I Knew It | Hacker News Reader

I Knew It

gilesbowkett.blogspot.com

15 pointsraganwald11 comments

Forget a down arrow; we need a trashcan icon.

Bleh, I agree. But he links to an old post by Aaron Swartz with an intriguing Google critique that I hadn't seen before. Since I've slammed Aaron's blog in the past my conscience wants me to point this out.

Edit: it's at http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/googlife in case anybody wants to bypass the OP.

I for one am a believer that once you let mediocrity in through the door, you've screwed over your company. "Bad" people hire more like themselves, and eventually the kernel of brilliant people doesn't enjoy working there anymore and leave, and you end up left with all the ok and not-so-good people.

Yes, I'm elitist. I believe that you need elite people to achieve elite things.

This sounds like the Dead Sea Effect.

Yep, but I believed that long before that article was published.

Google may have lost some of its feel and culture as it has grown but for such a large company it is a really cool place to work.

You mention since they can't find smart people to hire fast enough they can either lower the bar or hire less. The third option is to work more on recruiting people and that is just what they are focusing on.

The fourth option is to pay more.

Which in part explains their Traffic Acquisition Costs - http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/images/goog2q1.png

Can you elaborate a bit?

I know I'm probably being dense but I'm not seeing what you mean by hiring affecting their traffic acquisition costs. All that graph shows to me is that ad revenue is growing faster than outlay for traffic.

In order to maintain that trend, Google has to both keep hiring and acquiring the best people and also do what it can in a non-evil way to prevent the best people from becoming serious competitors.

So after being hyped to ridiculous extremes, Giles, in all his omniscience, foretold that some people might not find it quite so rosy?

In other words, he predicted some people...changed their minds?

Quite the savant.

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