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Google Tries Not To Be a Black Hole of Brilliance
theodp writes "Google says it's declined to pursue awesome job prospects to avoid an over-concentration of brilliance at the search giant. Speaking at the Supernova conference, Google VP Bradley Horowitz said the company intentionally leaves some brainpower outside its walls: 'I recently had a discussion with an engineer at Google and I pointed out a handful of people that I thought were fruitful in the industry and I proposed that we should hire these people,' said Horowitz. 'But [the engineer] stopped me and said: "These people are actually important to have outside of Google. They're very Google people that have the right philosophies around these things, and it's important that we not hire these guys. It's better for the ecosystem to have an honest industry, as opposed to aggregating all this talent at Google."'"
Seriously, Google SHOULD consider the idea of funding a number of these folks in small start-ups to force competition. Basically, HONEST competition is GREAT for the industry and for Google. The problem comes in when you have a monopoly that uses their weight and money to buy out established competitors and try hard to create a small oligolopoly, or an illegal monopoly (typically tied to a set of closed products like an OS and a office suite).
In fact, if GM REALLY wanted to excel, they would break themselves up, and have the divisions compete. The problem with the situation for GM, Chrysler and Ford was that it was too few CEO's and worse, they were incestuous (had to come up through the industry). Heck, rather than sell volvo, saturn, and hummer to China, they would be better off rolling them into one company, giving them a CEO from outside of the industry, and then allowing them to compete against others, esp GM itself. It will mean that the company would have to shrink, but, within 4 years they would be ready for IPO, or would be bankrupt.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Google doesn't need that many more smart technical people. What they could use some people who could figure out something other than ads that people would actually pay for. Their track record in actual products is awful. The overpriced "Google Search Appliance" isn't doing well. They do corporate hosted mailboxes, but that's Postini, which they bought.
Google is really an ad agency. That's where the money comes from.
At first I thought this sounded like the very definition of hubris on Google's part, but then I read TFA. Nobody really said anything about leaving the rest of the industry starved for talent. All they said is that a particular group of engineers were more useful to Google where they were than they would be if brought in. It's actually not an uncommon situation, as having talented and like-minded people at other companies can be great for forming partnerships and communities. If everybody working on XYZ was at Google, two problems could occur: groupthink inside, and antipathy outside. A more Machiavellian engineer might even have suggested sending current Google employees to evangelize and facilitate partnerships elsewhere. Recognizing that a like-minded person elsewhere can be more valuable than a hire seems rather insightful to me.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
I've had low, very low, traffic websites were I never got up to the $100 threshold for Google to send me money for ads that were clicked on - so I was never paid, the merchants, of course were charged for the ads, so that means Google had a 100% gross profit on those ads that were on my site. Now, I wonder how many sites were like mine?
In this society most careers revolve around seniority. Wages, benefit time, retirement, etc... they are all based primarily on seniority at most companies. Your hypothetical machinist probably started out a young man (or woman) with a healthy body a small apartment and few responsibilities.
Now, after faithfully giving 15-20 years of their life to bettering your company you would just cut them off to go start over somewhere else? Most likely with a family to feed, a mortgage doctors bills to take care of their now older body, etc...
I don't believe in paying someone to do something which no longer has a purpose but I think a company could at least inform the employee as soon as they think they might be moving in a new direction, plus a chance to fill a different position. Now.. if they cannot or will not learn to perform a new task... then sure, go ahead and can them.
I know you're joking, but there's something to that. Cringely wrote an interesting opinion piece on what would be the downfall of Google one day, and his idea was that it would be a job satisfaction issue.
With so many brights working there, all coming up with ideas in their 20% time and developing them, only the top tier of ideas will become official products, supported and released by Google; there's only so much time in the day, you know.
Well, some of those engineers who have one, two or N ideas passed over may decide that one or more of them may not make the Google cut, but might be successful business ideas which would fly quite well outside the organization. Those folks might leave, which would lead to two things.
First, all the institutional knowledge, all the investment in that engineer walks out the door with them, and there's a huge cost to that. Second, they may take some of their favorite colleagues with them, and suddenly the losses multiply.
There's something to be said for controlled growth, not trying to take over the world too fast. I wouldn't doubt that, if this is indeed official policy, that it's a sort of sustainable selfishness, an understanding that hoarding all the best engineers will inevitably lead to an internal breakdown and a loss of that talent.
The knowledge trade is much like an economy; maybe they realize that as fast as they're growing, pushing the envelope further would lead to an amazing boom that would inevitably lead to a massive bust. Good on them for avoiding it.
The CB App. What's your 20?
This just reeks of the problem with Google. They are sooo into themselves and into thinking that everyone smart works there. The reality is that far less than "all great programming brains" actually work at Google. I'd bet that not even 5% of the best programming brains work there - in fact, I'd bet that less than 1% even work there.
Google has become so cocky as of late that they think all the good people want to or do work there. That's just not the case.
We've recently hired 4 or 5 guys away from Google, and they are so into themselves for having worked at Google that they are almost impossible to work with. They think that they have some special 'rights' just because their resume says "google" on it. They are far from the most talented engineers where I work. But don't go telling them that.
If (true) instinct tells you this was the best course, then it probably was.
Teachers with genuinely good stuff between their ears are a very valuable commodity. I don't know what I would have done without the couple of awesome teachers I had while growing up. Kept me from being crushed by the system and encouraged unconventional thinking. I'm a happy man today partly because of good teachers who weren't just system-bots but actually understood what it meant to be human.
Cheers to you, mate!
-Mark