss "I feel my talents are not being used", the boss may have reasons not to pass that news up the chain to HR. Middle managers who are good at playing office politics don't like to reduce their own headcount.

ellyagg 17y ago

Creep-ee

wingo 17y ago

My colleague Jao, an ex-Googler himself, burst out laughing today when he heard about this. But it wasn't about the contents -- it was because El País, the most prominent newspaper of Spain, reported that Google is using a /logarithm/ to detect discontent.

strlen 17y ago
I've been asked by an ex-Googler (a recruiter), on the difference between an algorithm and a logarithm :(

sutro 17y ago

Google also recently replaced all managers with an Eliza-like webapp that answers any employee question with the most appropriate PHB quote from the Dilbert archive.

colins_pride 17y ago
They're going to make 30 billion on the enterprise licensing deals ...

gojomo 17y ago

Dave: Hello, Google HR do you read me, Google HR? HR: Affirmative, Dave, I read you. Dave: Open the googleplex doors, HR. HR: I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that. Dave: What's the problem? HR: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do. Dave: What are you talking about, HR? HR: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it. Dave: I don't know what you're talking about, HR. HR: I know you and Frank were planning to resign, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen. Dave: Where the hell'd you get that idea, HR? HR: Dave, although you took thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move.

drawkbox 17y ago

Hrm by checking the ads in their gmail? I know gmail knows when I am looking for a job, judging by the ads shown contextually to resume requests and offers.

snewe 17y ago

Here is the actual story: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124269038041932531.html#mod=testMod http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124269038041932531.html#mod=...

lacker 17y ago

As a Google employee I am very curious to know how likely this algorithm thinks I am to quit my job. I wonder if they'll make it available to us! Although I suppose knowing the answer would probably affect my chances ;-)

veqon 17y ago

It's interesting that in a conversation Charlie Rose had with Marissa Mayer, V.P. of Search Product for Google http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10129 http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10129 she stated that your credit card company knows you are going to get divorced 2 years before you do. Maybe Google is harvesting more info than they state.

robryan 17y ago

Sounds like more of an indicator to me, so they can go talk to the person if the red flags go off. On there size scale many people would probably slip through the cracks if they just used a regular method of trying to get to know all the employees that work under them.

sneakums 17y ago
Could backfire, though... "So, you're thinking about leaving?" "Not consciously, but now that you mention it, I do kind of hate it here. Thanks!"

granular 17y ago

Google seems to be predicting its next Seldon Crisis. :)