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Comment by mixmax | Hacker News Reader

I think this is the exact problem Goolge is facing right now. It's increasingly hard for them to keep their high standards in hiring worldclass engineers and hackers. There simply aren't that many of them.

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Is that really Google's problem? I mean I realize there aren't a lot of great engineers, but it seems to me that their primary problem is that they are no longer the "hot" company to work for. I think all companies reach this point as they mature. Either they have to start paying a lot more than their competitors or they have to lower their standards. Most companies do some of both (best example would be Microsoft right now, they have good engineers, but not as good as they used to. They also pay well)

A third option would be to break the company up and let the by-products run like small companies that need to survive, potentially making it more attractive for recruiting purposes.

The two are probably linked. A hot company for hackers is one where there are other hackers that are great. Once you reach the point where your company isn't only staffed with only great hackers but also merely good developers the company seizes be as hot as it was.

It's a hard problem to solve. Especially if, like Google, you're a publicly traded company that needs to grow constantly to appease investors. Growth means hiring more people.

Personally I think Google has plenty of engineering talent. It's not that they don't have enough people to design the bridge, they just don't know exactly where it is suppose to go.

If that's the case, then why not stop hiring until more sufficient talent becomes available? Does this mean that Google's new hires are primarily there to increase headcount?

You seem to present a dichotomy for employment motivations: securing talent (i.e. so Facebook can't have 'em) vs. increasing headcount. However, Google is probably hiring because they have more opportunities and workload than their existing employee base can handle.

It's a difficult situation to be in. Google can't stop hiring because the only asset the company has is brainpower. If they don't continue to recruit the best they will wither into just another internet company. Many large companies can sit on their existing products because there exists some competitive advantage that prevents competitors from overtaking them in the near term. Google's competitive advantage is the algorithms and data, both of which result from having top talent, hence the need for them to continue hiring.

I'd argue that brainpower is not their only asset. It's an important input, but not their most important "asset". True assets can't walk out the door one day and not come back. People can do that, at any time. I'd say that Google's best assets are their vast technology infrastructure that's been "proven" and optimized for performance, reliability, etc., plus their brand and their existing userbase inertia. Employees can come and go. They are very useful and valuable. But Google's codebase and hardware isn't going to simply disappear one day on a whim. Folks like Guido and Vint Cerf and Thompson and Kernigan, etc., just might. Plus humans have egos and ambitions and dreams, and get old and tire or lazy or want lifestyle changes. Code and machines do not. A true asset can be sold off like a commodity. An employee cannot be sold off like this, not directly and explicitly anyway.

Google owns one unreproducible asset: its data. Indices, searches, clickstreams for hundreds of millions -- even billions -- of users, going back a decade.

Your responsibility to your shareholders is not to maintain the highest profits/employee - it's to deliver the highest total profit per share. If you need people, and can maintain the 3/2 ratio, you should add them.

Your responsibility to your shareholders is not to maintain the highest profits/employee - it's to deliver the highest total profit per share.

Management is legally obligated to act in the long-term best interests of the company; that is NOT the same as "deliver the highest total profit per share." For more, see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_judgment_rule http://crookedtimber.org/2008/07/25/what-obligation-maximise...

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