Google's Young Brainiacs Go Globe-Trotting 175
theodp writes "To train a new generation of leaders, Google sends its young associate product managers on a worldwide mission. Newsweek's Steven Levy tagged along and reports on the APMs' activities, which included passing out candy, notebooks and pencils to poor Raagihalli children, a 'Rubber Ducky' group sing-along at 2 a.m., and competitions to find the weirdest-gadget-under-$100 in Tokyo. The APM program, which seeks brilliant kids and slots them directly into important jobs with no experience necessary, was formed after Google's attempts to hire veterans from firms like Microsoft had awful results. 'Google is so different that it was almost impossible to reprogram them into this culture,' says Google CEO Eric Schmidt of the experienced hires."
Top-flight journalism from Slashdot again (Score:3, Insightful)
Great, provocative quote ... except it doesn't appear anywhere in the linked story. Apologies for RTFA, but it's about a lawsuit by a 50-something who insists he was fired from Google for not working 14 hour days and/or having spiky hair and rollerblades. Interesting story, and I'd love to hear more about it ... but it has no relation to the main story.
There's lots of stories on Slashdot about "citizen journalists" and how professional journalism is obsolete blah blah blah ... here's a hint: people who are "professional journalists" (and I was one, before I realized tech marketing paid much better) actually believe it is their professional responsibility to read and/or verify things before posting them. Just a thought.
Hiring and capital expenditures (Score:5, Insightful)
When you've overspent on hiring and capital expenditures quarter after quarter, it's a no brainer to see that it's cheaper to hire a bunch of young, cheap talent and send them around the world to get them all gung ho and Mouseketeer-y about working 80 hour weeks, than it is to hire senior product management with families and less mental plasticity who turn in mediocre-to-decent performance 9-5 at a $150k base (almost 2x what these APM's are getting).
So what if the APM's fuck up now and then, when your raw productivity is 4-5x that of "adult" talent, you can afford the occasional product airball.
And the reality is they probably even fuck up less.
Reminds me of all of those spy stories (Score:3, Insightful)
Inbreeding (Score:4, Insightful)
> with no experience necessary, was formed after Google's attempts to hire veterans from
> firms like Microsoft had awful results. 'Google is so different that it was almost
> impossible to reprogram them into this culture,' says Google CEO Eric Schmidt of the
> experienced hires.
This will come to a bad end.
Brilliant kids (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:No experience necessary? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No experience necessary? (Score:5, Insightful)
And while some of those people may not be in exactly the correct position, some of them are there (as you mentioned) because they can handle a project. They can't plug/unplug AGP cards, but they can make the system work well.
Here's my theory on Google's hiring... (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Hire anyone who seems to have any technical talent, lives only for work and/or could be useful to any competitor.
2) If an employee is not part of the core search project, give them some random B.S. to do. Also provide benefits out the ying-yang so competing offers look silly. Just make sure the B.S. provides our minions with no useful experience, exposure to real-world requirements or any tools outside the Google universe. This way, if they do decide to leave us, they will be unable to set up viable companies on their own or provide any value to our competition.
3) If anyone from the core search project (our only source of profits) tries to leave, kill them.
Yeah...I still like my theory.
Re:Top-flight journalism from Slashdot again (Score:1, Insightful)
My issue was with the fact that they linked a quote to a story where it didn't appear, not that the quote was linked elsewhere in the summary. Maybe that doesn't seem like a big deal. But let me illustrate:
The point here is that linking quotes to wrong publications can, for the majority who doesn't bother to read beyond the summary, provide seeming endorsement or validation from an independent source when it really doesn't. It may seem like a fine distinction, but I don't think it is from a true "journalistic" standpoint.
Maybe it's just a typographical error. But given Slashdot's outstanding track record for balanced stories and scrupulous fact-checking, it seemed worthwhile to point out that maybe they should do a little more QA before publishing stories. Oh well, maybe it's just me...
Re:Inbreeding (Score:4, Insightful)
Say that again? (Score:1, Insightful)
The APM program, which seeks brilliant kids and slots them directly into important jobs with no experience necessary
So I click that link, and I read the following:
If you have a proven track record of excellence...
They specifically point out that you need experience. What's with the obvious lie in the Slashdot summary?
Re:No experience necessary? (Score:3, Insightful)
On a counterpoint, my father is almost 60 and remains employed after about a dozen younger employees were let go. He does programming, but they asked him to help and tech support on some calls when support got overwhelmed. He closed a backlog of 6 months of calls in two weeks and an investigation afterwards showed that many of the other T.S. people were either a)emailing, shopping online and chatting by IM instead of working, b) had no idea what they were doing, or c) both a and b.
No age equals knowledge or ability.
MS and Google Culture... separated at birth? (Score:5, Insightful)
I interviewed for a job at the Microsoft campus back in the 90's, before the dot com era made pampered developers more of a common phenomena. This is also before any of the MS monopoly suits -- the company just wasn't seen as an evil empire by most people in the kind of way it can be now. The whole first round of interviews was composed of logic problems and puzzles to test your ingenuity/creativity. They had a hell of a campus and all kinds of unusual perks I wouldn't see again until the dot com boom. It was pretty clear that their strategy was to try to pull bright people straight out of college, give them 'fun' and pampered environments, and basically work the hell out of them. Not that anyone would demand an 80 hour week from you, exactly, but more: you've taken this new job in a city where the only people you know also work at Microsoft, you see your job as something kind of cutting edge / geek-cool, you're provided with this office and cushy work environment and any meals you care to eat at the office (and their cafeteria was pretty much the best I've seen anywhere before or since, not that they wouldn't also order out as appropriate)... you're with this team of people all fired up about how great Windows 98 is going to be, and they're all working late, and maybe you'll just stay long enough to get that free dinner...
Anyway, damn near everything I remember from that visit and everything I hear about the interview process and corporate culture at Google today is very, very similar.
Does Microsoft still try to do this? I have no idea. Of course, time does strange things to a company's culture despite its best intent. I know a guy who took a job there out of school and lived that kind of culture; today he's still there, married (his wife also works there), is a manager, and has kids. Even though a guy like that may have worked under a very similar culture to modern-day Google for years, he's not going to be the same guy and he's not going to see that kind of glorification of young genius the same way. Most likely he's seen projects where it helped a lot but also projects where it went horribly awry, and his inclination as a manager is probably not going to be to allow everything he had.
SERFs (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hiring and capital expenditures (Score:3, Insightful)
Senior Management has a different definition of 'work' when it applies to themselves, ie scoffing expense-account food while chatting = work, forwarding emails from a hotel room = work.
Lower echelon drones work longer than 9-5.
Re:Brilliant kids (Score:3, Insightful)
And when you don't live in the area? Watch that money get eaten up by the extra fees for your accommodation during that time.
5*7.50*52*0.9 (for, say, 10% taxes) = a whopping $1700 a year.
Seriously, your other posts are all "Well, that only leaves $28,000, and your parents can contribute that." like a shrugged throwaway statement. Other sibling posters point out that, in a far larger number of people's worlds than you seem familiar with, shock, horror, parents aren't able to just reach into their magic purse and find nearly thirty thousand dollars floating free.
Re:Hiring and capital expenditures (Score:2, Insightful)
Anyways, on to my point. I'm not technically the management team, but on the org chart, there's only one guy above me. I work odd hours, in different places in the office, I help the boss a lot, plan with the boss a lot, pitch the rest of management on stuff, work on making everyone else's jobs more efficient and I'm not always helping the guys on the frontline. In fact, it's so hard for me to get any project work done when I'm at the office because - and despite my best efforts to train these guys in my areas of expertise to where they are self reliant - I don't go in to the office in the morning anymore. I deal with customers from home, then I lock myself in a conference room when I get in to the office so I can get a couple things done on whatever project I'm tracking.
One day I came in at 12:30 pm and left at 4, when one of the guys on our networking staff finishes his shift. He wasn't ready to leave because he hadn't finished helping a customer.
As I was walking out, the guy says to me "How do you come in after me and then leave before me? This is ridiculous!"
I didn't even answer him. I had been working with a team in India on a functional spec till 4 am. I couldn't believe that not only did I get this sort of treatment, but that I had also supported this person for a raise and had kept track of how he had progressed behind the scenes.
Is it just me, or do a lot of people here (and in real life) assume everyone that's management or has management type functions lives a cushy easy-mode work existence? I'm not sitting here stuffing my face full of expensed food - and if I am, I'm usually working. I live, breathe and exude this job 24/7.
Re:Hiring and capital expenditures (Score:5, Insightful)
As a freelance software developer who often is brought in to clean up the mess which results in having overworked, inexperienced, bright (and cocky) young people designing and developing whole systems, i can tell you that the total costs (including maintenance costs and system improvements costs) of having a system designed and developed by these "cheap young people" far outweighs the savings you get from not including at least one or two experience persons in the team. And this is not even including hard to measure costs such as indirect business costs due to under-performing software (such as the ones you get because the system is 10x slower than it should be at doing time-critical, essential business functions, 'cause the guy that designed it didn't understand database indexes or thought that using remote calls in every layer would be "cool").
... or any other advanced form of project structuring or planning beyond pretty MS Project graphics.
Now that i think of it, often enough, even before the project is delivered, the initial development costs when using cheap young people outweigh the cost of having more senior people in the project.
Unfortunately, mediocre managers often fall into the trap of confusing "hours worked" with productivity. Proper measures of productivity - such as: business functions implemented per man hour - actually require having things like requirements specifications and mediocre managers don't use tools like requirements specs
Actually, for any piece of software which is in production for more than 6 months, they will keep fucking the support, maintenance and extendability of the software long after they've left the company.
If you're inexperienced:
Re:Top-flight journalism from Slashdot again (Score:3, Insightful)
But, to be blunt, I don't see much fact checking there either. People are used to believing what some TV anchor tells them, they believe what's printed. What's printed has to be true because, well, if it ain't, how'd they dare to print it?
For a long time, what you said was true. That's how our news got their credibility, and they still draw from that. It's very interesting to watch people read papers in Europe, where some people already had propaganda rather than information in their news. You will find much more critical readers in eastern Europe than in the countries that have been part of the "free world" for longer.
What's sad is that people equate the ability to write the truth with writing the truth. Just because the newspapers aren't forced to repeat the government's spin means to the people that, if they do, it's just because it is true.
You will find very few "mainstream" media that tell you the unbiased truth. Most want to sell, and what sells is to reinforce the point of view your reader has. Most people want to see and read what they believe is true.