Comment by ajju | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajju | Hacker News Reader

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I agree that quality takes precedence over speed, any day. Having said that, I would like to make the following points:

1) From the experience of close friends, it is not an extra week. It is typically at least an extra month. Some times it's even longer.

2) It is not clear to me whether the extra time is being spent on improving the selection or simply being wasted because everyone on the committee has other things to do which introduces delay in reaching quorum+agreement.As an outsider there is no way for me to tell one way or the other, but it's something for Google to think about.

3) Humans hate uncertainty, especially in important life decisions. Many people, given a choice between an uncertain prospect of getting a job at Google and a certain job at a company that is slightly worse than Google, will choose certainty. And there are many companies who are not obviously worse than Google competing for the top talent.

The extra month could be a few things:

1. Extra interviews required. This has nothing to do with the HC. In many cases, interviewers themselves screwed up here, and told the HC so. The alternative would have been "no-hire." 2. Candidate got redirected to a different department. This resets the hiring clock. This is unfortunate, but the alternative would have been a straight "no-hire." 3. HC too over-committed. I wrote a bit about this in my book and won't go into it here. It's not an easy problem, and Google's scaling problems came into play here.

Reed Hastings makes a case that as a company grows, hiring standards should go up: http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664. I agree, and if the consequences is that you have a harder time making a quick decision and have to lose some otherwise good candidates, I think the quick decision is the greater of the two evils.

This is especially true in Google's case, since there's no shortage of candidates willing to wait. Bear in mind that many candidates aren't really waiting: they already have a job and an extra month of latency won't reduce their interests. My brother worked at Intel while applying to Google. It took us 3 months to hire him. While it wasn't fun for him, it also wasn't costly either. (And yes, he took the job)

This is especially true in Google's case, since there's no shortage of candidates willing to wait.

This is the key reason it works for Google. I really like Google's products and hope that y'all continue doing the kind of work that has made this true. If you falter, this will stop working.

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