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by ChuckMcM
4907 days ago
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I had an interesting conversation with Alan Eustace (who was in charge of engineering at the time) about this. We had just hired, abused, and lost a guy who had been the CTO of his previous company, got hired in and forced to clean up message catalogs in i18n code, and quit after the slotting committee decided he was really 'junior engineer' level and should be put on a performance improvement plan so that he could learn to "step it up." I don't know how common his situation was, I was fairly outspoken (no surprise) and he had reached out to me early on when he was trying to figure things out. The PIP (which is basically a pre-cursor to being fired) basically put him over the edge, and he quit. The sad thing was of course this guy was really smart, had excellent design sense, and knew more about the way Java worked than I did and I was one of the original developers of Java at Sun! A real top notch kind of guy. He had been caught in the 'perfect storm' of which there were many, of a manager whose project was strategic to the company and understaffed, a skillset that waaay out ranked his assignment, so even doing perfect work it wouldn't begin to show his capabilities, and a 'peer review' system that primarily tested social engineering skills rather than technical skills. Everybody lost. He lost his job, Google lost a great engineer, the system lost an opportunity to improve. The essence of the discussion with Alan boiled down to "Its a complex system and its going to have some failures, but by and large it works well so unless you can come up with something better we're stuck with it." So in some ways the interview process is a good test to see if you might be the kind of person that would do well at Google. |
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Tell ya what, how about trying one of those infallible(tm) A/B tests where half the incoming people get the Hogwarts hat and the other half get to meet their team upfront before accepting a job? Do this for a year. Now one year after that measure which set of employees is happier/present/more successful.