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Comment by eplanit | Hacker News Reader

At one time, decision-making by Bureaucracy and Committees was considered a weakness and failing of large corporate institutions -- a negative, to be succinct. I guess it's different when you're a Committee member. Or, maybe its just another reality that Google has changed (yes, I'm being sarcastic).

This writer, being a member of such a process and committee, is unsurprisingly very self-congratulatory about how it works, and seems quite enamored of himself and his committee-mates. "And then I told this really clever joke, and we all laughed....".

I'm not learning much here except that Google has achieved a Cult following within its ranks. I say that in congratulation to Google - they're doing it better than M$ did in the 1980s.

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Ha! I made the candidate so nervous he peed in his pants! No way were we going to hire him after that!

I don't think I was particularly harsh. Just wanted to see what it would take to make them cry. Because that's exactly the kind of people we are looking for at Google. Because it mirrors the work environment so well!

High-five to me!

I know the author IRL and he's one of the nicest people I know. He's also incredibly whip-smart and, I suspect, the reason why it's so unnerving interviewing with him is that he can surgically hone in on your exact areas of weakness and gaps in your knowledge.

People who have survived all these years on pretty lines of bullshit and puffed up records will find the interview process harrowing. People who are smart, humble & enthusiastic should do fine.

I think that shows that the author may be a poor interviewer (at least on a first glance).

It is the job of the interviewer to make the interviewee to feel at ease, and relaxed as much as possible.

Some people get very nervous in interviews, and panic a bit, and some of them can be very good engineers.

It seems the author's "surgically honing", is more of a "look at me, I know more than you do", ego stroking type of thing.

Since I do interview people often (not google, but another top company on the valley), I make sure to make people at ease.

When I was younger and stupid, my first instinct was to find the interviewee weakness and 'hone' on them.

Looking back, that was plain stupid. It helped me make myself feel good than actually do any good to the process. I gained later on some insight on my behavior once I was on the other side. Since then I made sure to be really really fair and unbiased on the questions I ask. You need to find both strengths and weaknesses of a candidate, but make sure not to trigger a panic induced 'coder's block'. Otherwise you failed as a interviewer.

Are you his equal or better? Assholes are kiss up, kick down people. I'm not suggesting he is because I don't know him, but giving people shit on the grounds that they're less capable isn't endearing.

> Assholes are kiss up, kick down people.

I agree. No matter how 'nice' someone else claims this guy to be, if he was trying to make someone cry because they didn't know something during the interview, makes him a prick.

That is is plain and simple bullying -- no better than a physically stronger kid beating all the weaker ones on the playground. The playground here is the interview process and he is the bully.

I'm sure he is a great person -- in no way should my characterization of his interview style be construed as a knock against his entire person. But his interview style stinks.

(It is important to weed through people that just know buzzwords and get to the meat, but this kind of interview style is not really acceptable IMO. You should be able to know if somebody actually goes deeper than buzzwords in a 5-10 minute, casual conversation in the cafeteria over a cup of coffee.)

He talks about 5 interviews a week like that's some crazy number, try 5 a day for a while.

Someday, he's going to be interviewed by one of the people he turned away (at least he should approach it like that).

Two things. First, it seems that the HC has thus far been doing a pretty good job selecting candidates. People seem very happy with how Google is doing overall, and it's widely thought that the engineers there are on the whole fairly good at their jobs. Maybe things would be better if decisions could be made by individuals throughout the company. But it also seems like this could lead to more bad apples, and eventually to organizations full of them, like the MSN org at Microsoft. Being on a committee makes it psychologically easier to reject candidates, which is probably a desired effect.

Also, who do you propose might make the decision if not a committee? Managers certainly can't be allowed to, at least not unilaterally, because they have all kinds of conflicts of interest that might encourage them to hire subpar people.

I don't think "committees are universally bad" is a widely held view. For example, almost all companies are led, ultimately, by a committee (a board). They have their uses. Maybe hiring is one of them.

Now, about cult followings. One of the guys in that story, Bogdan, is famous for terse denials of various sorts of requests that might be sent his way (e.g. for more bandwidth, for a certain service in a datacenter, etc.). This was true to the extent that for a long time googlers on the kernel team maintained an extension at /proc/bogdan. When cat'd, it would print things like:

    No.
    No.
    We're already doing that.
    No.
    Absolutely not.

This Bogdan guy sounds a lot like Paul the Prophet: "I remember a guy who worked as a mainframe tech for a bank back in the late '60s who went by the name "Paul the Prophet," and had a dyed-green mustache. He was the only employee of that bank other than janitors and loading dock people who didn't wear a tie to work, but he had unique skills his bosses needed, so they put up with him."

http://www.linux.com/archive/articles/31117/

False. The board has the power to fire the CEO. They do not have the power to "lead" the company.

The executive board is led by a single person (the CEO) and that one person makes all the ultimate decisions, except for those which he delegates to his or her executive team.

Committees are pretty much universally bad. Their main purpose is diffusion of responsibility and inflation of work. I'm not saying this specific committee didn't work - there are always exceptions - but most committees are disastrously bad at getting anything done.

Committees are good for one thing: making sure that risky decisions aren't made. In some cases that can be good - for example, in some cases (eg: safety committees) risky == bad.

Note: Obviously, in some cases risky == good, too

Note 2: Group-think (eg, bay-of-pigs) is a counter example.

There's a lot of pressure to hire in fast growth companies. To prevent managers from just hiring warm bodies, Google decoupled hiring from management.

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