[terminado]

  “More often than not, she relies on charts, graphs 
   and quantitative analysis as a foundation for a 
   decision, particularly when it comes to evaluating 
   people … At a recent personnel meeting, she homes in 
   on grade-point averages and SAT scores to narrow a 
   list of candidates, many having graduated from Ivy 
   League schools, … One candidate got a C in macroeconomics. 

  “That’s troubling to me,” Ms. Mayer says. 
  “Good students are good at all things.”

Kind of a stunning misconception right there. A person only needs to look in the mirror, to invalidate such an idea.

[bhickey]

> “Good students are good at all things.”

This is an unfounded and dangerous belief. Skills do not necessarily transfer. Ben Carson, for example, is by all accounts the most talented neurosurgeon to ever live. He doesn't give the impression of being qualified as a federal administrator. Another example -- back in school we had a physics Nobel Laureate who decided he was a biologist. Despite all indications to the contrary he was taken seriously in this endeavor.

[walshemj]

No they are not real polymaths are incredibly rare and don't fit the mould that rote learning and getting a 4.0.

They only one close to a real polymath I know started a company when young sold it out for $$ at a young age then decided to get a Phd in music - after a bad accident whist in traction taught himself programming - oh and was also a session musician and played on top 10 hits

[dschuler]

Your comments are hard to read because they parse ambiguously. It could be "No, they are not real. Polymaths are...", or it could begin "No, they are not real polymaths...". This makes me wonder how Latin could do without punctuation.

[WalterSear]

He's nothing of the sort: he's a hatchetman of last resort.

[stochastic_monk]

Look at Watson from Watson & Crick to see that even doing one thing well in a field doesn’t imply doing other good work in the same field, let alone the other issues.

[Alex3917]

> Kind of a stunning misconception right there. A person only needs to look in the mirror, to invalidate such an idea.

It's shocking because making a statement like that seems almost incompatible with being an intelligent person. If that quote isn't misrepresenting her beliefs, it really raises quite a number of questions.

[mariodiana]

I'm inclined to think that "good students" are very often intelligent people pleasers who will drive themselves to achieve in order to win the attention of teachers, parents, awards committees, and friends and neighbors. These students often are "good at all things"—if our evaluation criteria is earning good grades in school. Good grades in school, nevertheless, only means so much.

Perhaps Ms. Mayer is most comfortable hiring such people.

[seibelj]

I got a C+ in linear algebra because it was the easiest math course I took in college. I barely studied for the final. I thought I could sleep through it and pass, so I skimmed the material and went to bed early, and then did really bad. I guess I’m not google material :’(

[faceplanted]

I had a calculus class at uni that started so easy that no-one was showing up after week one, and the module was 90% exam, 10% coursework, so people weren't bothering to do the assignments either. The people not showing up didn't seem to realise that the class ramped up to multivariable calculus by the end of term (Britain doesn't really separate calculus into numbered stages in the same way the US does), and the final revision lecture before the exam was completely full and the room had an air of absolute dread now that everyone knew what they'd been missing.

Not a very high pass rate on that class.

[osoba]

I had a class that was so easy that most students didn't bother to show up for lectures. Near the end of the semester the profesor got angry that nobody came to his lecture and decided to retroactively grade attendance with 70% of the grade. Most students flunked. I was fortunate that his class was in between two others I was taking, so I attended about half of the lectures and passed it with a grade that corresponds to the American C+/B-

[debatem1]

I graduated with a GPA so low recruiters used to ask me whether it was on a 4-point scale, but I got a job at Google and eventually led a team there. Probably shouldn't freak out over one test.

[stefkors]

How did you still end up at google?

[debatem1]

I did some interesting work, wound up on a recruiter's list somehow, and nobody cared about anything other than my code in my interviews. Which is pretty much the same way everyone else winds up there.

[alecco]

I beg to differ. Ms. Mayer is right. She wants high-functioning, compliant drones.

[bhickey]

Having worked closely with some of her old lieutenants, I don't think this is accurate.

[ralfd]

She wants low-functioning, rebellious drones?

[hammock]

Go on

[walshemj]

And if she wants people good in "economics" its to make 2+2 = 5 :-)

[yodsanklai]

“Good students are good at all things.”

If she doesn't have enough "good student" applications (according to her definition of "good student") in her company, which criteria will she relax? And even if she does have a large enough pool of "good student" applicants, how would she select one among them?

[hyperpallium]

Einstein failed experimental physics (src: Isaacson's bio)

[psyc]

The phrasing is unfortunate. It's reasonable in that context, in that very high GPAs aren't that uncommon at her level. "All academic things." Naturally "all things" is much too broad.

[terminado]

To frame an assessment of an individual like that, risks throwing the baby out with the bath water.

It leaves no room for externalities and circumstance, and assumes the individual had all needs met, perfectly, at all times.

Facts are facts, even if someone came up short once or twice. Maybe blame is irrelevant, and excuses aren't a substitute for productivity, but simply put, that's not how you measure humans, and any human knows that.

[arca_vorago]

What I don't think many people get is that these types of people and structures and institutions they exist in largely exist in order to perpetuate inequality in many ways.

It's not just google though, this is fairly widespread in America, and I bet many of these companies that practice hiring like that are either doing it because thats what everyone else has done (without realizing the reasons or not articulating the real ones), or because taking those kinds of candidates means not only do you get a potentially useful in their job employee, but you get access to another kind of elite-social capital.

https://youtu.be/PMotykw0SIk?t=595

[acjohnson55]

100%.

People ignore the extent to which the signals they're using as input are simply correlated with the signals some previous gatekeeper used. Therefore, they vastly underestimate how much a person's resume is "all signal".

I'm a great case in point. At some point, scholarships I had earned became the justification for giving me more scholarships. Much of my early adult life was spent compiling signals and statuses. I absolutely tried to develop real capabilities along the way, but to say my "impressive" resume indicated significant real world value created outside my own life probably wasn't true until about age 30.

When I was a hiring manager, I tried to evaluate people on what they accomplished relative to what they were given.

[jackgolding]

haha this is very relatable - there are massive rewards for signalling

[CalRobert]

I didn't originate the phrase, but read once that university is mostly privilege laundering. It seemed an apt description.

[alexbeloi]

I agree that this is a bad way of measuring humans accurately, but I would say that _accuracy_ is not exactly the correct or optimal goal for hiring.

Google (and other's) strategy is to optimize for precision rather than recall or accuracy, which is the optimal strategy when you receive several orders more candidates than you are capable or willing to hire.

To maximize precision, you need to minimize Type 1 errors (False Positives), and you don't really care about Type 2 errors at all (False Negatives, e.g. throwing the baby out with the bath water).

This is of course if you treat people like data points, which seems more and more common (and explicit) with larger companies.

[hinkley]

That would be great if nobody ever tried to emulate other companies.

But they do. Look at all the people trying to pretend like they have problems that require Google's infrastructure instead of just three machines with a shitload of memory and some redundant networking hardware.

If you don't react to the fact that other people are copying your actions then your moral compass is broken.

[harperlee]

Well but is that really Google's responsibility?

And if company A can have the luxury of copying Google and ignoring perfectly capable candidates because they had a C+ in one exam, what is the issue? There is then company B that cannot afford not to have that candidate recruited and she might turn out great.

At the end of the day, GPA is an imperfect ordering of candidates by quality, but it is such an ordering, and companies with the sweetest offer (money, prestige) will be able to get the best candidates, be that they look at GPA or not.

And it is not as if someone with a C+ is banished from the workforce - just from Google and the other companies that can afford to be so exquisite.

[derangedHorse]

Just to clarify, Google doesn't actually hire candidates based strictly on their academic performance. If you've had any side projects or prior jobs before applying, I'd say that's weighed more heavily.

[acjohnson55]

This assumes a false positive is such a bad thing. I've heard a bad hire costs $X, where X is some surprisingly high number, but why must it be this way? And are these big companies even avoiding bad hires in the first place?

The other problem is sameness bias. I posit that those false negatives are disproportionately folks that are underrepresented, demographically. Therefore, this approach has concerning externalities.

[ghaff]

>I've heard a bad hire costs $X, where X is some surprisingly high number, but why must it be this way?

Because most companies don't (and generally shouldn't) operate like pro football teams. "You've had a couple bad games; we're cutting you. Sorry it's just business." Most (though of course not all) people think that once you've hired someone, you should really try to make things work. Both because of the costs associated with someone getting up to speed at a company and because of the personal cost to the person being fired. Different companies have different philosophies of course.

[acjohnson55]

I think there are humane ways to part ways with an employee who just didn't work out. Give generous severance and some warm intros to places that might be a better fit.

If you really screwed up, make that choice soon. In the more common borderline case, that person is still giving you decent value, so it's not a total loss, even if you invest effort in trying to coach them up to your high bar.

[darpa_escapee]

Being precisely inaccurate isn't optimal. There needs to be a balance between precision and accuracy for a measure that's close to reality. Of course, there's going to be tradeoffs between the two, as well.

[rorykoehler]

What's more valuable to a company or society... someone who can come up with one paradigm shifting idea and execute on it but fail in everything else or someone who can never come up with a paradigm shifting idea and execute on all the ideas they come up with or partake in?

[psyc]

Oh I absolutely agree it's an appalling approach to hiring, at least for a role that isn't heavy on macroeconomics (or whatever). I suppose I was only making the trivial point that very high GPAs are common in that sphere. But upon reflecting on your reply, maybe that is an undesirable self-perpetuating selection effect.

[JumpCrisscross]

> risks throwing the baby out with the bath water

If one has an excess of qualified candidates, this isn't an issue. Wasting too much time on the decision becomes the biggest risk.

[quantumhobbit]

I think we have seen that an excess of qualified candidates, for some values of qualified, leads to problems with diversity in tech.

After all if you have enough candidates, you can choose to only hire clones if the founders. And completely miss out on the benefits of diverse experiences bringing out creativity.

[candiodari]

Isn't this racist ? Why are you saying "diverse" candidates wouldn't be qualified ?

Google is well known, as are many other companies, to have the upper echelons of engineering filled with Stanford grads (and faculty), with their idea of diversity being the occasional Berkeley faculty member that's well liked there. (other companies, of course, have different universities they do this with, although Stanford certainly seems to have more than it's fair share)

So on the plus side, it's not racist. On the down side ...

[GFY-NSA]

>After all if you have enough candidates, you can choose to only hire clones if the founders

Or you could choose to hire people who aren't clones. It's not like you're stuck with Hobb's Choice when you have a glut of options

[quantumhobbit]

Completely agreed, but that isn’t what seems to happen in reality. Im not a hiring manager but what seems to happen is when presented with too many candidates, hiring managers redefine qualified to be more like themselves.

[sova]

Especially with an education system that's effective on only 2 out of 12 different brain arrangements [see Timothy Leary's "your brain is god"], it's hard to say that school marks are any predictor of how beneficial one will be to Humanity or the Planet.

[icelancer]

>> it's hard to say that school marks are any predictor of how beneficial one will be to Humanity or the Planet

I've mostly found them to be negative signals. I blind applications for education now.

[sjg007]

I'm pretty sure that Google realized that this type of screening didn't work and dropped the GPA and associated requirements. There was a big article about it in the New York Times I believe.

[akhilcacharya]

I mean, if you look at the average Stanford CS student (as she was) they're probably at least mildly above average at all of the things they do academically. I know several with > 4.0 there while still being chess grandmasters or incredible in music.

[zdragnar]

> “Good students are good at all things.”

If you're going by grades, then odds are what you're really selecting for is students who are good at the things they felt safe taking, not those who challenged themselves.

[rootlocus]

My university colleagues who got straight A's were mostly mediocre but had very good memory, learned only what was needed for the test, and occasionally cheated. Most of them didn't understand how things worked, but they memorized everything possible.

On the opposite side, I had colleagues who passed some courses with flying colors (sometimes going so far as to being exempt from taking the final test due to their prowess during the semester), but failed other, unrelated courses, because they simply didn't care.

From my experience, I have zero faith in grades.

[nikofeyn]

it’s the first sentence that really gets me.

   “More often than not, she relies on charts, graphs 
   and quantitative analysis as a foundation for a 
   decision, particularly when it comes to evaluating 
   people …”

what a travesty that misses the entire point. seems she doesn’t hire people but rather resources.

[walshemj]

Sounds like some one the neurodiversity spectrum but doesn't realise her limitations and make any attempt to learn coping strategies.

[rajacombinator]

It’s not really stunning but actually a moderately reasonable and commonplace middlebrow misconception. (Still incorrect though.)