> The other is their hiring process (full disclosure; I’ve looked at Google a couple of times and it never worked) which has gotten pretty process-bound and odd. The last time I went through it, the site manager admitted that I was plenty smart, but they didn’t know what they would do with me. Given what they were obviously looking for, I wasn’t sure what I would do with them, either. But the whole process seems to indicate that they are looking for people to fit a pre-defined mold, which the top performers generally don’t do all that well.
My observation would be that the primary goal of Google's hiring process is that there is a very strong bias towards _not_ hiring any bozos --- even if that means that not hiring someone who might be a top performer. It's better than you miss out on a top performer than it is to hire someone into a senior position who turns out to be a bozo. That may be the cause of the OP's perceived "oddness".
The fact that Google's promotion system is done exclusively by peers (i.e., the people who decide whether someone at level N should progress to level N+1 are composed of engineers at levels N+1 and N+2; the manager can give input to the promotion committee, but it's not the manager's call) is a good way to hopefully prevent bozos from getting promoted from within.
Is it perfect? No human-created system is. But I think it's pretty good....
It's better than you miss out on a top performer than it
is to hire someone into a senior position who turns out
to be a bozo.
Is it possible that this model stops working when you get to have tens of thousands of employees and you've scoured the planet looking for people that you end up empty-handed, so you have to increase your risk tolerance for bozos if it means you can hire a top performer?
I guess google knows better than I about their hiring practices but it seems like they have probably taken more risks in these later years than they did when they had only 1000 employees.
> The other is their hiring process (full disclosure; I’ve looked at Google a couple of times and it never worked) which has gotten pretty process-bound and odd. The last time I went through it, the site manager admitted that I was plenty smart, but they didn’t know what they would do with me. Given what they were obviously looking for, I wasn’t sure what I would do with them, either. But the whole process seems to indicate that they are looking for people to fit a pre-defined mold, which the top performers generally don’t do all that well.
My observation would be that the primary goal of Google's hiring process is that there is a very strong bias towards _not_ hiring any bozos --- even if that means that not hiring someone who might be a top performer. It's better than you miss out on a top performer than it is to hire someone into a senior position who turns out to be a bozo. That may be the cause of the OP's perceived "oddness".
The fact that Google's promotion system is done exclusively by peers (i.e., the people who decide whether someone at level N should progress to level N+1 are composed of engineers at levels N+1 and N+2; the manager can give input to the promotion committee, but it's not the manager's call) is a good way to hopefully prevent bozos from getting promoted from within.
Is it perfect? No human-created system is. But I think it's pretty good....