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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."
True, but the question becomes, what experience? Working at Microsoft, or being a child? I know which one I'd value more. YMMV.
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
Experience is important!
Of course it is. You can't level up without it.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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"?
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).
Far be it for a professional journalist like yourself to read all the way to page 2!
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
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.
Yeah... it actually reminds me very strongly of Enron - because of their cult of talent, they had a similar program where the best and brightest were encouraged to transfer from disparate area to disparate area, regardless of how little competence they actually had in the new area. This Google program isn't identical to Enron, AFAIK, but I find myself wondering what other similarities there might be between the two companies.
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.
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.
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...
so you really don't know anything about what it's like to be from a poor community do you? I can count on my hands the number of families that could even hope to help with the other 20% + expenses of a Stanford education. 80% of tuition is about 28k now at stanford, so 7k per year + 15k per year for regular expenses according to their website. that is about 90k. I know lots of parents that couldn't afford 3 dollars to rent a movie once a month and their only goal was to see their child go to college(first ever for some). Some never got to go to anything beyond the Community college. If their parents could have afforded to pay for it, they would have got to a state university but they weren't naturally talented enough for a full scholarship or aid that could get them there.
You seem to have a distorted view about what options you get being from where most places are. We had students graduate with an AA from the community college with a high school degree and rock star SATs and still didn't get scholarships enough to pay for a university out of state. Those 80k dollar loans don't just appear and many people can't get them. Worse are the summer programs some have access to. I did. turns out 3k for a 4 week summer program isn't an option when you are working so you can buy clothes.
Try to remember lots of more qualified people(far more than you or I) would dominate the top tier colleges if money was so easy to come by or pay off. Few college degrees offer you a cash flow deep enough to afford to pay off your loans(the highly qualified writer still makes far less(probably 5x) than the highly qualified financial engineer at 22).
Now I'm not trying to blame stanford for being expensive or to blame the government for not giving everyone a chance. Stanford is a luxury good. you pay for a great name on your resume(for as long as that matters) and in a small subset of fields, the possibility of working with a professor that may mean something to you. But don't act like it's magically affordable for everyone qualified enough to be accepted. There is a wide range of talent that gets accepted and few are in such a cushy position to be able to acquire the money for that place. Regardless of whether this is the fault of the parents for not caring is immaterial; there are qualified students that can't go due to money.
as an aside, a big reason why Asians have come to dominate the to tier schools is because as immigrants, the parents are generally top tier students from their schools which means they do have strong genetics. If Asians had lower average income families and higher acceptance your end result could be a function of parent involvement levels. But given that they have higher average family incomes and family income is a major predictor of college success, it is doubtful it is unproven that it has anything to do with culture.