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Google's Young Brainiacs Go Globe-Trotting
theodp writes "To train a new generation of leaders, Google sends its young associate product managers on a worldwide mission. Newsweek's Steven Levy tagged along and reports on the APMs' activities, which included passing out candy, notebooks and pencils to poor Raagihalli children, a 'Rubber Ducky' group sing-along at 2 a.m., and competitions to find the weirdest-gadget-under-$100 in Tokyo. The APM program, which seeks brilliant kids and slots them directly into important jobs with no experience necessary, was formed after Google's attempts to hire veterans from firms like Microsoft had awful results. 'Google is so different that it was almost impossible to reprogram them into this culture,' says Google CEO Eric Schmidt of the experienced hires."
Experience is important!
Google has a very different culture. Microsoft employees, the veterans, are used to business a certain way.
FlyingPizzas.com, for the tasteful hermit
I can't think of a topic that could interest me less.
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
Google is an awesome company and google google google!
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
That's great, because rubber duck distribution skills are vital for today's modern executives in nascent monopoly companies.
For numerous reasons, I'm beginning to get where Steve Ballmer was coming from...
Azural - instrumentals
Great, provocative quote ... except it doesn't appear anywhere in the linked story. Apologies for RTFA, but it's about a lawsuit by a 50-something who insists he was fired from Google for not working 14 hour days and/or having spiky hair and rollerblades. Interesting story, and I'd love to hear more about it ... but it has no relation to the main story.
There's lots of stories on Slashdot about "citizen journalists" and how professional journalism is obsolete blah blah blah ... here's a hint: people who are "professional journalists" (and I was one, before I realized tech marketing paid much better) actually believe it is their professional responsibility to read and/or verify things before posting them. Just a thought.
"95% of all Slashdot
By the time they've been through University, their thinking processes have been moulded. Wouldn't Google do far better getting them even younger than that?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The Apprentice nodded and went back to his cubicle. For three days and nights he tried his best not to think of Windows Vista, but every time he tried, he couldn't help but think of it. Finally, he gave up, went home, and played with his Nintendo Wii.
When Monday came, the Google Apprentice excitedly burst into the Google Master's office. "Master, I did it! I finally succeeded in not thinking about Windows Vista!"
Google Master: "And what were you thinking of when you weren't thinking of Windows Vista?"
The apprentice paused. "I don't know," he said. At that, the Google Master snatched an old S100 Bus he had hanging on his wall, and smacked the Apprentice upside the head.
And thus the Apprentice was enlightened.
The enlightenment lasted for a full three days, right up until the Apprentice was transfered to marketing.
(And if anyone from Google is reading this, and has an opening in the Austin area...drop me a line. ;-) )
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Newsflash:
When you've overspent on hiring and capital expenditures quarter after quarter, it's a no brainer to see that it's cheaper to hire a bunch of young, cheap talent and send them around the world to get them all gung ho and Mouseketeer-y about working 80 hour weeks, than it is to hire senior product management with families and less mental plasticity who turn in mediocre-to-decent performance 9-5 at a $150k base (almost 2x what these APM's are getting).
So what if the APM's fuck up now and then, when your raw productivity is 4-5x that of "adult" talent, you can afford the occasional product airball.
And the reality is they probably even fuck up less.
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
So how does reprogramming people sit with "don't do evil"?
What the holyshitfucking nutsacks of academia was THAT?
Trackball users will be first against the wall.
like Alias where the kids are trained to be spies by playing games, etc.
Dear Google,
You are infringing on the copyright of our business model by assimilating it into your own and must demand that you stop using it at once!
Sincerely,
The Dot Com Bubble Companies of 1999
The game.
Schmidt's quote appears on Page 2 of the Newsweek article (first linked article).
Is Copeland going to write a sequel to Microserfs?
Da Blog
You must be new h... Wait...
1...2...3...4...5...6... digits in your UID.
1...2...3...4...5...6...7... digits in mine.
You must have been gone for a while!
> The APM program, which seeks brilliant kids and slots them directly into important jobs
> with no experience necessary, was formed after Google's attempts to hire veterans from
> firms like Microsoft had awful results. 'Google is so different that it was almost
> impossible to reprogram them into this culture,' says Google CEO Eric Schmidt of the
> experienced hires.
This will come to a bad end.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I realize it's very much an American thing to go to a poor country, and assuage your guilt by handing out pens, etc. to poor kids, but please stop it.
I travel around a bit (about halfway through an approx 18 month trip now) and it drives me nuts having kids demanding pens. Here's a free clue: the kids don't use them for schoolwork, they just sell them to buy lollies.
If I ever meet the person who started this damn thing, I'd like to give them a sound kicking.
Companies have changed over the years. Instead of having a large staff to service the company; they save money by having a skeleton crew. This skeleton crew is either a group of veterans who aren't going anywhere(especially if the pay is good and they can't get it anywhere else) or it's a group of young people desperate to make it in an industry. Usually it's the second option. Young people cost less, put up with more bullshit, and can easily have the wool pulled over their eyes by more experienced liars(managers/owners,etc.).
I feel for this gentelman. I, myself, am getting older and want to have more in life than busting my hump for a career. Companies don't see it this way and never will. This begs the question?; when did it get so hardcore driven? And why did we go along with it? There was time when we used to point our fingers at "those Asians" and say "well never have to work that hard". Now it's normal to go to work for long hours, leave, and go home to some more work. I'm not blamming Asia but I am blamming that type of business model(I'm unsure if it even originated there and I know it didn't come from Europe, right?).
Older workers are useful. They come to work on time. They're usually more experienced. They make less mistakes. They're also more responsible for the company. They're also less likely to ditch the job on a whim. This isn't a competition or a talk down to the young. This is a declaration that youth worship and all the things associated with it are just one aspect of life that "mainly" get outgrown(not by some people). We all get older. There comes a time when in your life when you can definitely say; "I'm just a little old for this shit!". In any event, I feel for this man. He should either get his job back or be compensated for his loss. Shame on companies that support age disrimation! Google? I love your search engine but FUCK YOU!
no more google news for me, i will disable them just like i did with apple news, i don't care about google, i don't worship their business or their products. two articles about google in the front page that contains ZERO content?, and both by zonk?. slashdot is getting worse every day
1) Hire anyone who seems to have any technical talent, lives only for work and/or could be useful to any competitor.
2) If an employee is not part of the core search project, give them some random B.S. to do. Also provide benefits out the ying-yang so competing offers look silly. Just make sure the B.S. provides our minions with no useful experience, exposure to real-world requirements or any tools outside the Google universe. This way, if they do decide to leave us, they will be unable to set up viable companies on their own or provide any value to our competition.
3) If anyone from the core search project (our only source of profits) tries to leave, kill them.
Yeah...I still like my theory.
There's a difference?
Everyones a troll, I just have the balls to admit it!
Google's recruiters have been quit busy calling people. It's obvious what sorts of things that they're working on from the people that they've been calling. Not only that, but they call back at regular intervals after being told no ("has anything changed?").
The problem for them is that everybody has heard about what happened to Brian Reid. What's worse, many of us know Brian Reid. That sort of behavior by an employer has repercussions in this industry.
So Google wants to pick my brains for a few months, promising stock options they have no intention of granting, then dump me like trash once they got what they needed. No thanks. I'd sooner go to work for Microsoft; Microsoft is evil but not that evil.
The APM program, which seeks brilliant kids and slots them directly into important jobs with no experience necessary
So I click that link, and I read the following:
If you have a proven track record of excellence...
They specifically point out that you need experience. What's with the obvious lie in the Slashdot summary?
What type of reprogramming are we talking about here?
I have learned to take news stories like this with a grain of salt. I'm sure it's true that Google has a program like this, and I'm sure that Eric Schmidt thinks it's pretty cool. But the company is really big, and I'll bet you can find pockets of conventional thinking and surprisingly traditional business practices. (After all, the traditional practices become traditional because they work much of the time.)
I remember reading another news story where Eric Schmidt said Google has a completely non-traditional recruiting system. He said, approximately, "we don't care what your background is, if you are really smart we'll hire you and find something for you to do." This made me really excited, because I'm really smart, and I really wanted to work at Google. (I can show evidence to support my claim that I'm really smart. My SAT scores were not only really high, but I took the SAT before they dumbed it down. Would I be the smartest person at Google? Heck no; they have Rob Pike and Vint Cerf and Guido van Rossum and all sorts of top-echelon guys. But I think it's fair to call me "really smart".)
I applied at Google (the Kirkland office, near Seattle). I signed a non-disclosure agreement, and I will honor that by not discussing the details of the process. But I think I can say, without violating NDA, that I did not observe anything about their recruiting process that was markedly different from any other technical company that has interviewed me. Indeed, I'll go further: about half the people who interviewed me were really good at interviewing... but half weren't especially good.
Before I even applied, I did a whole bunch of stuff to try to make myself stand out. I wrote up short proposals describing new businesses that Google could enter. I wrote up code samples, showing that I am competent with several of the four official languages Google uses for everything. (If you are wondering, the four are: Java, C++, Python, and JavaScript.) I studied Google from the outside, so that if they asked me "What do you know about Google?" I could give non hand-waving answers. (And wow -- they run their business on some truly great software. MapReduce and Sawzall, and Google File System, are brilliant! I really would have enjoyed a chance to work with them.) None of my extra work did any good at all, as far as I can tell. I didn't meet anyone who mentioned reading my code samples, or had any questions about the open source projects I worked on. Few even gave me any evidence they had read my resume. I'm not sure anyone ever read my business ideas.
Some of the interviewers actually asked me about my work history. A single one asked me to describe what I had been doing in my previous job. But some just asked me trivial stuff that a recent university graduate might have memorized. The good interviewers would ask questions that were interesting and required competence in computer science to answer; others would ask things that you could answer if you memorized a data structures textbook, and in some cases I didn't have the answer memorized. (I was tempted to answer "um, that is always available as a library function, and if I needed to write that, I would refer to one of my books first." But I never did; I just answered my best.)
I very nearly made it, I believe. But one interviewer asked me a question that just baffled me, and his unfriendly manner, combined with the time pressure, left me spinning my mental wheels. My answer was quite unsatisfactory, to me as well as to him. (I don't think I can describe the problem without violating NDA. I will say it was abstract and not related to any work I had ever done for any company.) The person immediately following him was one of the good ones, and asked me one of the interesting questions, and I think I did quite well with him, despite being rattled by the previous interview. But I think the unfriendly one likely told everyone I was some kind of gibbering idiot, because after that I got the phone call that said "thanks for your tim
Come on everyone, let's convince ourselves we're unique and important through trivial acts. It's corporate "culture," since we're killing every other form of culture. Repeat after me: Google is not the new world order, it's Progress, sainted progress and soon we will dominate the world. If you want to be part of the Good and not the Evil, you'll eat that soggy biscuit and like it, or no bonus and no free cafeteria!1!!
Anti-Globalism
Parent was mod'd troll at the time of this posting, a little erroneous given that more than a few folks consider using indoctrination techniques to be abhorrent - evil, even. As described in the article the world-tour sounds like a standard 'retreat' that so many cults use to strengthen the training of their members.
Most high-indoctrination businesses have a very hard time retaining creative and engineering types without destroying their abilities to be creative and think critically, respectively. If google has found a way to do so, we have reason to be very afraid. It might be that they are only seriously indoctrinating the management, but trying to keep them technically literate so that they can be used to liase between the developers and the senior management. By hiring only very social young tech graduates they can at least ensure that their management layer will be able to speak the same language as their developers - something most companies have a serious problem with.
I kinda hope this is true, as I don't particularly like the idea that they can do much more than get their folks to work insane hours every day of the week. The net bubble of a few years ago certainly showed at least that much was possible to get out of developers without breaking them too immediately.
I think this is sort of interesting (ironic?) because I'd say the corporate cultures of Google and Microsoft (at a developer kind of level -- not necessarily CEO etc.) have or had a lot in common.
I interviewed for a job at the Microsoft campus back in the 90's, before the dot com era made pampered developers more of a common phenomena. This is also before any of the MS monopoly suits -- the company just wasn't seen as an evil empire by most people in the kind of way it can be now. The whole first round of interviews was composed of logic problems and puzzles to test your ingenuity/creativity. They had a hell of a campus and all kinds of unusual perks I wouldn't see again until the dot com boom. It was pretty clear that their strategy was to try to pull bright people straight out of college, give them 'fun' and pampered environments, and basically work the hell out of them. Not that anyone would demand an 80 hour week from you, exactly, but more: you've taken this new job in a city where the only people you know also work at Microsoft, you see your job as something kind of cutting edge / geek-cool, you're provided with this office and cushy work environment and any meals you care to eat at the office (and their cafeteria was pretty much the best I've seen anywhere before or since, not that they wouldn't also order out as appropriate)... you're with this team of people all fired up about how great Windows 98 is going to be, and they're all working late, and maybe you'll just stay long enough to get that free dinner...
Anyway, damn near everything I remember from that visit and everything I hear about the interview process and corporate culture at Google today is very, very similar.
Does Microsoft still try to do this? I have no idea. Of course, time does strange things to a company's culture despite its best intent. I know a guy who took a job there out of school and lived that kind of culture; today he's still there, married (his wife also works there), is a manager, and has kids. Even though a guy like that may have worked under a very similar culture to modern-day Google for years, he's not going to be the same guy and he's not going to see that kind of glorification of young genius the same way. Most likely he's seen projects where it helped a lot but also projects where it went horribly awry, and his inclination as a manager is probably not going to be to allow everything he had.
At least they won't instinctively duck every time the CEO puts his hands on the back of a chair...
EvilCON - Made Famous by
Irony is difficult to project. We're using a metaphor here, not a literal parent-child relation. I was referencing the current media lionisation of Google. It's a nicer place to work than many, I know this because some of my friends and ex-colleagues have worked there for years now and they are, for the most part, happy. However, it's a long way from Nirvana, and it gets lots of stuff wrong (like, say, why make people wait five years for IMAP?). However, all the sycophantic portrayals of this idealised Google with its *zany* workplace remind me of similar Microsoft hagiography in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Back then MS was becoming the world's largest software company, was gaining an impressive monopoloy, and was beginning to use more and more of its power unscrupulously. However, you couldn't really hear any of that from the mainstream media because they were full of stories about MS as a fun place to work, an unstoppable brilliant idea factory, a new kind of campus for the smartest-of-the-smart college grads, and a machine for turning these wunderkinder into millionaires. As it happens, much the same way Apple from a few years earlier had been portrayed by, woah, Steven Levy.
Da Blog
So, Google doesn't want to hire Microsofties and apparently any other adults from any other area (no sense providing jobs in their own backyard - it's Microsoft or nothing). But young minds! Ah - there's an angle! Not since a group in Oakland made people drink the kool aid have I heard anything more insane. Perhaps they found out that the people in their own backyard are tired of Google thinking themselves as so self-important that there's better jobs to be had.
Of course - Google can't be to blame. Bring on the kids.
What flavor kool aid will go down this time?
"manager types who are going to be _setting_ schedules which are often impossible to achieve." ?
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
I worked with Rob Pike and I can tell you he is not stupid, but not a genius either. Just a a hard working guy obsessed with his work. And that before joining Google while at Bell Labs. These days at Google it doesn't seem he is doing much anymore. And about Vint Cerf, he is just the guy that was at the right place at the right time. Since then, he hasn't done anything relevant. He is just a trademark that Google acquired.
Why are you so desperate to work for Google? It is just a company that created an excellent search engine and a large pool of irrelevant stuff afterwards. I have never seen google as anything particularly special or more attractive than IBM, Lucent, MS, or of course Bell Labs in its heydays.
Wasn't it called "The Boys from Brazil?"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Reid_(computer_scientist)
For god's sake the man has his own wikipedia entry!
1) The first firewall
2) Altavista
3) the Alt hierarchy on usenet
and they fire him 9 days before the IPO announcement...
COME ON!
The article mentioned first Word Processor too.
Correct, but the quote is not in the story that the quote was linked to, which is why the submission itself is misleading. Still a good article though.
That sure puts the GP's rambling about "responsibility to read and/or verify things before posting" in a whole new light.
For god's sake the man has his own wikipedia entry!
So do Paris Hilton and Ken Lay. Just being in Wikipedia is not exactly a ringing endorsement.
I've been reading some of the comments regarding this article, and for those who say older IT workers can't compete with younger ones, just wait till you're in your 30s and 40s. Your outlook will probably change at that point.
The startup culture at Google works very well with young IT talent. In the beginning of a business venture, you have to have that "force it through, just get it done!" attitude towards your IT projects. Once you're established, however, that craziness has to be turned down a notch. Otherwise, you have situations like I've seen, with people rolling untested code into production systems, no testing at all, etc.
Older IT workers tend to build systems that don't randomly blow up in the middle of the night. This is because they know the business units they support don't want to hear about new, cool stuff when the systems are down 2 hours before close on the last day of the quarter. The older types also tend to have lives outside of work. (This isn't an unfair stereotype -- a lot changes once you get married and have a family. They expect you to be around once in a while...)
Innovation and new thinking definitely has its place, but it should be totally separate from day-to-day operations. Personally, I want to be building new stuff until I retire. This involves a lot of personal investment in my career, learning new things as they come up, and using my experience with things that worked/didn't work in the past. Not all of us old-timers coast along in management when we get sick of learning.
I guess at 46 I qualify as "older". I have two university degrees, lots of experience, a bit of grey hair (which I see no reason to dye), and have found the work/life balance that works for me. It's not 70 hours a week, but I'm not some clock-watching union droid, either. If you have no life apart from your work, how do you come up with new ideas, anyway? From painful past experience, I now cringe when companies talk about their culture.
I'm also 99% likely to be looking for a new job in the new year, and am not looking forward to it. I'm far too young to retire, but I do not rule out career change.
One of the biggest cultural things I've come up against in my current position is consistency of environments. There is a reason why people need to use the same OS, compiler, runtime tools, etc. It's not old fuddy-duddy stuff: how can you track down bugs otherwise?
...laura
Sounds like another business (wink)... with the US gov't.
Some folks will love it, some won't. It's not about reprogramming from different cultures, it's about people making choices from their experience--which for the young googlers they hire--pretty much have nil. Obviously google would rather sculpt people than leverage their strengths and weaknesses from their experience... No right or wrong, just 2 different approaches. You don't see GE, which has been around for +100 yrs, following the same style...
If you are working at Google as a recently hired peon, then surely you are not the brightest person. Only a sucker would work long hours in return for free food, massage, lava lamps, hockey, etc and a feeling that he/she is changing the world. I would rather just take cash - it's more liquid. Only suckers sing employment contracts, non-compete clauses, and work one day on personal idea projects instead of working on those at home and monetizing them for their own profit $$$.
No, the brightest people don't even bother to submit resumes to behemoths like Google, Microsoft, etc and don't respond to their solicitations.
Funny, the capcha is "ripoff"
Read again..the quote was in the FIRST article that the story linked to. The reason part of that quote was linked to a different article was because that other article was an example of just what the quote was trying to convey. Nothing misleading at all.
Indeed, there are those of us out there who know Brian Reid. The message google is sending is you may be disrespected if you come work here, no matter how talented you are. They shouldn't be at all surprised if people look elsewhere. What's more, they should perhaps consider fixing up their busted HR policies before crying to the US Congress that they can't find qualified people.