Eric Schmidt: “It Is A War For Talent”

There's no significant return to google for fixing the metadata. It's not that google can't do it, it's that they don't want to do it.

Google is a company which is about scale. Hiring librarians is not a scalable solution to fixing metadata. Figure out a way to automate that fixing and I'm willing to bet Google will offer to hire you.

edit: As it happens I actually looked at working on a fairly similar problem for my undergraduate thesis (automated dating of works of unknown provenance) so if someone wants to talk about ideas for how to fix it feel free to email me.

Oh please!

The egregious metadata of Google Books is almost all date related problems. Anyone programmer who has done metadata-related work before will tell you that human compiled metadata always needs to be treated carefully, and date related metadata is usually "wrong" when the metadata comes from multiple sources.

Don't believe me? Crosswalk your data to dublin core and then tell me what date it was written, first published and the date the edition you have was published. I bet all those field go to dc.created and in standard dublin-core you have no way to identify which is which.

Now tell me why Google's data is so bad again?

The truth is that for subject-related data it is much, much better that library catalogs, for Author data it is pretty close and for date data the library catalog wins at the moment.

(Speaking as someone who spent a long time working in the field, and has had papers presented at the world library congress and at dublin core metadata conferences)

They email every six months.

It depends on what you want to work on. There are problems that only get interesting at scale; people who are good at solving them will likely always be working square jobs, because square jobs willol haved the capital to misallocate and create said interesting-scale problems. There are also problems where there is no immediately obvious way to disrupt an existing market, many of which are fascinating. And there are many, many, many talented hackers whose risk appetite is such that they're happy to trade ev for security.

And then again, too, "talent" is too gnarled a word to be meaningful intercontextually. The "talents" that Schmidt is shopping for may very well be disjoint from those that pg seeks out.

I get LinkedIn In-Mail from both Facebook and Google recruiters periodically. It's nice to feel wanted, and I get a certain enjoyment out of politely rejecting google recruiters. This is a lot more fun than subjecting myself to their grueling and ego shattering interview process.

As to your second question, some people are smart enough to know that running a business is not one of their core competencies.

I have offers from both and am deciding presently. I don't know that they're "aggressively" recruiting me though.

The reason I'd rather work for them than start my own company (now) is that I'm interested in infrastructure. I could go start a company and be an architecture astronaut (and never sell any infrastructure to anyone), or I could go to Google/Facebook and learn the kind of domain specific knowledge that I can only get at a Google or Facebook.

I was in the interview process (was just about to schedule an on-site) with Google a couple weeks ago, before I decided to go to Matasano. They were pushing pretty hard and rushing a lot (since I had other offers/potential offers), but in the end I just decided I didn't want to work in the team I was interviewing for, and decided not to waste any more of their time. From what I've heard, they decide whether or not they want you pretty early on, and will bend over backwards to accommodate you in most cases if they really want you, it just wasn't for me. (Not quite the aggressive recruitment most people think of, but I figure it's a data point nonetheless.)

I get emails from both every 6 month (and tell them each time to come again 6 months later still, as I continue to run my own business).

Two friends of mine, fine engineers with background in database systems and large-scale distributed systems, have got offers from both and had successfully played one off the other. One of them ended up in Facebook and the other one in Google.

It's a war, no doubt.

I get email from Google recruiters every couple of months, you'd think they'd lay off now that I've told them a few times I'm a full time student... and will be for another year and a half. I've also been pulled in for a contracting job, but that wasn't from a recruiter.

I also get e-mails every 6 months from Google.

A few years ago Google required a 3.75 or higher college GPA. That is an amazing GPA for the college I went to, so I've never applied. I wonder if they have relaxed that criteria.

The map: http://map.web2summit.com/

I had a similarly frustrating experience interviewing for an internship there. I'm very happy to be doing what I'm doing right now (CTO of a startup) but the experience with Google still left a bad taste in my mouth, and it makes me reluctant to apply to them rather than e.g. Facebook or MSFT in future.

Yeah, the latency of their hiring amazes me. I lean towards small shops, but for some reason I entertained a phone screen from them a few years ago. Well, they called me several weeks later hoping for an onsite, but I had already interviewed for, accepted, and started another position in the meantime. I don't see why they would expect anyone good to remain available long enough for them to have a chance with, unless the candidate has singled out Google as the only place they're even considering for a month if not an entire quarter.