[old-gregg]

Worked pretty well for Google, no?

While reading "In the Plex", one fact stood out: nearly all of their early hires were well-respected CS figures from 1st grade universities. Not only you had to be smart, but you had to have good grades from a good school to get hired by Google early. The only exception I could find was Salar Kamangar. At least that was my impression from reading the book.

[hkmurakami]

Quora has done the same, yet their results speak for themselves.

(Brilliant people for sure, but that hasn't saved them from a suspect business model)

[pc86]

Isn't the early Google work a good definition of a Hard Problem, though?

[Startup X] does not need a CMU PhD to build the latest Node app. The domain is blocked at my office so I can't read the article, but I'd argue that spending the extra money on "10x" talent does nothing but shorten your runway.

[dingfeng_quek]

On the other hand, the investment in [Startup X] is partly justified by the idea that spending money on "10x" talent is a chance for "100x" returns.

[randomdata]

Not necessarily. While you seem to recount the history as I remember it, it has been said on here many times that Google did not maintain those policies. Perhaps they ultimately saw the same risks in continuing down that path?

[tkahn6]

Also in "In the Plex" they talk about how Google kept a record of everyone's SAT scores and GPA and alma mater and found no correlation between those things and skill/quality/productivity/effectiveness.

[yyqux]

If this is true, then it doesn't actually do anything to confirm the argument of the original article. The opposite actually. If you had selected a random sample of people and placed them in jobs in Google, then sure, that would provide a lot of evidence that academic performance doesn't matter. But that isn't what happened: this is a sample of people who already made it past the Google hiring filter, which allegedly is placing too much weight on credentials.

If the premise of the original article was correct though, you would expect that the uncredentialed people who made it past the hiring bar would be far stronger than the people who got an unjustified boost based on their credentials and the prejudices.

If it's true that easy-to-measure academic credentials are basically uncorrelated with job performance, then that's probably a good indication that their hiring process actually is well-calibrated: if people with poor credentials were doing better than people with good credentials, then their hiring process isn't giving sufficient weight to non-academic factors. If people with good credentials were doing better than people with poor credentials, that would indicate that they were putting too much weight on credentials and could improve hiring by weighing other factors.

[dingfeng_quek]

I wouldn't generalize this way. P( Y | X ) != P( Y ).

X: Hired by google, good grades, good school.

In fact, it doesn't test the difference between institutionalized tertiary education vs a lack of it, only differing academic performance among those who are already relatively successful in it.