Really good point. Mostly, I was amazed at the amount of time devoted to doing "manager-ish" things like writing up perf feedback, snippets, and also the laborious interview task.
Part of my frustration there was seeing myself doing 2+ interviews per week for most of my career, and my colleagues and coworkers doing 1/month or less. This isn't right. I also saw internal recruiters who had "favorites" who were googlers that were more laxed in their feedback and would more likely lead to a hire. This is wrong.
Interviewing and hiring is really, really important! But, I think that Google's distributed system actually bogs down everyone instead of doing the fast & easy thing.
How would a 3 person company hire their 4th and 5th people? Google needs to do that, at scale.
Having interviewed at several 3-person companies - the good ones have everyone in the company interview the candidate, then everyone reports back to the CEO and a single "no hire" nixes the candidate. That obviously won't scale to Google's size, nor should it. In an early-stage startup, it's crucial that everyone be able to work well with everyone else. In a 25,000 person company, not so much.
"One way Page tries to keep his finger on Google’s pulse is his insistence on signing off on every new hire—so far he’s vetted well over 30,000. For every candidate, he is given a compressed version of the lengthy packet created by the company’s hiring council, generated by custom software that allows Page to quickly scan the salient data. He gets a set every week and usually returns them with his approvals—or in some cases bounces—in three or four days. “It helps me to know what’s really going on,” he says"
He didn't review mine, because he was out of town for Thanksgiving at the time and I had another offer that was getting antsy. OTOH, it took like 3 VPs to sign off on it in his absence.
> How would a 3 person company hire their 4th and 5th people?
> Google needs to do that, at scale.
Yes, exactly. If you're doing 2+ interviews/week this should directly lead to you getting more high quality co workers on your team. While the folks who are only doing 1/month end up with withering teams. Properly aligning this incentive is the key to solving the problem.
Part of my frustration there was seeing myself doing 2+ interviews per week for most of my career, and my colleagues and coworkers doing 1/month or less. This isn't right. I also saw internal recruiters who had "favorites" who were googlers that were more laxed in their feedback and would more likely lead to a hire. This is wrong.
Interviewing and hiring is really, really important! But, I think that Google's distributed system actually bogs down everyone instead of doing the fast & easy thing.
How would a 3 person company hire their 4th and 5th people? Google needs to do that, at scale.