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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."
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There's lots of stories on Slashdot about "citizen journalists" and how professional journalism is obsolete blah blah blah ...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
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
like Alias where the kids are trained to be spies by playing games, etc.
> 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.
Yes, and I can see why the hospital has older folks who can handle the project.
You mad
While your boss may not know how to take out an AGP card, I'm sure he knows a heck of a lot about policies and procedures... specifically when it comes to user IT management. IT is more than just a field of working with computers- it's about working with users to help them and show them how technology can impact their jobs.
And while some of those people may not be in exactly the correct position, some of them are there (as you mentioned) because they can handle a project. They can't plug/unplug AGP cards, but they can make the system work well.
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.
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?
You'd be surprised. I an in my 20s and work for the IT department for a 50+ user environment. Almost 100% of the problems I run into are caused by poor user management. They are group policy issues that I could resolve in 10 minutes or less if I were given access but instead take several days to get fixed. The other people in the department are older and simply put unable to do their jobs. I was hired to fix the issues (since according to them all the issues are desktop problems), and commonly find myself walking my bosses through adjusting the policies after proving to them beyond a doubt that it isn't a problem with the specific computer. Honestly the only reason they remain on the payroll is because they are buddies with upper management and have been there a long time.
On a counterpoint, my father is almost 60 and remains employed after about a dozen younger employees were let go. He does programming, but they asked him to help and tech support on some calls when support got overwhelmed. He closed a backlog of 6 months of calls in two weeks and an investigation afterwards showed that many of the other T.S. people were either a)emailing, shopping online and chatting by IM instead of working, b) had no idea what they were doing, or c) both a and b.
No age equals knowledge or ability.
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.
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.
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