Thomas Friedman: How to Get a Job at Google

[DefiantSix]

I heard Rush talking about this article yesterday, and it echoes much of my own experience in my working life.

How to Get a Job at Google
Thomas L. Friedman | Feb.22, 2014

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — LAST June, in an interview with Adam Bryant of The Times, Laszlo Bock, the senior vice president of people operations for Google — i.e., the guy in charge of hiring for one of the world’s most successful companies — noted that Google had determined that “G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless. ... We found that they don’t predict anything.” He also noted that the “proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time” — now as high as 14 percent on some teams. At a time when many people are asking, “How’s my kid gonna get a job?” I thought it would be useful to visit Google and hear how Bock would answer.

<snip>

There are five hiring attributes we have across the company,” explained Bock. “If it’s a technical role, we assess your coding ability, and half the roles in the company are technical roles. For every job, though, the No. 1 thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it’s not I.Q. It’s learning ability. It’s the ability to process on the fly. It’s the ability to pull together disparate bits of information. We assess that using structured behavioral interviews that we validate to make sure they’re predictive.”

<snip>

What else? Humility and ownership. “It’s feeling the sense of responsibility, the sense of ownership, to step in,” he said, to try to solve any problem — and the humility to step back and embrace the better ideas of others. “Your end goal,” explained Bock, “is what can we do together to problem-solve. I’ve contributed my piece, and then I step back.”

And it is not just humility in creating space for others to contribute, says Bock, it’s “intellectual humility. Without humility, you are unable to learn.” It is why research shows that many graduates from hotshot business schools plateau. “Successful bright people rarely experience failure, and so they don’t learn how to learn from that failure,” said Bock.

They, instead, commit the fundamental attribution error, which is if something good happens, it’s because I’m a genius. If something bad happens, it’s because someone’s an idiot or I didn’t get the resources or the market moved. ... What we’ve seen is that the people who are the most successful here, who we want to hire, will have a fierce position. They’ll argue like hell. They’ll be zealots about their point of view. But then you say, ‘here’s a new fact,’ and they’ll go, ‘Oh, well, that changes things; you’re right.’ ” You need a big ego and small ego in the same person at the same time.

<snip>

The comments on the article are also enlightening.

[JohnnyReb]

50 years ago while I was at college, GE (General Electric) came in the spring to interview engineering graduates. The post went something to the effect that they wanted to interview engineering students with a 4.0 and those that had barely gotten by....down around 2.25 to 2.5.

I wasn't about to graduate but it did perk my interest and I've always been...well, nosy when my interest is perked.

I dropped by and caught the GE rep while he wasn't busy and asked why they wanted the less smart engineers. He explained that sometimes they made the best engineers, especial those that had been raised on a farm or some how had some hands on experience fixing things. He said the geniuses could dream up all kinds of wonderful stuff but lacked the know how to build it or make it work. He said the less smart guys didn't dream up to much new stuff but given a good general idea they could build anything and make it work.

Looks like GOOGLE has discovered this fact for themselves. 

[Ralph Wiggum]

I heard Rush talking about that yesterday too.  Didn't have time to look it up further, but it sounded very interesting.

[Mike220]

Good info for those of us who are reevaluating their life while stuck in a dead end job with no prospects... Been considering studying something computer related. Or medicine. Who knows.