What do 16,000 people do at Google? | Hacker News Reader

What do 16,000 people do at Google?

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8 pointsgibsonf112 comments

Who wants to bet that the "copyright content filtering" tech is just done by Peter Norvig in his 20% free time.

Give me a break!

The most important thing they do: not work for the competition.

If they can keep finding more and more people that pass their insane hiring process, they will do well to keep hiring them.

My experience was that Google's hiring process isn't insane at all -- if you're going to hire someone for a technical job, it's crazy to not have phone interview(s) followed up by a day of on-site interviews, both full of technical questions.

My experience was broken in other ways -- my recruiter changed her mind about which job I was applying for three times without consulting me -- but (being assured by Googlers that the problems I encountered were rather unusual) I can't find any fault in the process.

Perhaps insane as in "insanely selective." 1500+ SAT Score and a 4.0 high school and college GPA are very important. Then, I think there are 7 or 8 levels of veto you need to get through. At the end, everyone they hire is truly, certifiably smart any way you measure it.

...in engineering. They don't apply the same standards in other groups.

Yes.. any idea what percentage of their new hires were engineers?

http://eskeptic.wordpress.com/2007/05/31/introducing-the-par...

1500+ SAT Score and a 4.0 high school and college GPA are very important

I was offered a job; but I've never written the SAT and I didn't tell Google my GPA. Admittedly, the doctorate from Oxford University probably helped, but clearly they don't have any hard rules concerning SATs or GPAs.

Keep in mind that now that with 16,000 people, even if Googlers have the 16,000 highest IQs in the world, they're still only hiring at an IQ cut-off of 168. It's easier to only hire smart people when you're still a small company.

>>1500+ SAT Score and a 4.0 high school and college GPA are very important

>I was offered a job; but I've never written the SAT and I didn't tell Google my GPA. Admittedly, the doctorate from Oxford University probably helped, but clearly they don't have any hard rules concerning SATs or GPAs.

The SAT/GPA scores are part of Google's psychometric for intelligence. In your outlying case, I am sure that was easily proven via other means.

Your bad Google recruiter experience wasn't that unusual.

With the way they generate revenue, I imagine about 12,000 are now doing SOX compliance.

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