RSSGoogle: Too darned smart for it’s own good?
There has been a bit of a low-level buzz lately over whether or not Google’s famously rigorous hiring standards have actually resulted in superior performance at the operational level. The company is famous for its preference for Ivy League graduates and marathon interview sessions requiring copious quiz-taking and brain-teaser solving. Some data from inside the company, however, suggests that these qualities have not resulted in a great deal of production among candidates who excel at them.
The hiring process isn’t anything new in the tech industry; Amazon has long been known for outlandish degree requirements even for warehouse jobs and Microsoft pioneered the “quiz as interview” concept that has become de riguer for coding job candidates. But just as happened for a time at Microsoft, reports from inside Google indicate that a focus on young, over-achieving candidates without much real world experience has resulted in an increasingly stultifying atmosphere of red-tape and academic preening at the company (to be clear, Microsoft never really fell into the academia trap, but did make some bad mis-steps resulting from youthful arrogance that continue to cost the company to this day).
Google, of course, disputes this, but I think a look at their track record with respect to internally developed products is telling. For all the buzz, Gmail is still well behind Hotmail and Yahoo in adoption; and Gmail may be the only bona-fide success the company has had outside of its core search/ad business. Maps, Youtube, Blogger, and Picasa might be other products that come to mind with great adoption, but they all started and were primarily developed outside the organization. Further, many products which have been acquired by the company have seen their development slow or stagnate; Orkut and Jaiku come to mind. This is not to say the company hasn’t made great technological advances: the back-end systems that power most of its products are a wonder of modern technology, the real secret behind the company’s success, and it’s real strength going forward. And I am personally excited about some of the new technologies they are developing. But for all the best and brightest it has hired to build these and other products, there has been remarkably little in the way of general market success. As an R&D lab, with brilliant wonks cloistered in comfortable isolation contemplating the great works of science, the company may not have any equal. As a business developing and selling marketable products, it’s been a bit of a one-trick pony, hitting on a revenue motherlode in search-based advertising, but failing to introduce and sell its more high-brow concepts to the mass market.
You can’t blame all this on hiring, of course; corporate officers, many of who have considerable outside experience, obviously dictate much of the direction of the business, including of course hiring processes. Personally, I see such such processes as a dangerous impediment, selecting for a very narrow range of skills, promoting isolationist group-think and ignoring a more holistic appraisal that might leaven the work force with broader perspectives and result in a more healthy long-term dynamic. Of course, in some respects the company is still young, and some of the initiatives I have disparaged may yet bear fruit. But history has not been kind to most organizations that have not learned the value of diversity. “The reed beside the staff” as the Spartans said, makes for the strongest teams… the serendipity of youthful exuberance and experienced temerity can achieve things that neither in itself could hope for. Google has plenty of reeds; perhaps it’s time to shop for more staves.
