CS183C Session 8: Eric Schmidt
medium.com
medium.com
I'm quite surprised that he would say something like that in public. I understand that this is a transcript made in a class in which Eric Schmidt was being interviewed. I know the chances are slim, but can anyone confirm that he really said this?
but that's trade secret!
no seriously, I wonder if that's been tried.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/10/schmidt-...
What does he mean by this? Social people that make a good environment? Or generalist that know a bit of everything?
> You don’t hire generic people — you hire people who have had stress and achievement.
Isn't this bias inducing towards good storytellers?
> Once we decided to review all the tactics, we put in a scoring system. Sergey said, the problem is, these scores are biased.
How does google evaluate performance?
http://www.amazon.com/Pedigree-How-Elite-Students-Jobs/dp/06...
BTW, thanks for this one [1]. I'll be reading it, and similar material, really soon (had it bookmarked here.)
Regarding my comment, I should have explained myself better in any case.
I suspect all software developers have experienced some amounts of stress in getting things done on time. My problem is that I don't keep a track record of it.
Just a few days ago on a phone interview they asked me of any interesting problem I had solved. My honest non-impressive answer was "nothing in particular, I just go at it and keep going".
I have faced countless problems and when I do: I fix them. I don't write them on my diary. But now I know I should have.
One thing I do keep track are my programming and linux notes because I've dealt with so many different technologies.
And will be moving those to github and blogs since nowadays you need to be a social coder.
Yes, the book helps. She wrote it to expose unfairness in American society, but unfortunately some people read it as a "how to break into the elite." One section explains how storytelling works in an interview context.
Hah! Good one. The best datacenter is one you never see, and never have to see.
However it does make me wonder if Schmidt knows less about software than I thought he might. The random scattered mentions of machine learning present the same image. Then again, I assume this is a person taking notes which are snippets of conversation potentially out of context.
He has a deep understanding of software. I've met him, he asked about my project, and his level of detailed questions showed he understood a great deal about software.
Maybe i am being snarky, but that seem like wishful thinking.
I wonder what led to Google changing their minds and not considering the GPA as a part of hiring decisions.
The recruiter claimed that it was because more people started to be hired out of my school. But that still isn't sufficient to discount this possibility.
Granted I'm living in a country that isn't the U.S., that could have played a role. But I'm not confident either way.
« So in 2007 we started looking for themes across the ten thousand or so people we had hired, as well as the millions we didn’t. In addition to testing technical hires on their engineering ability, we realized that there were four distinct attributes that predicted whether someone would be successful at Google:
1. General Cognitive Ability. Not surprisingly, we want smart people who can learn and adapt to new situations. Remember that this is about understanding how candidates have solved hard problems in real life and how they learn, not checking GPAs and SATs. »
The three others are Leadership, "Googleyness" and Role-Related Knowledge.
Noam was a very successful early googler. He was one of the feel people at early Google who actually did fundamental work in machine learning (George Harik was the other).
This may have been a transcription error, but as written I can't make sense of it. Can anyone else?
Many of them release a fair amount of their code as open source, but these sorts of capabilities are generally dependent on having absurd amounts of data, which is prohibitively challenging for anybody who doesn't run a website that sees massive traffic.
I was imagining some bit of AI that had figured out the best way to download asynchronously. Or the best way to layout a UI with code. You could maybe describe a process using natural language & it would just create a best attempt for you. You could then modify or steer it.
Seems doable, but I don't see how you'd need big data from massive numbers of users. And seems very interesting given that APIS and what they can do is much more finite than the physical world.
I went back and re-read the interview and I believe I'm channeling Eric properly.
When Microsoft got into hot water during the browser war with Netscape, it was about abusing their position in one market (computer OS) to gain a position in another (web browser and web server). This by bundling Internet Explorer for free with Windows, that in turn had special binding to their IIS web server.
So when EU is looking into Google, they are looking into how their position in one market gets used to affect other markets (like say when they re-jig their search algorithms).
You obviously don't even understand what writing is, on the internet or anywhere else. Writing is done as a service to the reader. If you can't be bothered to do an edit and correct obvious spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors, you're telling your readers that what you've written isn't very important, interesting, or worth reading.