But I would like to point out that of the two of us, only the one who doesn't know is suggesting that we have "terrible hiring figures" or a "terrible interview process".
I was hired when getting into Google was arguably more difficult than it is now (2007). During my years at Google, I conducted hundreds of interviews and managed dozens of engineers at Google. I left of my own accord, in case there's any temptation to question that.
In my personal experience, the high false-negative rate in exchange for hiring only the best people is a myth that perdures from the early times. It's also a great morale booster for those who need to feel part of a select elite.
I had the pleasure to work with many exceptional people at Google and I learned more from them that I could have ever dreamt. As the organization grew to tens of thousands of engineers, I've also worked with many who are definitely not the cream of the crop. Same for management (proof: they hired me). And sadly saw very talented people rejected for stupid reasons because they just couldn't, or didn't want to fit into a mold.
Of course, you'll point out, this is just anecdotal data, and you have internal, non-shareable data that proves you right and we just have to believe you because you're currently an SRE at Google.
My point is that bringing a tired, cold argument about false negatives sounds elitist and inconsiderate. It's obvious that discrimination has taken place that has affected a fellow engineer and human being. I would be amazed to be helped at an Apple Store by such a talented individual. I would love to chat with him about his past work and share war stories of he had some time.
Your comment and posterior response smack me of elitism and lack of sympathy and tact.
It's a ruthless industry but we need not be.
Yes, there are many things I just can't share, and the only data point you can get in that area is my own opinion. How much value you place on that is up to you; I'm giving you the only thing I can. If that is of no value to you, you're free to discount it. I freely acknowledge that I can't prove you wrong. The only alternative I have is to say nothing at all, which is what I usually do. If you would prefer to have no input from people like me at all, by all means say so.
> It's obvious that discrimination has taken place that has affected a fellow engineer and human being.
I would like to make it clear that I am responding only to the comment I responded to, which raised a very specific question that I could answer. I do not feel that I have any basis to comment on the original article; please do not associate what I am saying with that.
What he said was fully reasonable, why do you doubt his ex-affiliation?
I just didn't find it necessary to comment on anything until I saw your comment yesterday. And, honestly, I don't see any reason why I should disclose my identity to you.
I don't know how long you've been at Google, and I don't know what culture you're drinking from. At my Google we tried to listen carefully and respect opinions and arguments without regard to who issued the opinion. Doubting a person's background just because they are presenting conflicting arguments wasn't part of the Google I worked at.
It's ok to be proud of one's company, but it's dangerous to bask on reflected glory and put oneself above others based on that. Ego is a reason killer.
What exactly is your objection to this post?
Kind of reminds me of this HN comment and rejoinder: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079
Did you win the Putnam?
Yes, I did.
(I didn't downvote you)
And you therefore need to focus on things you can clearly demonstrate and/or prove. Which is good advice for all discussion, really, but especially when people are going to be evaluating your commentary with more skepticism.
If you know someone is wrong due to confidential data, there's a couple ways of tackling that. Saying you know they're wrong because of info they can't see is generally not a productive way to correct someone, because nobody can really be sure you're being honest, or see what you mean. You will change no opinions with that approach. However, you may be able to use public data to at least demonstrate that someone is probably wrong.
Quality of candidates and success of hiring practices tends to be pretty subjective, mind you, and it's going to be hard to provide hard evidence of it. Long term success of a company would probably be the best metric. (Of course, which Google has in spades.) Though the counter to that would be many of their more recent stumbles that show that trend may be coming to an end.
As an additional question, apart from the rest of my comment: You've said you're an SRE. Do you have a hand in hiring at Google, perhaps for a team under your management?
> Of course, which Google has in spades.
http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/020515/busine...
That includes gmail, youtube, etc, not just search.
A further breakdown would be interesting though, AFAIK the still pay mozilla a bucket load to use google as the default search, so I'd say search alone was a significant portion of this.
The Mozilla deal ended some time ago. That is how we got here: http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/07/recode-mozilla-could...
So 23% + some portion of 77%. Still not the vast majority.
From the article:
- 75 billion revenue total
- 52 billion "AdWords and Search Advertising"
- 15 billion AdSense
So yes - the vast majority came from the ad business:
15+52=67 billion (90%) from the ad business, that leaves just 8 billion from all other businesses.
"came from Google’s own websites" - that was traffic, it still was ad revenue! With that ad revenue they created free content websites like Youtube. But what pays for Youtube are Google's ads. It is ad revenue. Creating a huge free video site over the years when you have billions to subsidize it is not a sign of superior business intelligence in my opinion.
I never disagreed with that. Originally you said:
> Or do they? The vast majority of their income still is from the search business alone.
This is very different, their search business is a subset of their add business.
The sort of people that we want to comment are likely to come back for another try anyway, and the long-term effect of this process seems to be doing what it was supposed to.
echo "Your Manager Name Here" > file; shasum file b8de53741d9e64711d4f47dd3a409230fc242fac
I made 30+ interviews before i got bored, for the reasons explained by ludable@. That's a personal choice, but i didn't buy much into asking useless and weird data structure questions. The attitude interviewers had wrt the "false negative" was also really artificial, and also felt elitist. You could really feel that when interviewers were thinking of/discussing new questions, and you could feel how "proud" they were when they found something not even remotely relevant to their day to day job.
I have been at google more than you have, that might be a factor in my thoughts, too.