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Google's Answer to Filling Jobs Is an Algorithm
An anonymous reader tipped us to a New York Times article about Google's newest HR tool: an algorithm. Starting soon, the company (which gets roughly 100,000 applications a month) will require all interested applicants to fill out an in-depth survey. They'll be using a sophisticated algorithm to work through the submitted surveys, matching applicants with positions. The company has apparently doubled in size in each of the last three years. Even though it's already 10,000 employees strong Laszlo Bock, Google's vice president for people operations, sees no reason the company won't reach 20,000 by the end of the year. This will mean hiring something like 200 people a week, every week, all year. From the article: "Even as Google tries to hire more people faster, it wants to make sure that its employees will fit into its freewheeling culture. The company boasts that only 4 percent of its work force leaves each year, less than other Silicon Valley companies. And it works hard to retain people, with copious free food, time to work on personal projects and other goodies. Stock options and grants certainly encourage employees to stay long enough to take advantage of the company's surging share price. Google's hiring approach is backed by academic research showing that quantitative information on a person's background -- called 'biodata' among testing experts -- is indeed a valid way to look for good workers."
It will be interesting to see if any company using this technique ever get accused of racial,sexual etc bias.
"But the computer chose them! You're not going to sue my computer, are you?"
all they have to do is slashdot the survey.
then they will get a flood of some a million people taking the survey.
i would guess anyone here at slashfot would love to work at google, i know i do
WulframII - Free Online Mutiplayer 3D Tank Shooting Game
Tomorrow Google online dating?
I mean, seems like he's always an option....
A goal is a dream with a deadline
Do you feel guilty when you masturbate?
Do you enjoy harming animals?
Sounds like someone got one of these shirts for Christmas and took it to heart.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I don't necessarily want to work for Google but it would be interesting to see the actual survey.
Applicant is honest in their response to the survey.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
I was one of those people who was hired with the under 3.0 GPA, and while getting the interviews was difficult, the people doing the interviewing really didn't care. They asked me to solve problems and show that I could do the job, and that was all they cared about.
Luckily for me I dont have to worry about it anymore, but especially in the technology field why should GPA be more important than actual projects and experience?
It's easy to maintain a low turnover of staff as long as the vast majority of your staff isn't fully vested, and the stock is moving upwards. As soon as the growth in staff numbers slow down, though, you're going to see the turnover percentage increase significantly as a larger and larger percentage of staff have been there for the full 4 year vesting period of their options, and the company starts seeing pressure for lower refresher grants.
You can't hide bad questions behind an algorythm. The interview process has lots of laws around it now, and it's well established that there are only some questions you can ask. Here's a great example:
The questions range from the age when applicants first got excited about computers...
This question doesn't directly reveal your age, but a clever interviewer can glean much from it. "Oh, got excited in computers at 22, eh? Probably older than I thought. We don't want old employees we want young ones."
It is illegal to ask some questions in an interview. Age related questions are one of them. You are only allowed to ask questions that pertain to your performance of the job at hand. For example, I can ask someone "would you have a problem lifting heavy boxes?" but I can't ask how old you are and make a judgement because you are 40 that you can't lift heavy boxes. The above question you as a logical geek might think is iffy, but to a lawyer, it's shark bait and they'll be all over it, so don't ask it. If you ask a question that falls into this category, you open yourself up to a gender/age/racial discrimination lawsuit. These and many others are protected classes under the law.
And there's a great reason why an interview is a poor indicator of performance... because people lie!!! It's a sales process. They want your job, and you want the best candidate. Last two people I let go both gave great interviews, but when they actually worked, they sucked. They had all the right answers in the interview, but there is no escaping performance reviews.
0% firing rate is impossible, as is 100% retention. 96% retention is a stellar figure, even for silicon valley. I think they should be pretty happy that number.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
does anyone have example questions?
i'd be curious to see how relevent they are...
music - http://www.subatomicglue.com
At the time I thought it was kind of rude, really. What business is it of yours if I "consider myself an outgoing person"? After asing me a few preliminary questions he left the room and had me fill out responses on a computer program. I specifically remember one screen with something like 50-100 checkboxes that asked you to check which ones you felt applied to your personality type. It was then followed by the identical screen, this time to be filled out with "how you thought people saw you". A good half hours worth, many more screens, a personal essay, by the end I was rather ... pissed, actually spent about half of my time deciding whether to be polite or not (I'm sure the test was sensitive enough to detect this and needless to say they didn't call me back). At the time I thought the the HR guy had convinced the company to buy him a new toy and was busy tormenting all the new hires with it.
In any case I'd be curious to hear people's responses to such. Do you think this is fair? As is probably clear from the above, I think it's way out of bounds and personally intrusive.
Lest you think the Google stuff is all technical, here's a quote from the article:
"Some questions were factual: What programming languages are you familiar with? What Internet mailing lists do you subscribe to? Some looked for behavior: Is your work space messy or neat? And some looked at personality: Are you an extrovert or an introvert? And some fell into no traditional category in the human resources world: What magazines do you subscribe to? What pets do you have? "We wanted to cast a very wide net," Mr. Bock said. "It is not unusual to walk the halls here and bump into dogs. Maybe people who own dogs have some personality trait that is useful."
Everyone knows that a growing company loses money, no? (ah, Dilbert!)
10,000 employees??? What the heck are they doing? 20,000 employees next year? How the heck do they manage to coordinate anything??? Do they even -have- a corporate culture, or agenda?
Lets see... 10,000 employees, on average, costing the corp ~$200k each... that's... $20 billion a year... in salaries/benefits/office space/etc. Are they even making that much? Are they paying their workers with ``profits'' from stock sales?
Either their salaries are low (and employees work for stock options), or something is fishy.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
http://www.okcupid.com/
"Last week we hired six people who had below a 3.0 G.P.A."
This to me is a clear indication that something seriously messed up inside Google HR right now.
I have a 3.65 GPA and couldn't get an interview at Google New York. And they are hiring sub 3.0s now ? LOL
Either there is a rotten apple syndrome, where one dude is helping all his friends get jobs there and hitch onto the Money Train.
This is the start of a trend, that if unchecked, will ultimately result in bankruptcy of this overpriced POS.
I eagerly await the day when Wall Street bends Google over and destroys 30-40 percent of market cap (billions) in a single bloodbath.
In the meantime my browser default search engine is happily set to Yahoo search !... I haven't missed big G for a picosecond !
I have applied to google several times for positions I was highly qualified for. At some point during the interview process I always get a weird - sorry answer.
Usually for something that makes no sense.
My younger friends get in with no trouble, and advice me to die my hair etc to look younger.
Nice company, nice people but all very young.
At the height of the dotcom bubble, Bill Gross & Idealab! had the philosophy that no company should have more than 100 employees. If your business model got above 100 employees, there was a high likelihood that you were better off dividing and spinning off other business units. (Don't know if they still preach that or not, but that was the thinking "back in the day.")
I don't know that Google would be better served as two hundred smaller companies, but at the same time, it's hard to imagine managing 20,000 employees would be any easier.
This sig intentionally left justified.
Are we going to see this being sold to corporates? This could potentially be a money spinner for google if it works well enough.
If corporate HR could ask the questions to suit its own corporate profile, and google allows this technique to be tailor made to suit any corporation, then i don't see why this wouldnt be a success.
Man holes are round because if they were square, they'd fall in the hole, Mr Fuji, and I'd move the mountain with smoke and mirrors or perhaps optical rays into retnas.
... Google searches for Myers-Briggs have shot through the roof.
Are they now going to implement a new algorithm called PeopleRank(TM)?
This sounds pretty much like how the military does it.. although the military is obviously less choosy about accepting people and more interested in where to place them. They also have surveys you take once you are in that are paired with your military history. Results are used as indicators for future enlisted; or so I've been told.
bool recommend = true;
if (surveyResults == Evil())
forwardResumeToMicrsoft(bool recommend);
hire();
ACK NAK RST
I'm a HUMAN BEING...
No, really!
-- (alms for the lameness filter)
... I read that as (Steve) Jobs, figuring the Apple/Google relationship had gone sour and that Jobs had better not bend over in the shower to pick up the soap.
I really am sick today (*atchoo*)
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
They could just flip a coin.
This is the sort of thing that happens when a company has tons of money and can't figure out what to do with it all.
(last line of TFA)
> "More and more in the time I've been here, we hire people based on experience as a proxy for what they can accomplish," he said. "Last week we hired six people who had below a 3.0 G.P.A."
Arrrgh! It's like saying: "Last week we hired six people who weren't white."
Augurs poorly for GOOG.
"Piter, too, is dead."
Google uses Java extensively, so your suggestion is dumb (assuming "gtfo" means "get the fuck out").
Reminds me of the story about timothy leary taking his own psychological tests when he was admitted to prison. He got away.
..... After it concludes you won't fit in at Google:
"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't hire you."
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Disclosure: I am an unemployed web developer, and I've never actaully READ PKDick. Only half of this rant is serous. I'll let you decide which half
;-)
WOW! My house must be haunted by the ghost of Philip K. Dick! I just got a chill when I read TFA! The first thing that came to mind is "Great... my employability at Google is reduced to the same as a FICO Credit Score."
But then I wondered how long until it grew into "the Google Overall Diagnostic Heurism for Employers to Assess and Determine Suitability" (GODHEAD) where employers would request a "GODHEAD Score" on an applicant. "Well, Mr. Starglider... you're resumé is very impressive, you seem to match our culture, and your references beam about you, but... I'm afraid that your GODHEAD score is too low."
It is difficult enough in the IT world to convince an HR person (who doesn't know the difference between Java and Cocoa) that you are a "good fit" without giving us a one-dimensional point over which to jump. In a world where job listings ask for "UNIX Admin with VB.NET experience and Flash/Photoshop" having one more reason to reject you is NOT what this job market needs.
But maybe I'm being paranoid... Maybe this is a good thing... maybe an entire industy will spring up, coaching people on how to "spoof" the test. GOOGLE Surveys for Dummies. ScoreRunners that "retire" people whose GODHEAD scores drop too low. And what about GODHEAD Score (a la identity) theft? And one could ask of the HR people administering the test "Did you ever take that test yourself?"
And finally, it sounds from TFA that this score is not a very mutable score... it's a test of who you are. It won't change much over time. Maybe after a few tests and the transients level off, you could have it tattooed into your right hand or forehead
I'm thinking of a number... between 350 and 850... know what it is?
I'm shocked that the company hasn't yet started to fade or lose its reputation as a congregation of geniuses, given that with all the reqs they're having to fill, they're bound to be hiring in a less discriminate fashion than they used to. Those new lesser employees in turn conduct interviews, which begets another batch of lesser employees, until eventually you hire just about anybody with a CS degree. Meanwhile, your founding geniuses cash out their millions and go live in Hawaii, leaving their jobs to be filled by lesser talent. Ultimately this leveling of talent begins to show in the quality of your products, which in turn leads to a decline in your company's reputation, and before you know it Google is another bloated bug ridden software company that gets its daily dose of malignment on slashdot.
But eventually, profits will level off and then start to decline. Nothing goes up forever. And when the money gets tight, Google will suddenly realize that they've got a whole bunch of people that they don't really need.
....this will stop the relatively constant stream of unsolicited recruitment letters that I and many others in the OSS world are subject to. Each time I get one I forward it to abuse@google.com (which nets me a canned response) and respond to the sender telling me to remove me from their list. Apparently Google are like every other spammer in that these requests are ignored and the UCE continues unabated.
If the come to the interview dressed like crap, they're automatically out. If they turn up late, they're automatically out.
It's facinating to me the utter-crap voodoo that some people having in making hiring decisions. People like yourself actually believe there's these simple little tests that seperate the good from the bad.
Did you ever consider that all you're doing is just trying to hire people like yourself? You may think that's a great way to seperate the good from the bad... but you may eventually discover that any workplace relies on a variety of people with different personalities, attitudes, and "views of the world". Hire too many people like yourself, and you might just wind up with a bunch of people that can't see outside of the box you've built. If you want a perfect example of this problem, look no further than the Bush administration.
AccountKiller
The algorithm goes something like this: 1.) Name the Ivy League school where you received your MBA. 2.) Did you do both your undergrad and grad work at Stanford? 3.) If female, is your blonde hair natural? How much over 5'6 tall are you?
It is illegal to ask some questions in an interview.
Not exactly. What is illegal is to discriminate in hiring based on certain criterias such as race, gender, age etc.
This usually leads to company lawyers issuing rules forbidding employees from asking about this, on the theory that if the company doesn't know your age it couldn't possibly discriminate based on it.
But in practice, you usually need more to win such a law suit than just claiming you were asked a certain question. And it's never a legal problem to ask people any questions, as long as you offer them employment.
Finally, all this pertains to the USA. Other countries have other rules, and Google are hiring in many of them.
The company has apparently doubled in size in each of the last three years.
;)
The company boasts that only 4 percent of its work force leaves each year, less than other Silicon Valley companies.
Let's think about this for a moment:
4% of current numbers leave each year.
Except the overal job pool was only half that size a year ago... So 8% turnover in a year relative to the size of company it was at the start of the year?
Go back two years and it was half the size again... So 16% turnover relative to the number of people that were there only two years earlier?
And they say it's doubled every one of the last three years so we know 4% of current numbers is actually relative to 32% of all those who were actually there three years ago.
Now, to be fair, not everyone necessarily stays a full three years. So maybe half of the last year's 4% (making 2%) is people who were hired within the last three years and the other 2% is people who were hired at least three years ago (when the pool size was 1/8th current levels). So we're looking at, what 16% turnover for people who've been there 3+ years as well as those who simply didn't make three years.
Sure, these numbers are pulled out of my ass. They still illustrate that the stellar 4% turnover claim really isn't worth that much when you're conveniently glossing over 50% of the people here this year haven't even put in a full year's work yet, 75% haven't put in two years and almost 90% haven't yet been there for three years - about the time most people with an eye on their careers and wanting to avoid a reputation as job hoppers would consider looking anyway. All of a sudden, that 4% really isn't much to boast about.
If you think about it, it's a lot like failing to grasp compound interest. Maybe they should ask simpler questions in their intereviews rather than the legendary entertainingly abstract ones that evidently miss out on basics.
I think one should wait till 2010 to apply for job at Google... as this "algorithm" will stay in beta phase for at least 2 years!!
Why would people mod you up for feeding the trolls? lolz. Perhaps google's algorithm should include something along the lines of: public string test (string company) { if(company.getLanguageProminence("JAVA") > .10 ) {
System.out.println("kill yourself lol");
return "FAIL";
}
else {
return "WIN";
}
Frosty piss posts are worthless, GNAA posts are worthless and hurtful, but they are the least of this site's neuroses.
The point the GP is making: All of these questions, taken together in some black box computation, may be able to answer the *other* questions which are illegal to ask individually. To grossly oversimplify: If I ask you the last digit of your age, and then I ask you who was president when you were born, I know your exact age. Nobody would argue that these two questions asked together should be legal.
The GP is probably right that this survey and algorithm could, with the correct calibration, figure out someone's age, hence the debate, here and perhaps in the courts, over legality.
So, what if the computer is *actually* using a neural net that automatically selects young candidates? No human would necessarily know this. Such algorithms aren't really inspected by humans, they're more or less grown in a vat. Is it illegal to use a piece of software that, internally, figures out someone's age and then hires or rejects them with age as the primary factor? Sure. Is it still illegal if neither the people who wrote the software nor the people who use the software know it does this? Well, there's your lawsuit waiting to happen.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
This type of profiling can be figured out, i.e., people will start faking answers to fit the "google" profile.
Interviewing is not the best way, but so far it has worked for a lot of companies.
Esta es una firma en Espanol.
That's the nice thing about factor analysis. They don't have a clue why it matters, they just know that it does (because desireable employees have certain traits, and undesireable employees lack them).
You're looking for predictors of good or poor performance, and the only thing that matters is how well those predictions fare in keeping your standards at an acceptable level and making sure people end up in positions where they will be able to deliver, and get to work with people they will gel properly with.
Did they really? How fucking stupid can such a decision be? I know plenty of people who went to Rutgers (state university in NJ) for undergrad. and are *extremely* bright. Their parents just didn't have $100,000+ to blow on a top-tier private or out-of-state education, at least not without selling their home or dipping into retirement. Not did the kids want to leave school $100k in debt.
-b.
Way to make people feel like their personal contributions don't matter. Right from day one. Amazing. Wait till Google's stock does crash (as it must) and watch the sentiment get repaid as people dessert.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I can't believe they would deliberately make decisions on the basis of anything that was not obviously going to help them. First, they are a global corporation, so institutionalizing a lack of diversity would seem suicidal. And second, leaving someone who could do something cool deliberately on the sidewalk is an invitation to them to start a competing company that does better. So I have to believe they have a genuine desire to grow.
On the other hand, while they might not do something like that deliberately, anyone could do it by accident. People have built random number generators that turned out not to be random. People have built perceptron recognizers for tanks on a battlefield that turned out to be recognizing the time of day the pictures were shot rather than the tanks. People can confuse themselves with their own "intelligence".
The weird thing is that they say they chose to use their own data to seed their algorithm with their own people. If they already have such people, why wouldn't their present hiring practices be fine for finding them? I heard a talk by Amar Bose of the Bose corporation where, among his several messages, was a catch phrase "better implies different". So if Google wants to grow and become better, patterning its growth on "more of same" seems bizarre.
I've also not seen ethical guidelines published by Google that says they're afraid to use their own data. Perhaps they do or perhaps they don't. But absent clear promises not to use data in certain ways, I'm not confident of what they're doing. Surely they receive search strings from people typing to computers at successful companies they admire and would like to emulate. A lot can be learned from examining those strings in the aggregate, I'd bet. (Even if they didn't work back from the IP addresses, they could cross-correlate the searches against "anonymous" information about "all searches from sites that seem business-related" and get similar results that were at least superficially "ethically cleaner"... though it's still second-hand use of data that others who don't own search engines don't have access to). And surely they must have their own internal search data (things their employees have typed) and the results of these profiles they asked for from their employees, too. So they can create a psychological map of the areas their employees inquire about and compare it to what the world is interested in. Surely a cross-match of that will reveal "interests" and "skills" and "areas of inquiry" and other useful stuff that they could beef up on in hiring in order to see and shore up their "weaknesses". Surely something like that would be more likely to reveal what they need to hire for. Not that I think it ethically a good idea, but given that they haven't promised not to, somehow I'd be surprised if they weren't utilizing that vast quantity of knowledge about what people search for in order to know what to hire next, if not what research areas to go into or what products to develop. Search engines already count the number of searches for various things and correlate them to events and products to find out the popularity of all manner of things in today's fashion culture. Sometimes that data is just for coffee station chatter (e.g., "more people searched for thus-and-so sport at this year's olympics than last"), but eventually (or behind the scenes already) it may be more (e.g., "people are asking awfully specific legal questions about thus-and-so kind of genetic research at thus-and-so company")...
I've discounted the hypothesis that, like the "all volunteer" US Army, they're having so much trouble getting v
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
Now instead of computers taking my job, they're hiring me!
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
You hit the nail on the head. Like nearly all methods for hiring people, it's an open loop system. In order to to evaluate the effectiveness of the approach you'd have to monitor those you hired and those who you rejected to determine their relative performance. This is pretty much impossible to do, but the difficulty of testing an algorithm doesn't eliminate the fact that an untested one may very well be worthless.
This is just the same hit-or-miss approach everyone uses dressed up in psuedo-scientific garb.
I'm just waiting for the day that someone inserts code into the AI scanner that says
if(!strcasecmp(applicant->name, MY_FRIENDS_NAME)) {
hire(applicant);
}
Time to start making friends with Google employees...
Something like 200? How about 191.7808 people a week, people? How hard is it to compute that? (And if I can figure that out and Google can't, do you think they'll hire me?!)
"string" is not a java class, and I see no imports for a custom class, so you get a compile error. Google's algorithm rejects you for your inability to write java.
Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons for you are cruchy and good with ketchup.
To Be brutaly honest HR doesnt attract the brightest bunny's as direct entrants does it.
You will never get to heaven with an Ak 47... But A Zu 30 is good for Low Flying Cherubim
This selection technique is not new. It's not unique to Google, and they didn't invent this "algorithm". It's called biodata, and it's quite common.
Wait til Google offers this as a service to other companies! Why would they develop something this sophisticated just for internal use? Google is becoming an identity aggregator - if you log in, they can track all your searches and group posts. Now they've got google checkout which can track all your purhases online, aggregating all your purchases from multiple stores. They have your gmail that they already index and search through for ads. (Nevermind tracking your embarassing moments on youtube.) Now they want your job application. You could read the terms and services, but what good would that do? Remember amazon.com stabbed its customers in the back - to get a customer base, they promised that they would NEVER share your personal information, and a few years later when they were self-sustaining, they unilaterally changed that. And there was no way you could quit being a customer or have your data expunged. Google's intentions seem pretty clear at this point - become a single point of aggreagation for online identity. So what are they planning to do with all this information?
I am sorry, but I just can't resist.
There are a few problems with this code:
* as pointed out by another replier, when passing parameter to the function (bool recommend), "bool" should be omitted, this won't compile
* why define a recommend variable, if it always is set to true, simply call forwardResumeToMicrosoft(true) instead
* Evil() function does not receive any parameters, so if we have to focus on the surveyResults variable. If this variable is a boolean, than why not simply compare it to true or false, or a global constant? If this variable is a number (indicating the survey score), then comparing it to a function that returns a number does not make sense - either compare it to a global constant of PURE_EVIL = -9 (for example), or pass the result into the Evil() method for valuation. Same logic applies to the variable if it is an object of some sort.
* and finally, what's with mixing notations - either use camel-case notation everywhere, or use capitals, why is surveyResults camel-case, and Evil() starts with a capital letter, notice that hire() method starts with a lower-case.
Well, now back to our every day problems.
http://dtum.livejournal.com
Which schools are those? Where does the cut-off in the rakings happen? Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, NYU, Chicago, Penn, Michigan, Berkeley, Virginia, etc...
Yeah, I admitted during the last interview my /. login was Anonymous Coward. Big mistake.
One thing I forgot to post was that we've noticed getting rejected by Google is now a badge of honour. My 5 interviews don't even leave me in the running compared to some who went through 10 or 15 interviews and never hearing anything back, or getting a reject email 6 months after the last interview.
the AC
How in the hell did my post get modded up to 4? Flamebait, pure and simple, but I can't mod my own posts
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
You're in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it's crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't, not without your help. But you're not helping. Why is that?
Never underestimate the potential of Human stupidity. -Heinlein
But that's a prefectly valid question. We know people who are good at math and logic like cats. We just don't know if those cats are alive or dead.
A couple points:
1) Having run a business before I would probably not hire you either. Your tone makes you come across as petty, bitter, overly cocky, and rather self absorbed.
2) Yes 3.65 GPA is good, congrats on that. Is that a 2 years degree, a 4 year degree, or from a graduate program? Do you have any work experience to go with it, especially in your field? GPA is not nearly the most important factor in finding a good employee.
3) Guess what, Google didn't want me either when I got out of grad school. This coming from someone who had a 3.48 in undergrad with minors in math and applied physics. My graduate GPA was 3.7 completing both a master's in CS and a Graduate Certificate program (think Master's equivalent to a 2 year degree) in Software Engineering and Project Management. Oh yeah I also worked a full time job all through college (undergrad and graduate), worked a second part time job all through undergrad, taught for the university as a grad student in addition to my full time job at night (in IT) and helped run (as in one of the 5 people who started the company) a small and profitable business during my graduate work.
In the end I had a really hard time finding a good professional level job even with all this. The main reason why was that I was way too cocky. After being turned down for a lot of jobs I knew I was qualified for gave me a little humility during interviews I had multiple job offers to choose from.
From the way you come across in your post, you need to remember that you may have something to offer a company, but so do a few hundred other people that applied for the position.
simple: advertise stuff to you that you actually want.
Do not trust this signature.
Those psychological tests are highly questionable. Give any programmer the test and it says they're better at management. Give any manager the test and it says they're better at artwork. What's happening is these tests are written for an ideal world where everything is 100% efficient and plugged into exactly what it should be for maximum effectiveness. They don't factor in the cultural aspect of knowing the right people, tradition, politics.
For google to use this test means they're not going to get any programmers. If google allowed users to view the results of the tests, which they won't of course, it would be a neat way for people to find out about themselves.
Google is probably using a derivative of the MTBI. As usual, the fans are going to say it's another Google triumph and Google is going to change the world with this totally original, insanely great idea. The test has been around for 50 years.