Slashdot Mirror
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."
So how does reprogramming people sit with "don't do evil"?
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
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.
Unfortunately, you are too right. A while back I started subscribing to some of the more popular e-mailed network magazines. I honestly didn't see too much content there that was newsworthy (or new, for that matter). The reason I subscribed was because these were the magazines I saw on the desks of the older management... the policy creators. I would read the magazine on a Tuesday, and by the Friday meeting I would know what insane user or network policy was going to be put in place. If the magazine had an article on how fingerprint scanners were the only secure way to get on the network, one manager was insistent on the need for those on everyone's laptops and desktops (including our customers, since we were a consulting firm).
I think you are right, though- the merit for the job should not be solely based on experience or age. It should be based on the ability to do the job and do the job well. I just think that because someone is unable replace an AGP card does not mean they do not know how to design a good system for the end users (or for the people administrating the system).
On a similar personal note, my mother has been programming for the better of 25 years now. I do not think she would enjoy doing hardware support or tech support, but she can manage a coding project from start to finish better than people half her age that have more knowledge of the hardware her systems are going on. From what she's told me, the people that can't do their jobs are the ones that do not know how to ask the important questions to get the job done...