Re:work – tools and lessons to make work better | Hacker News Reader

Re:work – tools and lessons to make work better

rework.withgoogle.com

239 pointskelukelugames65 comments

Re:hiring

I've been through various pieces of Google's hiring apparatus a few times and have come away pretty unimpressed that they have it any more figured out than anybody else. In fact I'd wager that tossing all the resumes they receive down the stairs and picking whoever ends up at the top of the stairs for any given position would probably work as well as the broken process they have in place. Google's process is so bad from the applicant standpoint that I've had to short circuit and kill the whole process, twice, from my end it had gone so off the rails on Google's side.

This isn't a particular criticism of Google's process in particular, hiring in general is pretty broken for every company, but it comes across as a bit of hubris that Google is going to bring something new to the table other than dysfunctions that are unique to Google.

Here's an interesting anecdote, I've applied to Google directly, for specific positions I would be qualified for, about a half dozen times and gotten crickets each time. Then out of the blue, months later, I'll get contacted via Linkedin by a recruiter who ends up funneling me into filling a position I couldn't possibly fulfill -- and I'm very open about that up front. I've even sent open job reqs back to the recruiter that I thought I'd be better for, but some kind of internal momentum has dictated that I'm now in the queue for some job I don't want and wouldn't qualify for anyways.

I'm sure I'm just a number to make sure the hiring manager passes some internal threshold so that they can hire the person they want anyways, but given the number and length of phone and in person interviews Google demands of candidates, it's a big time waste for everybody.

These days I just tell the recruiters what I'm looking for and if they aren't hiring for that job in that location I'll pass.

> Here's an interesting anecdote, I've applied to Google directly, for specific positions I would be qualified for, about a half dozen times and gotten crickets each time. Then out of the blue, months later, I'll get contacted via Linkedin by a recruiter who ends up funneling me into filling a position I couldn't possibly fulfill -- and I'm very open about that up front. I've even sent open job reqs back to the recruiter that I thought I'd be better for, but some kind of internal momentum has dictated that I'm now in the queue for some job I don't want and wouldn't qualify for anyways.

Been there, done that, got the logo water bottle. I told the recruiters multiple times that I was fundamentally a systems/embedded developer and that I wanted a systems/embedded job (despite currently working in NLP). I was told they would make sure my rotation included people from those groups. I show up, and it's all guys from Search and Maps who want to ask me NLP and ML questions. :| The interview group was so far off my background and interests that one guy literally had to scrap all the questions he planned to ask. Overall it was a huge waste of time for everyone involved and money for Google, and has permanently turned me off the company.

(Tedious disclaimer: not speaking for anybody else, my opinion only, etc. I'm an SRE at Google.)

> I'm sure I'm just a number to make sure the hiring manager passes some internal threshold so that they can hire the person they want anyways

This is definitely not the case, because we don't have hiring managers (at least in engineering; there are parts of the company that this post doesn't apply to). The system has been designed to definitively prevent that sort of thing from happening. Nobody can say "I want that person" and hire them. You feed people into the hiring pipeline, they get interviewed by a series of calibrated peers, and then a separate committee of people who have never met the candidate reviews the interview feedback. There is no way for any single individual to get somebody hired. This largely removes personal biases from the outcome.

As for your own experiences, the key thing to understand here is that our hiring processes are designed to have a high false negative rate and a near-zero false positive rate. It is explicitly a goal to pass up on many capable people in exchange for not hiring any bad ones. It's not perfect, and there are ways in which people are working to improve the system, but for the most part it's doing what it's designed to do.

> As for your own experiences, the key thing to understand here is that our hiring processes are designed to have a high false negative rate and a near-zero false positive rate.

So why in the world would you create your Rework site, espousing the "amazing" insights you guys have about HR and management processes, knowing that only a tiny select few others could survive with this model?

99.9% of companies cannot afford your rather snobby attitude of "were cool with losing 100 very good workers as long as we don't hire 1 wrong one".

I mean, it's not like the guy was involved in that site :) But in any case the hiring tips in it seem applicable to a good range of companies to me.

Why? Because their applicant pool is too small? Or because the cost of doing that many interviews is so steep? Or something else?

I intuitively had the exact opposite reaction: most companies can't afford to hire any bad people, but large companies with lots of resources actually can. If google's rate of poor hiring was higher than average, they'd still survive, at least in the short term, because they're so large and profitable.

> As for your own experiences, the key thing to understand here is that our hiring processes are designed to have a high false negative rate and a near-zero false positive rate. It is explicitly a goal to pass up on many capable people in exchange for not hiring any bad ones. It's not perfect, and there are ways in which people are working to improve the system, but for the most part it's doing what it's designed to do.

Which is precisely why all small companies should do something completely different from Google.

Google is virtually guaranteed to get applications from the majority of people in the field, so gets very low cost for a high false-negative rate.

Arguably, it should actually be the other way around. If you make a bad hire, you increase the proportion of bad hires in your company by 1/NUM_EMPLOYEES. For Google, NUM_EMPLOYEES is very large, so making a bad hire is not disastrous for Google and they can probably get along for awhile. For smaller companies with <100 employees, you're increasing the proportion of bad hires in your company by entire percentage points every time you make a single bad hire.

If the company I work for had the false-negative rate that google likely has we would be able to hire less than one developer per year.

Perhaps other people are lucky in that they've avoided the impacts a bad hire can cause but I can say with certainty that the "right" bad hire can make life hell for a large number of people. They may not know or care about how to properly do their jobs but they know how to kiss ass and know full well how risk averse HR is in a big corporation and will use that to their advantage. It can dramatically impact morale for entire teams or even departments if they're in a management position.

Why do other people have to be "lucky"? I have argued before that having good management and the right processes mitigates the damage bad hires can do. Maybe those other people structure and run their organizations such that the "right" bad hire is impossible.

Yeah, I've heard similar from other folks I know inside Google so the process you describe sounds right. What I can't seem to figure out is how candidates are matched against openings...as an outsider who's been banged up against a half-dozen really obviously bad matches, it's kind of bizarre.

It's not even normal recruiter-trying-to-make-their-candidate-quota wrong...it's toothpaste and orange juice level mismatches. I have a feeling that the high, unchecked, false-negative rate contributes.

On the positive side, all the Googlers who I've spoken with through the various interviews have been smart and pleasant.

So the one thing that you might be missing is that in the engineering org, we don't hire into a job or team, we hire into a ladder. While individual job openings exist and drive the number of people that we're looking to hire at a site, during the recruiting process you aren't really being matched to those. If the job opening is for a SWE, then you get a generic SWE recruiting process and interview panel. If you pass that, then the site managers will figure out which SWE roles at that site you would best fit into - but because everything we do is secret, as an outsider you are basically unable to have any useful input into that process, you just cannot know enough about it before you're hired. The public versions of job postings are missing most of the important details, and the way we do things is too different. We're also far more interested in skills than experience.

Moving between teams is easy once you've been hired (because you've already passed the generic interview for your ladder), and at that point you'll have enough information to make an informed choice. People are expected to move around, and do. This has got a lot to do with why the hiring process works the way it does: you're being hired for all the future jobs you'll do, not the one you get assigned to on day one.

(If this was about roles outside the engineering org, I have no knowledge of how hiring works for those)

> On the positive side, all the Googlers who I've spoken with through the various interviews have been smart and pleasant.

This is in some sense both the goal of our hiring process and the evidence that it's working well.

> Google's process is so bad from the applicant standpoint

That's an artifact of a time when Google believed that working for them is a privilege, and qualitatively better than working for any other company, so you should be willing to eat shit for the chance to do it. Well, they probably still believe it.

> a time when Google believed that working for them is a privilege

I don't see that that has really changed. It doesn't help the number of people that also still believe it though.

I thought Google's hiring process was very fair and considerate, even though I initially felt I had done poorly on their interview.

Don't get me wrong, I think the process, once you're in the chute, is fair and relatively impartial (and about on par with any large company I've ever worked for). It's the matchmaking process beforehand that's a mess.

My experience with their process is it is impartial to the point of being inhuman -- Like, Google is so thoroughly obsessed with "making the perfect decision" that they ignore the fact that candidates are actual human beings, not "machines with a programming attribute that can be rated with a scale of 1 to 10, and we'll take the 8s while passing on the 7s", and if after a day of interviews we're not sure whether we've got an 8 or 7, we'll throw it through the evaluations again.

Also on hiring, I find the following passage wrongheaded and insulting:

The average employee received thirty-one hours of training over the year, which works out to more than thirty minutes each week. Why not front-load the investment and spend the majority of time and money on attracting, assessing, and cultivating new hires? If you are better able to select the right people up front, then you can spend less time on training bad hires and dealing with the consequences.

So, only bad hires need training, and by extension anyone who needs training is a bad hire? That's preposterous. Training is a good thing, and 31 hours is right about where it should be. It is the minimum required in most states to maintain a PE license[1] and many real engineering companies expect their engineers to take ~20 hours of job-related (as opposed to compliance-related) training every year. That increasing numbers of companies are pulling funding for this kind of training is terrible, not something to be applauded and encouraged.

[1] http://www.nspe.org/sites/default/files/resources/pdfs/educa...

I think with a certain definition of training the argument works, but it's not clear if this is actually the definition they had in mind.

If you have the choice between hiring two people for an engineering position, one of whom can write code and one who can't, you'll probably want to pick the one who can rather than training up the one who can't. If your hiring efforts are lackluster, perhaps you can only attract the latter category of people, so you spend a lot on training people to simply do the jobs they're hired for. It's a bit like the Silicon Valley "senior engineers are impossible to find" argument right now. Nobody wants to take the burden of training a junior engineer into a senior engineer if they can hire someone who's already made their mistakes somewhere else. (Not a mindset I particularly agree with, since it implies a failure-intolerant atmosphere, but you get the gist.)

On the flip side, once someone is in a position that they are qualified to do, training for growth and development is a must-have -- 31 hours seems low to me. I definitely spent more than that in learning/development programs at Google, and I don't think that culturally they have an anti-training mindset, but I could be being too generous -- the quote on the site certainly reads exactly like your interpretation.

I don't believe that's what they're saying. They're saying that if you're better at selecting people, you won't have as many bad hires (really?). You then will be giving the training to people who will be better helping your company.

They specifically said "front load the investment". That says to me, "move money from training to hiring and reduce the total of both". Combine that with the Google SWE's comment that Google hires for "skills not experience" and that tells me Google sees non-compliance-related training as a net negative.

I'm almost certain the way you've read it is correct.

Rework. This version is much better: https://37signals.com/rework/

I find it an amusing irony that one of their issues with meetings is that they are about "abstract concepts" not "real things", but the entire book is about abstract concepts.

Yep! Really lame of them to use that name. Does no one there actually read good business books? How about a web search search before you decide on the brand?

That's why Re:work seemed so familiar!

I was thinking the same thing.

I've seen nothing to convince me that I should pay attention to Google's idea about what makes a good workplace. The more Google reaches, the less of my engagement they've kept. At this point Google has reverted to being nothing more than a search engine for me. And a couple other services I use grudgingly or unenthusiastically.

You've seen nothing, what about all the billion dollars? "Google Inc. Races Apple To $1 Trillion Valuation"... And what about Translation, and Google Drive, I love it. Google Maps, too. It changed the world. Maybe too much? I think we're biased against them, from the power they hold. We feel subservient from the lack of alternatives, like for governments. Science is their private army. The low hanging fruits have been picked. They were first, they hire the best, they'll remain the best... Maybe, it makes us reflect that we chose this, capitalism, man against man, and when we pay the price, there comes the cognitive dissonance, that it's too much both good and bad.

The most amazing service after their search engine has been Google Photos. The way their deep neural net can identify objects in images is going to be unmatched for a long time to come.

I liked Mail and Maps once, but feel like after endless redesigns they got less useful, less responsive, less straightforward to use, etc.

Have you found a maps replacement that you like?

I've switched over to using Here Maps[1]. It's fast and doesn't hide controls, unlike the new Google Maps, and you can get fully offline directions in its app by downloading map sets ahead of time.

[1] here.com

No. But I've lived in the same area for a while and know how to get around so it doesn't come up much. I use a dedicated GPS device in my car when I need it and prefer that to a smartphone app.

I feel the same way, I moved to fastmail.com about a year and a half ago and I'm perfectly happy with it.

have you tried maps in lite mode?

maps.google.com/?force=lite

I'm actually quite optimistic about this. Finding good, high-quality advice on hiring best-practices is difficult. We're currently looking to re-tool our hiring process at the place I work as we look to expand, and this could not have come out at a more opportune time.

Why is google doing this?

The posted this under "Why Rework?"

https://rework.withgoogle.com/about/

Looks like they just want to improve their own work environment by learning from others

P.R. to make it look attractive as a place to work. Execs wanting to be more important in the world and build a bridge to future opps outside of google

On the recognize and learn from great managers section:

I apologise in advance for the negativity, which is total on these points, but it's just my genuine opinion from experience that there are some truly bad ideas here.

> Having identified eight behaviors of great managers at Google, the research team wanted to recognize the role models who demonstrated these behaviors and helped define what great management looks like.

In my opinion this is a really, really flawed way of viewing and evaluating management. Management is about human relationships, and every team of humans and their interconnected web of relationships is completely different in myriad ways from every other team of humans. This applies even when you change a single member of a team: the new team now usually functions and interacts in a very different way from the old one, assuming the new member is actually embraced and included.

I know this from experience of managing teams with frequent turnover (both intra and inter company) - the way you manage the team and even your relationships with people you already know changes every time a member joins or leaves, or even when people get promotions or slightly change their job focus, sometimes in very unpredictable ways.

Sure, there are commonalities between good managers, just as there are commonalities between great athletes. You can intuit these and copy them, try new things and see what works in different situations. But trying to strictly categorise these behaviours across a massive, constantly changing organisation and build a quantitative analysis framework on top of these categorisations is a huge mistake and will never work. Humans are humans, and trying to map human behaviour and relationships to aggregate models is an approach now widely discredited by research in behavioral economics and psychology. Don't try to do it.

> Who better to identify those great managers than the Googlers they manage? In 2009, the annual Great Managers Award (GMA) program was created to recognize some of the best managers across the company. Any Googler can nominate any manager for the award.

Yes, this sounds like a great idea in theory, but see above - humans are not homo economici - I've seen schemes like this have the opposite from intended effect in previous companies where the votes and subsequent prizes break down and become basically a mix of an enforcement of the (often disliked) politics of the organisation and a popularity contest, as opposed to the meritocratic, democratic recognition mechanism they are intended to be.

Everyone likes the theory, 80% of people in the organisation will probably be disgruntled by the reality of the implementation. Again, knowing how humans and organisations behave by default, it may be a huge mistake to even attempt this kind of thing.

What is this wack interpretation of Material Design? I can't remember the last time MD was meant to have such high radius for corners.

Uhhhh https://37signals.com/rework/

While we're at it, Medium is just a ripoff of: https://svbtle.com/.

Except Svbtle spent too long as an invite-only platform marketing themselves as an exclusive group of thinkers, and instead came across as kind of pretentious. By the time it opened up, they weren't the only minimally designed blogging platform and nobody cared.

  Svbtle is a new kind of magazine.

  It’s part of an invite-only publishing network that brings some of the
  best things from newspapers and magazines to a network of great 
  people. We focus on the people, the writing, and the ideas. Everything 
  else is secondary.

  Our goal is to make it easier and more natural for interesting people
  to write down their thoughts. In the process, we also hope to help our 
  members become better writers. To accomplish these goals, we provide 
  benefits that aren’t usually associated with blogging, like 
  copyediting, to all members, for free.

  Think you should be a part of the network? Apply for membership below.

I came here to note this exactly.

Googling for the word seems to imply that the term is being used in a few different contexts — and it is a real word. I suppose my beef is that Google's re:work and 37S' both deal with the workplace. It's a little too close in context IMO.

If it's close enough 37S could have a trademark case there.

a. they don't have it trademarked. b. copyright protection is not available for titles of works

Trademarks exist without registration, though with limited protections

These guys do though: http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4806:xod...

"This search session has expired" is what I get.

My first association was https://github.com/reworkcss/rework

It's hard to complain about others reusing a title when the title is a simply a common English word.

Rework : to make changes to (something, such as a piece of writing or music) in order to improve it[1]

[1] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rework

Both 37S and Google's "rework" is not actually the "common English word" but a particular split to 're' and 'work'.

I guess it's a textbook example for why trademarks were invented - Google naming this that way with almost identical split to 're' and 'work' is just confusing the shit out of everyone.

They should probably put a space after the colon. And just generally make it look more like an email subject.

Yeah, exactly. I just spent 5 minutes trying to figure out how the hell Google is involved in that only to realize that they aren't.

It does suck that their using 37signals brand—but the idea is awesome.

Only slightly ego-mad.

I'm sure Basecamp is going to be thrilled about this. It's ironic since google is the antithesis of all that is preached in Rework.

This is just a PR stunt.

>There's a lot of room for unconscious bias to color the information. Research tells us that subtle indicators - names, clubs, addresses, school, previous employment, race, parental status, socio-economic status, etc - may unconsciously affect expectations and assessment of a candidate.

"Here at Google, we're independent, free-thinkers, and we're definitely not influenced by the militant leftist crowd that plagues the Bay Area. That's why you're not allowed to take anything about a person into consideration before hiring them. Literally nothing. We're all the same person in every way and everyone is as talented and special as everyone else. Everything is a bias and should be expunged from your evaluation process."

These companies will let the PC police ruin them.

Is that an actual quote within your quotation marks? Or are you creating your own straw man and attributing it to them?

  Here at Google, we're independent, free-thinkers, and we're
  definitely not influenced by the militant leftist crowd 
  that plagues the Bay Area

Stopped reading here. You might have had a good argument had you not just completely trangented off in an unnecessary political jab.

"We're all the same person in every way and everyone is as talented and special as everyone else."

That pretty much sounds like "hire whomever walks through the door."

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