Google Tries Not To Be a Black Hole of Brilliance 322
theodp writes "Google says it's declined to pursue awesome job prospects to avoid an over-concentration of brilliance at the search giant. Speaking at the Supernova conference, Google VP Bradley Horowitz said the company intentionally leaves some brainpower outside its walls: 'I recently had a discussion with an engineer at Google and I pointed out a handful of people that I thought were fruitful in the industry and I proposed that we should hire these people,' said Horowitz. 'But [the engineer] stopped me and said: "These people are actually important to have outside of Google. They're very Google people that have the right philosophies around these things, and it's important that we not hire these guys. It's better for the ecosystem to have an honest industry, as opposed to aggregating all this talent at Google."'"
Evidently, they do hire idiots (Score:2, Interesting)
Like that VP.
If he worked for my company, I would fire him. A VP should know when to keep his or her mouth shut.
Re:Obligatory Google is awesome thread of the week (Score:2, Interesting)
and dont engage in illegal practices
brian reid would have a different view from you, I think.
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-137384.html [zdnet.com]
http://public.getlegal.com/articles/cultural-fit [getlegal.com]
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9792046-7.html [cnet.com]
from what I've read of the case, it sure seemed illegal to me. I've been in that situation before, myself (age discrimination) and it SUCKS. very shameful for google to do that.
google has done evil and they have lost all their 'shine' when they pull crap like this.
read that and then tell me google is 'all wonderful'.
(sigh)
Job Security (Score:2, Interesting)
"But [the engineer] stopped me and said: 'These people are actually important to have outside of Google..."
It sounds to me like this guy is trying to protect his job. "Uh.. don't hire him, we need him outside of Google..yeah that's the ticket". I read between the lines that this guy doesn't want anyone smarter than he is too close to his job.
They shoudl fund them (Score:5, Interesting)
In fact, if GM REALLY wanted to excel, they would break themselves up, and have the divisions compete. The problem with the situation for GM, Chrysler and Ford was that it was too few CEO's and worse, they were incestuous (had to come up through the industry). Heck, rather than sell volvo, saturn, and hummer to China, they would be better off rolling them into one company, giving them a CEO from outside of the industry, and then allowing them to compete against others, esp GM itself. It will mean that the company would have to shrink, but, within 4 years they would be ready for IPO, or would be bankrupt.
Technically, the hard part is done. (Score:5, Interesting)
Google doesn't need that many more smart technical people. What they could use some people who could figure out something other than ads that people would actually pay for. Their track record in actual products is awful. The overpriced "Google Search Appliance" [cmswatch.com] isn't doing well. They do corporate hosted mailboxes, but that's Postini, which they bought.
Google is really an ad agency. That's where the money comes from.
Re:Evidently, they do hire idiots (Score:3, Interesting)
That is the public version...
The real reason. Such people are too expensive and we don't want to pay his salary. Better off with people with less skills who can be trained then get the best at a high cost who will only have a disproportional benefit vs cost to the company.
Misleading headline (as usual) (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Excuses Excuses (Score:3, Interesting)
If you live in SF you get to know a lot of Google people.
Generally they meet the typical CS reputation for being socially clueless: I've had dates and friends recount going out w/Google employees, and almost all the stories can be summarized as the guy being a big spender with no taste (simply get whatever's expensive) and that faux-Asperger's lack of empathy and understanding that a lot of nerds have.
More industry-specific, though, they have a reputation for being dicks to work with in collaboration (with outside firms).
Oddly enough, in my seven years in Seattle I'd never heard similar things on either front concerning Microsoft employees. I might be wrong, but I think MS employees tend to be better integrated into the local community.
(Never applied to Google myself, as I have no desire to deal with a protracted hiring process. At least one person did 19 interviews with Google for a single position and didn't get the job. Not worth it. Not to mention that they, apparently unwittingly, heavily bias the process to favor recent grad/PhD graduates rather than people who've been working in the field doing things other than research.)
Re:Maybe... (Score:1, Interesting)
I think this is probably more on the mark than most of the other comments. When you start aggregating all the top talent in the one area, you're not going to be able to take full advantage of it. For example programmer X proposes scenario 1 and programmer y proposes scenario 2 - both are great programmers and both are great ideas - which one gets worked on and which one gets dumped? Both could have been great open source projects or great business ideas, but even google can only pursue so many things.
This programmer may not have wanted to be the one who had his ideas usurped by another.
Re:Google - Hater (Score:5, Interesting)
I've had low, very low, traffic websites were I never got up to the $100 threshold for Google to send me money for ads that were clicked on - so I was never paid, the merchants, of course were charged for the ads, so that means Google had a 100% gross profit on those ads that were on my site. Now, I wonder how many sites were like mine?
Re:Technically, the hard part is done. (Score:3, Interesting)
Google is really an ad agency. That's where the money comes from.
100% spot on! so many people can't see this. they are blinded by shiny things.
google is a new age ADVERTISING COMPANY. ie, doubleclick. didn't we hate DC a few years ago? don't we hate ad banners and crap like that?
google's ONLY real product is selling eyeballs to advertisers. all else is just window dressing.
while everyone in the world seems to want to work for google, I don't. I don't want to empower MORE advertising on the internet! (seriously)
last time I checked google's MAIN product (search) they had exactly the same results from bing or yahoo. their differentiation is now gone, completely.
google will fade away and downsize. massively. its not IF but WHEN. been there long enough in the valley to see this a few times over. you watch.
Re:Obligatory Google is awesome thread of the week (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, after faithfully giving 15-20 years of their life to bettering your company you would just cut them off to go start over somewhere else? Most likely with a family to feed, a mortgage doctors bills to take care of their now older body, etc...
I don't believe in paying someone to do something which no longer has a purpose but I think a company could at least inform the employee as soon as they think they might be moving in a new direction, plus a chance to fill a different position. Now.. if they cannot or will not learn to perform a new task... then sure, go ahead and can them.
Re:Technically, the hard part is done. (Score:3, Interesting)
If I where to run that big company, with 99% of their income from one product (adwords et al), I would hire all the smart people in the world to figure out how to diversify myself successfully (No, google apps & Sketchup Pro wont save them).
You might say the same thing about other companies, like Microsoft, but its far far easier for customers to flee an advertising model en masse , than over night switch their IT infrastructure.
Considering that adwords becomes more expensive and more crowded by the day, Google needs to do something
Re:Obligatory Google is awesome thread of the week (Score:3, Interesting)
Depending on many factors (size of employer, industry, position type, etc...), retraining may not always be available. For example, my summer jobs while in college were with an ice factory. I was a laborer and did basic task like bagging ice (machine, but required operator intervention), stacking onto pallets (manual labor), stacking pallets (via fork lift), ensuring smooth ice flow through the system (shovel to assist ice to flow through shoots and into the auger system), and customer sales. First summer working there, we had about 6 employees and struggled to get things done. Second summer (most of us being college students), we figured out ways to improve on the process and got it to a point where 3 of us could cover the work of 6 and still have time to do odd yard work for the owner. What do you do with the 3 extra employees at that point? The third summer, the owner bought an automated system to get it down to a single operator (basically monitor the system and pull the auto-stack pallet to the freezer. So now down to 1-2 employees sharing a 7 day schedule and not enough work, what does a company do? Granted these examples were for an industry that primarily deals with summer help, but I hope you can see them applying to other industries. Don't get me wrong by thinking I want to harshly kick an employee out. Most of the employers I've had (post college) have some form of severance package and generally try to find other opportunities when a position ends. My current employer does this very well, but then they are a bigger company. My brother works for a smaller company of about 50 employees and likely wouldn't have the flexibility that my employer has for shifting employees to new task.
As married man with two kids, I always found it unfair the way some of my employers gave me benefits over some of my single co-workers. If I asked to have a day off to go on a field trip with my kids, I'd get approval without little trouble. A single person asking to have a Friday off since friends were coming into town would generally get a refusal. The point of this is that a company shouldn't care (in fact it is really the managers that care since the company is not capable of caring). From the way you are posting, I have to wonder if you want reverse age discrimination in favor of older workers.
Is this Google's way of saying... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Google - Hater (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Warning! Warning! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I'm so good (Score:5, Interesting)
With so many brights working there, all coming up with ideas in their 20% time and developing them, only the top tier of ideas will become official products, supported and released by Google; there's only so much time in the day, you know.
Well, some of those engineers who have one, two or N ideas passed over may decide that one or more of them may not make the Google cut, but might be successful business ideas which would fly quite well outside the organization. Those folks might leave, which would lead to two things.
First, all the institutional knowledge, all the investment in that engineer walks out the door with them, and there's a huge cost to that. Second, they may take some of their favorite colleagues with them, and suddenly the losses multiply.
There's something to be said for controlled growth, not trying to take over the world too fast. I wouldn't doubt that, if this is indeed official policy, that it's a sort of sustainable selfishness, an understanding that hoarding all the best engineers will inevitably lead to an internal breakdown and a loss of that talent.
The knowledge trade is much like an economy; maybe they realize that as fast as they're growing, pushing the envelope further would lead to an amazing boom that would inevitably lead to a massive bust. Good on them for avoiding it.
Re:What a coincidence (Score:4, Interesting)
This just reeks of the problem with Google. They are sooo into themselves and into thinking that everyone smart works there. The reality is that far less than "all great programming brains" actually work at Google. I'd bet that not even 5% of the best programming brains work there - in fact, I'd bet that less than 1% even work there.
Google has become so cocky as of late that they think all the good people want to or do work there. That's just not the case.
We've recently hired 4 or 5 guys away from Google, and they are so into themselves for having worked at Google that they are almost impossible to work with. They think that they have some special 'rights' just because their resume says "google" on it. They are far from the most talented engineers where I work. But don't go telling them that.
Re:Excuses Excuses (Score:2, Interesting)
I can't make a generalization of that scope.
There's definitely been stages in the "maturity" of Microsoft. Early Microsoft was uber geek, for sure.
Now, it's more like Boeing than Google, just a megacorp filled with corporate wage slaves.
Re:What a coincidence (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I'm probably one of the few... (Score:5, Interesting)
If (true) instinct tells you this was the best course, then it probably was.
Teachers with genuinely good stuff between their ears are a very valuable commodity. I don't know what I would have done without the couple of awesome teachers I had while growing up. Kept me from being crushed by the system and encouraged unconventional thinking. I'm a happy man today partly because of good teachers who weren't just system-bots but actually understood what it meant to be human.
Cheers to you, mate!
-Mark
We can safely conclude "ignorant" then :) (Score:1, Interesting)
Gears is being phased out since most of its ideas is being put into the HTML5 spec. So this way of phasing out means its actually a success. Gears was never meant to stay for good. For a large company to contribute to a specification like this is almost unprecedented and a good sign of more work going into good specs than feeding the proprietary trolls.
Adsense/adwords is brilliant. Good on the eyes for the surfers, and good for advertisers and websites, which are given optimal self-control in the back-end. If you have ever used them, you would know what I'm talking about.
For website owners there is also Google Analytics, which I do admit I have not used too much, but is also given lots of cred.
Also their backend to their web-spider / indexing service for webmasters is cool. Unprecedented at the time it came. It gives alot of control for SEO and fixing errors on your pages.
GMail I will prefer over Yahoo mail and especially Hotmail after they got taken over, but point taken. Although you have to give credit to their labels (tags) over folders, strong search capability, free IMAP/POP access, themeing and probably a bunch of other things forgotten. The G in Gmail changed the online email industry forever. Overall Gmail is not too intuitive for new users, but much more usable than anything else once you get used to it.
Distributed storage works for most of their line. It's different than doing "a search engine", and required a completely different set of skills and resources to accomplish, although it made making a world-class search engine possible with less energy consumption.
I would say Google is impressive in innovation, with GMap, Google Earth and all the other things we quickly take for granted or have forgotten about (G in GMail). Even marketing is brilliant over there with the do no evil-thing and getting trust - which I'm fine with, because honesty is important today.
I just can't see where the money is coming from though. Think MS still have the upper hand in revenue-generation, despite all their technical incompetence and failures. However, in coolness and innovation, Google wins hands-down. If you actually take a look at all their projects, you quickly realize they have defined much of what we take for granted in the IT industry today.
Read between the lines. (Score:3, Interesting)
This is just an obfuscated way of saying "We don't want to pay them as much as they're making now, let alone enough to entice them to switch."
Mal-2
One more explanation (Score:3, Interesting)
It could have something to do with the allegations that Google and Apple had an informal, probably illegal agreement not to recruit from each other.
"See, we avoided recruiting from Apple for vague altruistic reasons, not some secret anti-competitive deal."
Re:I'm so good (Score:1, Interesting)
Brilliant minds typically never work well in a team since self-centereness is usually a side trait of a brilliant mind.
Either you end up managing big egos, prima donnas, personal believes, competitive spirits, procedure/code nazis, the MIT vs Stanford way, etc... Basically you'll have a company with people trained to fight for their point of view, social hermits, intellectual property strategists/blockers, credit takers, and a lot of mental sword rattling/swash bucking among folks.
Or in other words, too many chiefs in the kitchen. And that means ideas/projects move slower from a life cycle standpoint. Also, group think can become a negative result in the long run, especially since Google likes to create a one team, one attitude culture. Lastly, Google needs so-called less brilliant guys to actually get the product release, i.e. do the real work (duh!).