Google is Losing Top Talent; Twitter is Growing It | Hacker News Reader

Google is Losing Top Talent; Twitter is Growing It

mashable.com

9 pointstksohishi17 comments

I think these numbers need to be scaled by the total number of employees at each company for them to have any real meaning. Consider that Apple and Zynga appear, on the first chart, to be doing similarly poorly in the "keeping key talent" department. However, Apple lost one key employee per 7,000 employees, and Zynga lost one per 250 employees. Obviously larger companies will have more key employees, spread out over more components of the company, and it is natural to expect them to churn (lose or gain) more key employees in absolute terms.

Another vague thing is, how do they define "key employee"? The article describes it as, "those notable enough to make it into the tech news". How does one get to be so notable? Having a high-responsibility job at an important company probably helps a lot. So by the term's own definition, you're naturally going to find that big companies like Google are where "key employees" are grown and exported.

... then Twitter will IPO, their lock-out period will expire, Twitter brain-drain will start, next hot startup will gain said talent, and the cycle will start all over again.

Google can buy talent, twitter (being a loss making venture) can only offer imaginary riches.

When you're as large as Google, these kinds of talent losses are natural. Take, for example, Marissa Mayer, disregarding whatever people on HN might think of her (she almost certainly represents one of those 'Key Employee' numbers). She clearly has ambition, and she was clearly not going anywhere at Google, so the only thing to do was to leave.

I also suspect that the challenges Twitter faces are more business-oriented - they probably attract a different type of talent.

TL;DR Google is frickin' huge and just plain different than Twitter. It makes no sense to compare the two this way.

I think Google could go a long way towards addressing their current woes by doing away with their blind allocation policy. During my brief tenure there, the number of times I was told that Google runs on generalists and not specialists was ridiculous. Seriously, would you allow a podiatrist to do your heart transplant because the heart surgeon was too busy with his many proctology patients? That said, the food was great and TGIF was always fun.

The blind allocation policy exists because a lot of the work at Google isn't very interesting.

That was precisely my experience, but I did see a lot of things going on around me that were both interesting and for which I was far better qualified than what was assigned to me. The dealbreaker for me was when it was made abundantly clear that there was a near zero chance of transferring off my assigned gig, and given that I had plenty of other options besides Google, I quit and moved on to one of them.

The dealbreaker for me was when it was made abundantly clear that there was a near zero chance of transferring off my assigned gig, and given that I had plenty of other options besides Google, I quit and moved on to one of them.

Yes, that's horrible. It's harder to get a decent transfer than a promotion, but if you start out on a dud, you're not going to get either on a decent schedule.

Did they say why they were keeping you stuck there? Don't they realize that they're losing good people with these policies?

For most people (the 80% that will never get anything interesting, but that Google will happily use for grunt work) Google is culturally a halfway house for those who are afraid of adult life. You have foosball tables but no chance of getting on a good project. It's infantilizing.

Yup. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2800880

This feels like handwaving. How is "key employee" defined?

Noteworthy enough to be detected by their news sifting algorithm.

Statistical power is hard, let's go shopping!

Google will just acqui-hire new talent.

Too bad that strategy almost never works.

I think it works better at destroying competition than it does at acquiring talent.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com