The parts that are different than what he said are different for reasons. I rounded in favor of the guy to better explain the problems and misconceptions his analysis had. When you detected me being "off-point," that is what it sounds like when a person says something different than what is in your echo chamber. New analysis isn't automatically wrong, but it might be different than what you already considered. It has at least some chance of value or insight.
If you think their process is "disrespectful," then you'd be an awful candidate. There is no rational reason why google should choose your system instead of their own. You just wave your hands, and conclude [some nasty words]. If they are expectant of faster answers than google gives, I say it is "utterly" disrespectful of the applicant to abuse them by applying anyways. And if they consider the process of applying for a job at a corporation unreasonable, then they're insane for having still done it.
I wouldn't apply for that sort of corporate job if they doubled their salaries, but that doesn't mean they're doing something wrong. It means I should make different choices. They're not violating laws, ethics, or commonly recognized moral codes. They're simply and only making choices you dislike. Waaa. Waaa. So not impressed by people feeling oppressed by other people's freedom. Nobody has a right to work at google. Nobody has a right to be considered by them. Nobody has a right to a return phone call. Nobody has a right to demand things that they don't have a right to; those things they need to achieve by mutual consent.
It seems to me that once they're fully using the Hollywood region system for licensed content, and their own international system for their own content, that will finally give a comparison to Hollywood and have the potential to start a conversation with them about the specific effects on profit of the traditional system.
I doubt treating the gatekeepers like delinquent children will improve the conditions of their irreplaceable content licenses.
If they were that principled, they could just close up shop and hurt the gatekeepers even more.;) But they're actually on the same team, even if they agree to use an adversarial negotiation process to work out the contracts.
but those greedy content-providers are at fault here.
From where I sit, everybody involved is equally at fault, from the content providers to netflix to the subscribers.
If you perceive what they're doing as being bad, the moral thing to do is to not give them money to enable and reward the behavior. It isn't like we're talking about food and shelter here; we're talking about entertainment that less than half the population regularly participates in, even here in the US.
If they are morally bad, why do you covet their non-essential product? Are you so easily drawn to support the things that you offend your moral compass that all it takes is a couple hours of sensory stimulation and you're joining the dark side? There are other ways to achieve sensory stimulation, from books to parks, or even independent films.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but that conversation was a pre-interview screening call, and had you said yes, you would have started the interview process being discussed here.
They're not trying to sell you the amazingness of google. They're trying to find out if you think so and are prepared to be a high-morale employee for them.
Except that Google keeps track of this and has the data to back it up.
False. Google keeps track and has the data, that part is true. But the part they have the data to back it up is false; they have the data for whatever their proprietary purposes are, and they will not release that data to back it up.
So we can't use the secret data in our analysis, we can only use the fact that google has secret data. This does not somehow propel you above and beyond anecdote. The anecdotes presumably are all fatally flawed, and yet, they are not secret and can be analyzed on a case-by-case basis. All we can analyze about google is the known details of their process, and the apparent success of the company. None of that uncovers the issues directly.
It may very well be that google is worse at hiring than their competitors, but they have a more successful workforce for other reasons, such as the practices in place after people are hired. We just don't have the information we would need in order to do that part of the analysis. So we can't come to reasoned conclusions about those parts.
That's the important thing to remember; these are heavily studied problems, and there is a consensus in the field studying them that they don't understand it well enough to predict outcomes. The uncertainties are still the main signal component.
Exactly. Asking for passion is just asking for employees to be using The Method during the interview. If the job is acting, that makes perfect sense; an actor should interview as if they are playing the role of an actor applying for a role. But you can't method act a solution to a technical problem, and spewing the expected bullshit while emoting what you think people want will really end up frustrating technical co-workers.
Guys, you contacted me to tempt me away from my existing job. I'm not going to start jumping through hoops to please you especially when I don't have any time.
They more likely contacted you to find out if you're eager to jump through their hoops to get out of your current job into something better.;) Between a temporary academic lecturer and google, whose time do you predict google values? This isn't a hard question.;)
The reason I flopped was probably because of my poor attitude...
...quizzed me about various really technical issues... revolving around the nitty gritty details of how command piping is implemented in different *nix versions
It may be that they wanted to know how you respond to stupid questions. Do you turn into a Superior Being Gazing Down On Them, or do you approach the problem in a positive way that would help build team morale?
Maybe they want some insight into your thinking around portability, and solving problems generally where you can't be sure that the implementation is what you used in the past. It may (or may not) be that the "correct" answer to some of the questions is to RTFM.
and I can state with absolute certainty that the average Google engineer would be a star virtually anywhere else in the industry
Appealing to absolutes doesn't exactly engender confidence in your analysis. It may be that many of those employees shine due to the work environment and culture, and that in other places they would become withdrawn and the magic wouldn't be there.
If a company has a workplace culture that values the company, the workers might give everything a bit more "little-league hustle" and when people are doing that in positive environment it really encourages teamwork. I've experienced that in multiple industries.
Lots of people have assumptions they absolutely believe in, and yet people who study the hiring process claim that it is largely unsolved, and the things that lead to positive results are difficult to define in a way that leads to a clear process. Clearly google's process is working, but it isn't enough to identify elements of it that you approve of in order to know why it works. There are too many known unknowns.
Excluding qualified candidates is only a problem if they have a shortage. So far, it looks like they have "a line around the block and down the street" and it might not matter. Of course, for other companies trying to emulate their practices it would usually matter a lot more.
And a 45 minute interview might not tell you how well they will cooperate over the course of a project, but it does at least tell you how they cooperate during that 45 minutes. Presumably there is a lot more to the grading than just the technical merits of their solution. You might indeed at least know how willing they are to work with one other person for a short time, depending on the structure of the problems.
Their HTML5 implementation sucks pretty bad. If you're humble enough to still run the flash player, nothing ever changed.
I was using the HTML5 player for months until a few weeks ago when it started sucking and blowing in a non-advantageous pattern.
They also disabled the opt-out for the new player; if you say yes, they want to feed out HTML5 unless it is disabled in the browser. This would be a major inconvenience, except that I don't use audio/video anywhere else online than youtube. And I don't trust websites enough for embedded content.
You're not going to be able to measure the things you're saying are more important. That is probably why you only state conclusions of what would be getting done better in a "successful" organization, but don't identify any process improvements; only desired traits that you don't know how to measure.
It may be that company reputation and workplace morale and ethics culture are the biggest factors in determining teamwork and collaboration, and not (in most cases) based on who the individuals are that are hired. It may be that google has such a reputation that people arrive there eager and expecting to be a team member. And it may be that companies that had weakness in this area had made a different mistake than you uncovered. Should I just trust you to be such a guru to tell me the answer, or should I want to contribute and understand it myself? You don't seem to really make a case that what you observed is relevant to google's workplace.
Yep, it's the kind of "engineer" (ha!) that has replaced engineering principles with religion.
So, a No-True-Scotsman on engineers, where if they come to a conclusion you disagree with it means that they are overly religious and not engineers?
I learned long ago just because someone has a PhD. or a fancy degree from an Ivy league college, does NOT mean they are smart or talented.
And a corollary; it doesn't mean that they're not smart or talented. And if google was selecting based on letters next to names and fancy schools, why would they have a difficult interview process? That they're deciding based on a difficult process instead of based on the resumes directly contradicts your conclusion that they value fancy degrees.
For your analysis to be reasonable, they would have to be a normal or average company.
They have a reputation as a highly desirable employer. That has to be considered in the analysis for the analysis to be reasoned. That is a key factor in the expectation to drop other offers. Especially when you attempt to comment on how the expectation affects their ability to retain "top-shelf" employees.
People who applied for a job there were aware of their reputation before applying. Those of us who want something different than that hopefully didn't even apply over there.
If you got bills to worry about, get to work and focus on the things important to you. Quit worrying about landing a dream job that is a limited opportunity; you've already taken on too many responsibilities to expect to have that many choices left.
The question isn't do you agree, the question is does google agree. Their hiring process is there to meet their needs, not yours or mine.
If you can't solve the job-application-timing problem smoothly, why are you sure you're a good candidate for the position they had open? Maybe the timing and availability are part of what they are looking for.
It seems you considered only the short term affect on yourself, and didn't apply Theory of Mind to consider what Google's perspective is. Everybody should value themselves, but why would everyone assume they're an awesome fit for jobs even when they don't know what exact help the employer needs?
I'm not even convinced you understand the reason for the existence of jobs. If we lived in the jungle with no technology, would you be expecting a job to be provided? Is gathering your own food to put in your mouth a job, or just life? Is the idea of a "job" about you, or about the person who is willing to trade the food for the work?
No, people who apply are going to quit the other thing and get on the plane. Duh. They're the most desirable employer in their field(s). People who disagree, (including myself) didn't apply there.
A person who applies to the industry leader and then turns down the job because they "already found something" don't even have a serious professional career, they're a fry cook looking for a paycheck. That isn't bad, but it isn't what the successful companies are looking for.;)
The fact is, google has good pay and a person who actually just wanted the money would know to quit the other job and follow it.
R&D may not benefit from having employees who want to worm in deep, become difficult to replace, and get stuck in a long-term process. The work they're doing is on a few-years cycle and most of that work product then gets thrown away.
As a consumer I've stopped adopting their products, and I do not consider their offerings for new products and services. They're already burned me by discontinuing things without turning them over to somebody else to run. I don't blame them; it was my mistake to trust them. But if I was still considering their services, I wouldn't be concerned by this question. They have so many employees, the only way that they're going to create a group-think problem is if they use a 90s-style microsoft process with too many managers. They don't have that, these days not even MS does.
What a load of crap. In the past when governments have been weak, that is exactly what established business interests could do. Anything and everything. Government stopping them is the only thing preventing "evil" corporations (and the rest) from taking everything you have.
Ask yourself why the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms is hunting down grease dumping instead of, say, the EPA?
I don't have to ask myself that, because I already know that the three things that were used for the acronym and the department title are just words, and that the specific things that they have the responsibility to investigate is determined by congress. There is a lot of politics that goes into which agency gets which turf, and sometimes it changes over time.
If you would prefer the EPA to investigate, that would be some sort of proposal to send to your congressperson. It has no bearing at all on the question of which agency is responsible for this investigation now.
It may be that illegal dumping results in fires, and is lumped in with explosives because fire danger caused by ignoring rules is the major thing that the ATF is combating in their enforcement, and that explosives are lumped in with firearms because historically fire danger to whole cities was one of the problems relating to the firearm industry that resulted in public demand for regulation.
What if it turns out that your chickens eat a smaller amount of grease than restaurants produce? What then?
It may be that it is very low quality as a food source, and a fire danger to store and process it, and expensive to transport it because of the weight and special equipment needed.
Slashdot Mirror
*woosh*
The parts that are different than what he said are different for reasons. I rounded in favor of the guy to better explain the problems and misconceptions his analysis had. When you detected me being "off-point," that is what it sounds like when a person says something different than what is in your echo chamber. New analysis isn't automatically wrong, but it might be different than what you already considered. It has at least some chance of value or insight.
If you think their process is "disrespectful," then you'd be an awful candidate. There is no rational reason why google should choose your system instead of their own. You just wave your hands, and conclude [some nasty words]. If they are expectant of faster answers than google gives, I say it is "utterly" disrespectful of the applicant to abuse them by applying anyways. And if they consider the process of applying for a job at a corporation unreasonable, then they're insane for having still done it.
I wouldn't apply for that sort of corporate job if they doubled their salaries, but that doesn't mean they're doing something wrong. It means I should make different choices. They're not violating laws, ethics, or commonly recognized moral codes. They're simply and only making choices you dislike. Waaa. Waaa. So not impressed by people feeling oppressed by other people's freedom. Nobody has a right to work at google. Nobody has a right to be considered by them. Nobody has a right to a return phone call. Nobody has a right to demand things that they don't have a right to; those things they need to achieve by mutual consent.
There are no fresh scams. "On a computer" is not innovation.
Bitcoin is also traceable, by design. See also: irreversible
It seems to me that once they're fully using the Hollywood region system for licensed content, and their own international system for their own content, that will finally give a comparison to Hollywood and have the potential to start a conversation with them about the specific effects on profit of the traditional system.
I doubt treating the gatekeepers like delinquent children will improve the conditions of their irreplaceable content licenses.
If they were that principled, they could just close up shop and hurt the gatekeepers even more. ;) But they're actually on the same team, even if they agree to use an adversarial negotiation process to work out the contracts.
but those greedy content-providers are at fault here.
From where I sit, everybody involved is equally at fault, from the content providers to netflix to the subscribers.
If you perceive what they're doing as being bad, the moral thing to do is to not give them money to enable and reward the behavior. It isn't like we're talking about food and shelter here; we're talking about entertainment that less than half the population regularly participates in, even here in the US.
If they are morally bad, why do you covet their non-essential product? Are you so easily drawn to support the things that you offend your moral compass that all it takes is a couple hours of sensory stimulation and you're joining the dark side? There are other ways to achieve sensory stimulation, from books to parks, or even independent films.
That's not entirely true; they are capable of bringing book adaptations to the screen that have never been made into movies before. ;)
It is not a creative act in the same sense that writing the book was, but it is original as compared to "recycle[d] old stuff."
Sorry to burst your bubble, but that conversation was a pre-interview screening call, and had you said yes, you would have started the interview process being discussed here.
They're not trying to sell you the amazingness of google. They're trying to find out if you think so and are prepared to be a high-morale employee for them.
Except that Google keeps track of this and has the data to back it up.
False. Google keeps track and has the data, that part is true. But the part they have the data to back it up is false; they have the data for whatever their proprietary purposes are, and they will not release that data to back it up.
So we can't use the secret data in our analysis, we can only use the fact that google has secret data. This does not somehow propel you above and beyond anecdote. The anecdotes presumably are all fatally flawed, and yet, they are not secret and can be analyzed on a case-by-case basis. All we can analyze about google is the known details of their process, and the apparent success of the company. None of that uncovers the issues directly.
It may very well be that google is worse at hiring than their competitors, but they have a more successful workforce for other reasons, such as the practices in place after people are hired. We just don't have the information we would need in order to do that part of the analysis. So we can't come to reasoned conclusions about those parts.
anybody who says otherwise is fooling themselves
That's the important thing to remember; these are heavily studied problems, and there is a consensus in the field studying them that they don't understand it well enough to predict outcomes. The uncertainties are still the main signal component.
Exactly. Asking for passion is just asking for employees to be using The Method during the interview. If the job is acting, that makes perfect sense; an actor should interview as if they are playing the role of an actor applying for a role. But you can't method act a solution to a technical problem, and spewing the expected bullshit while emoting what you think people want will really end up frustrating technical co-workers.
Guys, you contacted me to tempt me away from my existing job. I'm not going to start jumping through hoops to please you especially when I don't have any time.
They more likely contacted you to find out if you're eager to jump through their hoops to get out of your current job into something better. ;) Between a temporary academic lecturer and google, whose time do you predict google values? This isn't a hard question. ;)
The reason I flopped was probably because of my poor attitude...
...quizzed me about various really technical issues... revolving around the nitty gritty details of how command piping is implemented in different *nix versions
It may be that they wanted to know how you respond to stupid questions. Do you turn into a Superior Being Gazing Down On Them, or do you approach the problem in a positive way that would help build team morale?
Maybe they want some insight into your thinking around portability, and solving problems generally where you can't be sure that the implementation is what you used in the past. It may (or may not) be that the "correct" answer to some of the questions is to RTFM.
and I can state with absolute certainty that the average Google engineer would be a star virtually anywhere else in the industry
Appealing to absolutes doesn't exactly engender confidence in your analysis. It may be that many of those employees shine due to the work environment and culture, and that in other places they would become withdrawn and the magic wouldn't be there.
If a company has a workplace culture that values the company, the workers might give everything a bit more "little-league hustle" and when people are doing that in positive environment it really encourages teamwork. I've experienced that in multiple industries.
Lots of people have assumptions they absolutely believe in, and yet people who study the hiring process claim that it is largely unsolved, and the things that lead to positive results are difficult to define in a way that leads to a clear process. Clearly google's process is working, but it isn't enough to identify elements of it that you approve of in order to know why it works. There are too many known unknowns.
Excluding qualified candidates is only a problem if they have a shortage. So far, it looks like they have "a line around the block and down the street" and it might not matter. Of course, for other companies trying to emulate their practices it would usually matter a lot more.
And a 45 minute interview might not tell you how well they will cooperate over the course of a project, but it does at least tell you how they cooperate during that 45 minutes. Presumably there is a lot more to the grading than just the technical merits of their solution. You might indeed at least know how willing they are to work with one other person for a short time, depending on the structure of the problems.
Their HTML5 implementation sucks pretty bad. If you're humble enough to still run the flash player, nothing ever changed.
I was using the HTML5 player for months until a few weeks ago when it started sucking and blowing in a non-advantageous pattern.
They also disabled the opt-out for the new player; if you say yes, they want to feed out HTML5 unless it is disabled in the browser. This would be a major inconvenience, except that I don't use audio/video anywhere else online than youtube. And I don't trust websites enough for embedded content.
Yeah, they're right across the way from the people who blame everything on upstream.
You're not going to be able to measure the things you're saying are more important. That is probably why you only state conclusions of what would be getting done better in a "successful" organization, but don't identify any process improvements; only desired traits that you don't know how to measure.
It may be that company reputation and workplace morale and ethics culture are the biggest factors in determining teamwork and collaboration, and not (in most cases) based on who the individuals are that are hired. It may be that google has such a reputation that people arrive there eager and expecting to be a team member. And it may be that companies that had weakness in this area had made a different mistake than you uncovered. Should I just trust you to be such a guru to tell me the answer, or should I want to contribute and understand it myself? You don't seem to really make a case that what you observed is relevant to google's workplace.
Yep, it's the kind of "engineer" (ha!) that has replaced engineering principles with religion.
So, a No-True-Scotsman on engineers, where if they come to a conclusion you disagree with it means that they are overly religious and not engineers?
I learned long ago just because someone has a PhD. or a fancy degree from an Ivy league college, does NOT mean they are smart or talented.
And a corollary; it doesn't mean that they're not smart or talented. And if google was selecting based on letters next to names and fancy schools, why would they have a difficult interview process? That they're deciding based on a difficult process instead of based on the resumes directly contradicts your conclusion that they value fancy degrees.
For your analysis to be reasonable, they would have to be a normal or average company.
They have a reputation as a highly desirable employer. That has to be considered in the analysis for the analysis to be reasoned. That is a key factor in the expectation to drop other offers. Especially when you attempt to comment on how the expectation affects their ability to retain "top-shelf" employees.
People who applied for a job there were aware of their reputation before applying. Those of us who want something different than that hopefully didn't even apply over there.
If you got bills to worry about, get to work and focus on the things important to you. Quit worrying about landing a dream job that is a limited opportunity; you've already taken on too many responsibilities to expect to have that many choices left.
The question isn't do you agree, the question is does google agree. Their hiring process is there to meet their needs, not yours or mine.
If you can't solve the job-application-timing problem smoothly, why are you sure you're a good candidate for the position they had open? Maybe the timing and availability are part of what they are looking for.
It seems you considered only the short term affect on yourself, and didn't apply Theory of Mind to consider what Google's perspective is. Everybody should value themselves, but why would everyone assume they're an awesome fit for jobs even when they don't know what exact help the employer needs?
I'm not even convinced you understand the reason for the existence of jobs. If we lived in the jungle with no technology, would you be expecting a job to be provided? Is gathering your own food to put in your mouth a job, or just life? Is the idea of a "job" about you, or about the person who is willing to trade the food for the work?
No, people who apply are going to quit the other thing and get on the plane. Duh. They're the most desirable employer in their field(s). People who disagree, (including myself) didn't apply there.
A person who applies to the industry leader and then turns down the job because they "already found something" don't even have a serious professional career, they're a fry cook looking for a paycheck. That isn't bad, but it isn't what the successful companies are looking for. ;)
The fact is, google has good pay and a person who actually just wanted the money would know to quit the other job and follow it.
R&D may not benefit from having employees who want to worm in deep, become difficult to replace, and get stuck in a long-term process. The work they're doing is on a few-years cycle and most of that work product then gets thrown away.
As a consumer I've stopped adopting their products, and I do not consider their offerings for new products and services. They're already burned me by discontinuing things without turning them over to somebody else to run. I don't blame them; it was my mistake to trust them. But if I was still considering their services, I wouldn't be concerned by this question. They have so many employees, the only way that they're going to create a group-think problem is if they use a 90s-style microsoft process with too many managers. They don't have that, these days not even MS does.
What a load of crap. In the past when governments have been weak, that is exactly what established business interests could do. Anything and everything. Government stopping them is the only thing preventing "evil" corporations (and the rest) from taking everything you have.
Ask yourself why the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms is hunting down grease dumping instead of, say, the EPA?
I don't have to ask myself that, because I already know that the three things that were used for the acronym and the department title are just words, and that the specific things that they have the responsibility to investigate is determined by congress. There is a lot of politics that goes into which agency gets which turf, and sometimes it changes over time.
If you would prefer the EPA to investigate, that would be some sort of proposal to send to your congressperson. It has no bearing at all on the question of which agency is responsible for this investigation now.
It may be that illegal dumping results in fires, and is lumped in with explosives because fire danger caused by ignoring rules is the major thing that the ATF is combating in their enforcement, and that explosives are lumped in with firearms because historically fire danger to whole cities was one of the problems relating to the firearm industry that resulted in public demand for regulation.
What if it turns out that your chickens eat a smaller amount of grease than restaurants produce? What then?
It may be that it is very low quality as a food source, and a fire danger to store and process it, and expensive to transport it because of the weight and special equipment needed.