The Most Innovative Employees at Google Aren’t grads with Perfect SATs | Hacker News Reader

The Most Innovative Employees at Google Aren’t grads with Perfect SATs

blog.idonethis.com

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I am quite familiar with the current engineering hiring practices at Google, and what the story claims is completely different than what I've heard from actual engineers who perform the interviews.

The process is highly technical and if anyone marks you as a "B", you are unlikely to be hired.

I don't this contradicts the article, as I'd fully agree with both the article and you. The article just says that SAT scores and GPAs don't matter so much -- technical chops still do.

If a candidate can be eliminated from consideration because an interviewer marked him/her as a "B", I don't think that's more strongly correlated with innovation than SAT scores and GPAs. It doesn't mean the interviewer is being a good judge of technical chops. And on top of that, the article doesn't say technical skill or ability correlates with innovation, but individual drive. So really, nothing adds up here.

I'd say getting a high SAT score and GPA requires pretty much the same skill set as technical code-on-the-whiteboard interviews. Actually, technical interviews are even more narrow, and probably weed out very many highly creative, motivated people that "have a mission".

The top students often dont't have an overly high GPA because they take a difficult courslanded for them and go beyond there classes and end up prioritizing more than just a 4.0. Also I find highly technical interviews have limited value beyond a simple pass\fail because the poorly represent an actual working environment.

If you really want the best have them walk you through a project they are proud of. It takes a lot more effort and you need to let go of the ego boost of knowing all the answers as you go over the same problems with everyone. However, you can dig a lot further into how they think.

PS: It's important to reolise Google is way to large to be all that picky though. Lucky the vast majority of Google projects are not really that difficult or important. But, if you need the 'best' there are people out there that will blow your mind.

  | if anyone marks you as a "B", you are unlikely
  | to be hired.

Then what's the point of not making it pass/fail?

Perhaps that we're conditioned to give Bs more readily than we give Fs.

This post is really light on the references and methodology, but I'll take it at face value.

I think it's great that they've let go of this obsession for Ivies.

But what they don't even talk about in this post is how the Ivy-only policy poisoned their company culture. To quote a friend from mine from a top startup: "All the assholes at my company come from Google."

Well the article didn't exactly say that. It said Google's most innovative employees aren't necessarily the Ivy, perfect SAT score types.

At a company as large as Google not everyone is going to be an innovator. There are definitely tedious roles that need to be filled by someone who excels at working within the system. My guess is they learned a better idea of what to hire for given a specific type of need.

To quote a friend from mine from a top startup: "All the assholes at my company come from Google."

My personal experience is that the engineers at Google are really decent, capable people. I miss that crowd, actually. They were pretty solid. It's the rest of the company (including tech management) that's fucked up.

When you have a company that believes engineering is for smart people and everything else (people management, product direction) is Dumb People Work, well... who ends up fulfilling those (actually important) duties? Exactly.

However, my only gripe with Google engineers is that they tend to be closed-minded about "weird" programming languages like Haskell and Clojure.

Yea, to be fair, I think she was referencing mostly middle management and upper management folks, not engineers.

I think that article is a bit content free, the real gold is in the article it links to by the NY Times http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/technology/big-data-trying...;

It took analytics to show that people born into an elite status may not always be better employees than people who've had to work twice as hard to balance self-development and making ends meet?

I wonder about sampling bias. If Google has a preference towards MIT/Stanford with perfect SATs, then wouldn't the employees that don't meet that profile have to be a little bit more distinguished to begin with?

What is this blog post based on?

Begging the question.

Imagine that creativity doesn't necessarily come from spending a few grand on test prep classes.

I have always considered SAT scores to be highly correlated with how good of parents you have.

So how do you determine, during an interview, if the candidate has a strong sense of mission about their work and also feel that they have much personal autonomy? Perhaps the second piece happens after they're hired when you give them the autonomy, but it seems like a strong sense of mission isn't enough -- they need to be able to execute on it either through their own actions or by influencing others. And, of course, you need to find some whose mission aligns with the needs of your company.

Try behavioral interview questions. One of the folks on my team liked to use most of his hour with a candidate finding out about a project the person had worked on and ideally led. He'd dig for technical depth, project impact, and clues about soft skills all while having a fun conversation about something the candidate was passionate about.

Please excuse the HR speak above. I know geeks generally hate it but it helps explain to HR why we should really hire someone right now before someone else snaps 'em up.

Can any developer feel a strong sense of mission about a project when the project isn't their child? Personally, I don't think I can. If it's not my child project, then to me it's just a 9 to 5 job. At least I've decided it will be since last year, since any extra work I put in wasn't noticed / rewarded.

So I'd say autonomy is great, but will probably only give great results if the project itself is a pet project by the developer.

Sometimes you can determine it before the interview, just by googling them. Developers with a real passion for what they do will frequently have a significant personal web presence devoted to it, through open source projects, blogs, or what have you.

I'd estimate that a greater percentage of HN readers than Google employees have perfect SATs.

Why?

Because HN's account registration is darn right hidden.

Not going to lie, I didn't know where the signup button is when I was trying to sign up for a throwaway. I simply gave up after that.

I'm confused (HN newbie). Are you saying it's difficult to create an account here on HN?

I just created one a few days ago to comment on a different topic. It couldn't be easier, I don't think I've ever created an account as easily as here. All I did was "reply" and it kicked me into a screen to choose a name and password. That's all. No email verification or anything complicated.

The point is that there's no registration option if you click on the "Login" link in the top left. The idea is that a visitor can only register an account if they are planning on contributing a comment or post.

I have been trying to use probability in real life occurrence like this whenever I can, so let's get started back of the envelop style

according to this site http://research.collegeboard.org/content/sat-data-tables

Roughly 1.53 million students take up SAT every year and of which 10k students get perfect SAT score in Math (let's just focus on math for now)

so that's 0.67% (rounded) people getting a perfect score out of the total.

According to this data set, http://blog.rjmetrics.com/surprising-hacker-news-data-analys...

It says there are roughly 31k active users on HN, considering that I have personally seen many google employee's responding to a query/commenting on HN, let's assume a higher number of 2.5k.

so, 2.5k * 0.0067 which is about 17 people, so there are 17 active google employees on HN which have perfect SAT score in Math.

So that was my attempt, can someone provide a better probabilistic model? (maybe I will learn something new and exciting)

I think it'd be a fair assumption that the percentage of Google employees with a perfect SAT score is higher than the national average. Just like the percentage of students at MIT with perfect SAT scores is higher than the national average.

Google employees aren't representative of the entire population.

This is nonsense.

“All people decisions at Google are based on data and analytics,” according to Kathryn Dekas, a manager in Google’s “people analytics” team.

Calibration scores are not fucking data, not any more than bathroom graffiti contains reliable information. Data-driven my ass.

(She may have been only talking about hiring, but she said "all people decisions", and that's incorrect.)

Google discovered that its most innovative workers “are those who have a strong sense of mission about their work and who also feel that they have much personal autonomy.”

Bullshit. Take that attitude to work at a place like Google and you'll be on a PIP as soon as your boss catches wind that you have ambitions other than serving his specific career goals. Google hasn't valued "personal autonomy" since I was in high school.

Michael, I don't mean to be disrespectful -- I've enjoyed your comments a lot on HN, and find them to be incredibly insightful -- but I feel like you're beating a dead horse with your Google vitriol.

My work isn't done yet. Our industry is still hellish and there are trillions of dollars of value to be added to society by fixing it.

Programmer Autonomy is a $1 Trillion Issue: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/11/25/programmer-au...

The cultural war on closed allocation is the only trillion-dollar problem in the world that I have any power whatsoever to influence (not much, but I have a voice). Attacking Google-- exposing its closed allocation as a catastrophe that destroyed what could have been an amazing company-- is part of the campaign.

How to structure a software workplace properly is the only trillion-dollar issue on which I'm a world-class expert, and probably the only such one in my life. So yes, I do tend to be a bit overfocused on that problem domain.

>How to structure a software workplace properly is the only trillion-dollar issue on which I'm a world-class expert, and probably the only such one in my life.

Kind of reminded me of Zuckerberg's quote: "I don't really need any money. And anyway, I don't think I'm ever going to have an idea this good again."

I'm a world-class expert

What is the evidence that you are a world-class expert on that or on any other issue?

Let's start with the fact that open allocation (not a concept I invented, but one that I've advocated with extreme vigor and, to a large degree, popularized; and I did come up with the term "open allocation") is in force or under active exploration at pretty much every company where the talented engineers want to work, and that closed-allocation companies fall into mediocrity and develop retention problems through a process that I've discovered and documented with extreme precision, including on my blog.

I'm sure there are a couple people who know more than I do-- perhaps the CEO of Valve and that company's chief economist-- but it's pretty obvious that I'm on the short list right now. When it comes to setting up the culture for a technology company, I'm one of the few people who actually knows how to do it right.

Is the best culture for a startup one of hubris and poor emotional intelligence?

He's written quite a bit on the topic. It's worth taking a look at if you're interested in that kind of thing.

http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/

well, actually trillion dollar questions are a result of how the us economy works, not really a global statement(though the us wish it was). that aside i tend to agree.

If this was reddit, I totally would have posted "In b4 michaelochurch" when I read this article. His commentary on it was inevitable.

What I thought was interesting was that the blog post said that a sense of mission and personal autonomy was key, which sure sounds like it would feed into Michael's crusade for open allocation.

But then Googlers post here and seem to say that Google doesn't actually rank those traits highly. Which seems to back up his point.

I don't know the truth of it, and don't really care very much since I don't plan to work at Google, but it's an interesting discussion nonetheless.

Their HR department has the most effective PR of any Google property.

I've noticed that the companies with 3-sigma powerhouse reputations tend to be horrible, and the best companies tend to be firms (especially in scientific computing and consulting) that only nerds have heard of.

It took me into my late 20s to realize that it wasn't Google that was so great but that its marketing department was fantastic. Same for the horrible startup (executive ethics far worse than at Google) where I worked after the Big G.

"the best companies tend to be firms (especially in scientific computing and consulting) that only nerds have heard of."

Perfectly mirrors my experience. Out of college you mostly hear about the big tech companies and trendy startups.

Yeah, there's almost no correlation between a company's public perception and how it is internally. That's why, as a rule, I try not to work at places where I don't know somebody there personally.

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