Alex Martelli wrote: > Anton Vredegoor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: [...]
>>No insider information is necessary, the job requirements make it >>absolutely clear (at least to me) that Google is a company with an >>elitist culture, > > Absolutely yes, in terms of who we want to work at Google: we DO want > GREAT people. And we don't keep this a secret, either: right up there > at <http://www.google.com/jobs/>, we say "our strategy is simple: we > hire great people". Rather than hiring a LOT of people, we prefer to be > extremely, obsessively selective, and try to hire ONLY a few people, > ones who we can convince ourselves do deserve that adjective, "great". > > This does mean that we definitely tend err on the side of caution, and > FAIL to hire some people who are also great, just because we can't > determine with sufficient certainty that they indeed are -- I've seen > this happen more than once, and deeply regret it (for both Google and > the person), but I have no idea how we could do better without relaxing > our extremely elitist standards (we do debate these issues internally > all of the time, trying to do better, but have found no magic wand yet). [...] > students), but I've met many people with advanced degrees from even the > best/most elitist universities, such as Stanford or MIT, where it sure > looked to me as if the university's attempts to only graduate the very > best have definitely failed. [...] > Requiring a certain title for a job is mostly a desperate attempt to > reduce the huge amount of work and effort it takes to hire great people, > whittling down the number of resumes to be considered divided by the > number of hires from the high thousands to the low hundreds. If there > were available infinite resources for the job of hiring/selection, we > could easily interview, say, 6000 candidates for a post, giving each a > week or so of concentrated attention to probe their abilities; alas, > this would require about 120 person-years from our people for the > selection process. So, if nobody at Google did ANYTHING BUT interview > candidates, given that we have a bit over 5000 employees now, we could > hire in the course of 2006 another 40 or so, without doing anything > else. (The numbers are all off the top of my head, but I think they may > be roughly the right orders of magnitude). > > This is just impractical: we need to hire many more than 40, AND cannot > afford to have all existing employees do nothing but select new ones. > So, we need to shrink the ratio drastically, on both factors: say 10 > instead of 40 hours of selection per candidate, and 50 rather than 6000 > candidates being considered per post. So we perform selection in > stages, and most candidates out of those many thousands-per-job are > "weeded out" at the very first stage, e.g. by failing to meet specific > qualifications. > > I wish that, as you say, "titles" were indeed strong indications of > excellence. Unfortunately, they aren't, but in some cases they're > better than nothing. Many of our job descriptions, as I pointed out in > another post on this thread, say "BS or equivalent experience" or words > to that effect; if you can show the "or equivalent", and can get past > the first hurdle, then that title is the least of the issues. For > example, if we advertised a job requiring "PhD or equivalent", and among > the candidates were Bill Gates, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin, none of > whom has obtained a PhD to the best of my knowledge, they would surely > be able to display the "or equivalent" based on their accomplishments > and experience, and thus get past that first hurdle. [...] - TAG.google.evolution.talent.detection . -- http://lazaridis.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list