What Google Learned from Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team (2016)
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
That is interesting and I would not have expected that as I keep hearing that google's hiring process is focused on only hiring the best.
The way this works is:
1/ Google crunches some data
2/ The company leadership looks at that data, twists it to leave out "inconvenient" facts, and tells whatever narratives they want to tell (internally and to the NYT)
3/ No data or any empirical results are ever released (even internally)
FTR, I'm a manager at Google. I don't feel qualified to comment on the research or the specifics of this article, but I can assure you Google takes building effective teams pretty darn seriously.
I also read the article and saw no data points or anything that would suggest "some of the company’s best statisticians, organizational psychologists, sociologists and engineers" had any numbers to work with. (beside that certain employees were involved)
The thing is that confirmation bias is real, and cost and time often preclude the use of strong systems to exclude it. Additionally The Tribe quickly develop narratives which then dominate funding and discussion. Phrases like "we've moved to execution".
Before finger wagging at dumb managers starts... consider Richard Feynman : https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment
OP made some very bold claims about how Google works internally and unless he's a first-hand witness (Google employee), he really needs to provide some data of his own to back his assertions up.
I read the response from the Googler as an appeal to authority. If Google doesn’t release the study, they open themselves up for conjecture and skepticism.
To criticize OP for being inaccurate is fine, but absent any references, Google is making the same argument as the Googler.
There is not a single piece of useful data in any of those 9 articles.
Google is such a frightening, creepy company that really tries hard not to be. Kind of like the guy who breaks into a girl’s home with a gun screaming “why won’t you go out with me I’m a nice guy”.
If you work for Google no offense, you’re still competitive on the job market and Google became creepy as a function of emergence rather than anyone’s choice, but still wanted to say something...
"…the good teams all had high ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues. One of the easiest ways to gauge social sensitivity is to show someone photos of people’s eyes and ask him or her to describe what the people are thinking or feeling — an exam known as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. People on the more successful teams in Woolley’s experiment scored above average on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. They seemed to know when someone was feeling upset or left out. People on the ineffective teams, in contrast, scored below average. They seemed, as a group, to have less sensitivity toward their colleagues."
"When Rozovsky and her Google colleagues encountered the concept of psychological safety in academic papers, it was as if everything suddenly fell into place. One engineer, for instance, had told researchers that his team leader was ‘‘direct and straightforward, which creates a safe space for you to take risks.’’ That team, researchers estimated, was among Google’s accomplished groups. By contrast, another engineer had told the researchers that his ‘‘team leader has poor emotional control.’’ He added: ‘‘He panics over small issues and keeps trying to grab control. I would hate to be driving with him being in the passenger seat, because he would keep trying to grab the steering wheel and crash the car.’’ That team, researchers presumed, did not perform well."
The weasel-wording around "researchers estimated' and "researchers presumed" doesn't exactly inspire confidence. Though that may be just the NYT article, not the study itself (what's the actual data?).
I can only imagine this well-intentioned research was the seed of some internal directives, which eventually turned into a cargo-cult dogma, leading to things like the James Damore fiasco. The road to hell paved with good intentions and all that.
It's very clearly culturally biased too. If you have ever done any training in this area you know that different cultures (even if they appear racially similar) do facial expressions, eye contact, and so on differently. Maybe all we are seeing here is that white people can read the facial expressions of white people...
I'm under the impression that the cultural differences are largely in how much you let out, not in what the expression looks like when you do.
Annoyance vs anger is all in how much you let out, no?
http://www.creativitypost.com/psychology/gender_bias_in_the_...
http://socialintelligence.labinthewild.org/mite/
The test seemed somewhat biased to a certain social background however.
What isn't mentioned is that the 'Mind in the Eyes' test is used to assess autism and spectrum conditions.
If that kind of empathy is necessary for good teamwork then the neuro-diverse are at a disadvantage in that type of work and systematically excluded from companies that do all of their work in teams. Companies that take this seriously could assess where teamwork is important - and where it isn't - and hire appropriately.
The guy who re-plumbled my house was working there alone pretty much all the time. That seems to be a common way of working in many trades, and plumbers don't seem desperate for work.
A fair number of bits of heavily-used software started out as one person's project (many of the successful ones do eventually morph into community projects, but titles like "benevolant dictator for life" show that community doesn't necessarily mean a flat "team" setup). Lots of programming languages fall in this category. Sublime Text. Indy games (and, not so very long ago, the majority of games). Building software as a solo endeavour does seem to be somewhat out of fashion right now, but that doesn't necessarily mean it can't work.
There are many areas where individual work shines. Legal research, accounting, auto repair. I think the same is true in software.
If however you are saying that there exist many tasks for which you actually work together to come up for a solution for a known problem, I doubt that.
Case in point: Perelman.
To make it more concrete: if one is using cloud services, is one working together with that could service people? Is that teamwork? I don't think so. Yet, it is cooperation.
In jobs where you need to hold a heavy object in place such that someone else can put a nail somewhere is only teamwork, because of technological limitations. Robots that can do this already exist, but they are too expensive. As such, I also don't count those classes of work as teamwork.
Taking the above into consideration, what remains of your "teamwork"?
GP asked about hiring at companies, so solo projects are either not germane, or an illusion. Are you the only dev on a project that serves larger business goals? You're on a team! You need to understand how your work fits in with others' efforts, and either adjust or explain how others should adjust instead, most likely both. Oh, and don't forget to document everything, another empathy-heavy task. I think we all know this; it's just another way of discovering the meme that devs who understand the business go farther.
Part of the point I was trying to make is that those "large projects" you were talking about are going to become more common and more important, out-competing smaller teams that are almost by definition less capable in terms of feature output. If a solo dev outcompetes a team, it's because they were better at empathizing with customers. If that's not exactly teamwork, it doesn't avoid the problem, either.
It is really surprising how much negativity there is in today's comments as opposed to the older topic. In 2016 people were calling this article enjoyable and even "Their favorite Google-related article of the year". I found suggestions on how to further expand on Google's work in the comments and people seem to have supported them.
Fast forward two years and in today's comments I see nothing but negativity towards the study and its achievements, criticism of the NYT journalism, and disdain of the amount of power big corporations have over their employees.
I wonder how much of this is based on real improvements in the understanding of what makes a team work well together and how much of it is a result of the recent rise in paranoia over fake news and also distrust of corporations that are gaining power at a much faster pace than regulators can cope with. It is fascinating how a scientific study (although arguably not a very good one) can be interpreted so differently by the same group of people solely based on trends in public sentiment rather than changes in the actual evaluated metrics.
Don't think it's the same group of people, it feels like intelligent and mentally healthy individuals have been opting to abstain from online discussions in general over the last few years in droves after realizing their time and energy and better spent elsewhere. Especially with the trend of comments being taken out of context to attack individuals employers/livelihood. That leaves the young, socially broken and depressed (myself included).
So that said; where do people go online who want to have serious (tech) discussions? Must be some secret place with a person like Linus kicking everyone out he doesn't like at first offense.
Apart from that, technical forums for specific topics, like the ones for certain Linux distributions or other open source projects, have their merits; but they are naturally limited in the breadth of topics discussed. (Some might have very interesting and broad off-topic discussions though)
I've also had a couple of brushes recently where what I considered reasonably calm and uncontroversial posts on a technical subject got alternating up and down votes for hours. I don't recall that happening before.
Maybe that's just a sign of my growing older, but I think some of it might be the degradation of the community's general moral.
Articulating myself, to myself, even if I don't share it, is often worthwhile. Why do I agree? Disagree? Is my observation novel? Enough to share?
Once I figure out what I'm thinking, do I care enough to share? Is the recipient worth my time? Do I really want to interrupt someone who's digging themselves into a hole?
Etc.
When I first started browsing hn I was blown away with how smart and insightful the posts were. Ideas I had never thought of and quite a few I struggled to even comprehend.
It's very rare to see that now days.
I was the hub of a PC-Relay network (the FidoNet era), a moderator on CompuServe, and very active on various game boards. It's never been any different.
Social circles have a life cycle, span.
When the current one sours, go find the next one. Or start a new one with some friends.
I think Clay Shirky's article about a group being its own worst enemy applies. Probably monkeyspheres too.
Intelligence isn't a ladder, so that wouldn't make sense in any context. Effective understanding of the relationship of Google vs God vs a domestic country's population vs yourself, does require some sophistication that involves general intelligence (in aggregate) and education. There are correlations with median income and these factors. As the population of the world gains access, simplistic fears about shadowy organizations are bound to gain ground from a myriad of historical and cultural parallels, as the median education level falls (among other associated factors, like wealth).
But also the stubborn, the foolhardy, and the idealistic.
I can think of several instances in the past two years that makes me mistrust them more, such as taking down accounts at random and taking a peron's entire digital life with it (causing me to move as much as possible off of Google), the random flagging of documents (aka, they actively scan them and will take off content they don't like), etc.
On the stock Android phone (I have a Nexus), it has felt that they have been trying actively to suck up as much data as possible (the final straw for me to put on a custom ROM is when their google keyboard sent everything I typed to thir servers, effectively making it a keylogger).
I personally think the skeptism they have now is very warrented, and the days "Don't be evil" is long gone.
One of the best examples of this was the new Google Calendar UI announcement. I thought it was a welcome an pleasing change and nothing but a good product getting better, can't we all appreciate that? But the comments on HN were very negative and people floated thoughts like "Oh! Look! Another bored product manager cooking up ways to make Google engineers working for their money etc."
While it's far-fetched it wouldn't come as a great surprise to me if there's some paid troll army going around posting these kind of comments early on a topic to attempt to bias the opinion of people who read stuff here.
I suspect that the campaign was ultimately quite successful at bootstrapping an army of unpaid trolls.
I would note perhaps that as someone outside the US, it appears like opinions of people in the US about large tech companies appears to have shifted very recently, within the past 6 months so it seems to me.
Personally I feel the same about Google/Amazon/Facebook as I ever did.
Right now all traditional media (mostly as opposed to social media) is seriously struggling. Traditional media has been experiencing constant downsizing/layoffs and other consequences. And this includes big names like the New York Times. Cable news networks are likely only continuing along since they're owned by huge, profitable, corporations that can subsidize their operation in exchange for the valuable ability to use them to push agenda.
So what I'm getting at here is that if public reception and 'excitement' towards anti-fracking started to decline, news agencies would begin to cover it less and move to more exciting things that bring in the clicks which bring in the revenue. Blaming Silicon Valley is something that will likely continue to bring in hits since we live in this really paradoxical economy. By most of all measures, our economy is doing terrifically - yet simultaneously we're seeing things like real wages remaining stagnant for decades. So people want things to blame. And Silicon Valley is an easy target as it's seen as a realm of excess and increasingly societal apathy on part of the big players. This [1] single [phenomenally well framed] image is likely an embodiment of how many see the increasing divide. Makes for good clicks in any case!
On the other hand, the perception social science, psychology, and even STEM as science has changed a bit in the last several years and part of that change is increased scrutiny and skepticism.
Now I’m curious to see how the comment thread grows. The negativity at this moment could be anchored in the observations of the first couple of top-level comments.
Certainly it’s fair to characterize this as a PR puff piece. It’s common practice for companies to buddy-up with news publishers on stories such as this.
But, yes, between 2016 and today we’ve definitely leapt into the era of Fake News.
Have we, though? The evidence for "fake news" as a phenomenon qualitatively (or even quantitatively) different than chain e-mail forwards is, to my way of thinking, pretty slim.
Any negative comment about Google used to be met with an instant swarm of downvotes here.
That's changed somewhat recently.
Works for me. People should be disdainful of that.
I find that a stretch. Even more so as the paper makes 0 effort to falsify its own conclusion. E.g. if this is true then you should be able to find a team where each person is a highly skilled shopping trip planner (and how that was measured was not defined in the paper) against a team full of people who are less skilled. But some other trait, presumably some sort of empathy, makes the individually weaker team perform better. I would expect in nearly all cases the team of better performers at the given skill will outperform the team of weaker performers at the given skill. What she arguably showed is that whatever measure she was using for cognitive capability does not strongly correlate against skill at things like planning shopping trips, whereas the test she used for the 'other' trait, the "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" test, does.
[1] - http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ab/Salon/research/Woolley_et_al_Scien...
-- Psychologists United Now (PUN)
In time we will actually see that Google overly filters and selects and decides on the candidates it chooses, and that singular overarching, overbearing process guarantees they end up with a homogenised staff that all think and act the same. My three years there were a lesson in what to avoid when hiring. Difference of thought is seen as being against the hivemind. It is encouraged and tolerated only as much as to flush out all the individuals not on message. Sadly even with with xooglers, the Stockholm syndrome is strong and persists many external roles later. Friends don't let friends work for Google.