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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."
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"?
Yes, and I can see why the hospital has older folks who can handle the project.
You mad
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.