
Craig Silverstein, Google Employee #1, Leaving for Khan Academy - jc4p
http://allthingsd.com/20120209/googles-very-first-employee-craig-silverstein-technically-no-3-leaving/
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spicyj
I'll mention that we're still hiring for both full-timers and interns. Here's
the job post:

Our mission is to provide a world-class education to anyone, anywhere. We
already have millions of students learning every month, and we're growing
quickly.

Our students answer over 2 million math exercise problems per day, all
generated by our open source exercise generation framework
(<http://github.com/khan/khan-exercises>, <http://ejohn.org/blog/khan-
exercise-rewrite/>), and Sal's videos have been viewed over 117 million times.
We're just getting started feeding this data we're collecting back into the
product to help our users learn more (<http://david-hu.com/2011/11/02/how-
khan-academy-is-using-mac...>). If you're interested in data, analytics, and
education, this is a dream gig.

Plus, it's one of the highest educational impact positions you can imagine.
We're hiring all types of devs -- mobile, frontend, backend, whatever you want
to call yourself. Big plans ahead.

<http://www.khanacademy.org/jobs>

~~~
kamens
I'll just add that even though the job ad isn't up yet, we're specifically
looking for you quantitative big data folk.

Apply through the ordinary software developer position for now -- but we're
hunting for some passionate data engineers to do more stuff like this:
[http://david-hu.com/2011/11/02/how-khan-academy-is-using-
mac...](http://david-hu.com/2011/11/02/how-khan-academy-is-using-machine-
learning-to-assess-student-mastery.html)

~~~
tim_sw
can some of KA data be made available for 3rd party analysis?

~~~
kamens
We've thought about it, need someone to go through and properly anonymize
everything, etc -- not at the moment.

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apl
I wonder when they'll start hiring, well, _educators_. While engineering
challenges may exist, Khan Academy's biggest scaling problem seems to be
Khan's ability to produce solid content. His biology stuff, for instance, is
decidedly worse than the mathematics.

Other than that: great move.

~~~
jc4p
Do they need to actually hire educators? I understand that it would raise the
level of knowledge but if I remember correctly from the last Google Hangout
Khan said that they are currently working on a platform to make it easier for
anyone to add things to KhanAcademy without having to do github pull requests.

~~~
gatlin
Yes, they should. However, I think they should hire doctors of education in
the same way they're hiring engineers: the engineers are creating the
technical infrastructure to deliver lessons, and the educators should be
creating the pedagogical standards and informing the engineers about what
kinds of tools to create.

~~~
iskander
A doctorate in education is of dubious worth. As an academic field education
research doesn't yet have the tools of structures to answer interesting
questions. In place of rigorous theories there is currently a swamp of poorly
verified or unverifiable notions.

Hire teachers, hire experts, hire anyone who either has deep knowledge or
experience transferring knowledge. Hopefully both. A doctorate in education,
alone, provides neither.

(this comment brought to you by small sample size interactions with real-life
Ed.D. dunces)

~~~
robocat
The most exciting thing about being involved with software development is that
it is a practical discipline that has both scientific testing (A/B, unit
tests), and fast evolution that is discovering successful organisational
structures and working processes.

Education seems to test the wrong things (knowledge, ability at tests, not
practical nor personal skills), and changes at glacial speeds (conservative,
and aiming for politically motivated outcomes).

------
ComputerGuru
Craig Silverstein is someone I've had the distinct pleasure of interacting
with one several opportunities over the years. More important than being
Google employee #1 is that he's THE Google open source person. He's always
involved in Google Summer of Code and personally maintains a number of very
cool open source projects on Google Code.

I wish him the best!

~~~
Donch
I'd like to second this opinion. I've had the pleasure of reading and using a
lot of his code in the form of the sparsehash, ctemplate and tcmalloc projects
and I know for a fact that my own projects would have been a lot harder to
write and test without this code.

He's a top notch open source advocate and a great encourager of contributions
from non-Google employees, so hat's off and all the best at Khan Academy!

------
SkyMarshal
Do you want to sell advertising the rest of your life, or do you want to come
with me and change the world of education?

~~~
nextparadigms
If he's the first employee, doesn't that mean he helped create the Google
search engine, and thus _changed the world_? I think that's a lot closer to
the truth than what you're implying. I don't think Google started worrying
about advertising until years later.

~~~
redthrowaway
I'd be interested in trying to figure out just how much Google Search changed
the Internet, and by extension the world. How different would the Internet
look if we were all still using AltaVista? Certainly it would be difficult for
quality content to find viewers, as everyone used to pad their articles with
thousands of keywords to jack up their rankings. What else would be different?

Google's been a great boon for the Internet, but i'm curious just how much
Search changed things, on its own.

~~~
Matt_Cutts
Websites would probably be stuck with "pay for inclusion" and all the other
nastiness of the early days of search. Google also labeled our ads clearly;
the FTC had to warn ~8 other search engines not to label paid results as
"partner" listings and similar things. We also took a stand against pop-up ads
in the early days when many other major search engines were doing pop-ups on
their site. Not to mention that search engine spam was pretty bad in those
days.

Certainly I'm glad that Google disclosed DMCA complaints (instead of dropping
them, which every other major search engine did), push backed on overly broad
DOJ subpoenas that tried to get 2 months of user queries, worked hard not to
partner with scumware/malware companies, helped to push back on things like
SOPA, and launched a transparency report to shine a light on government
requests to take down information around the world.

Google has also been a major proponent of open source (e.g. Summer of Code,
Android, Chromium), not to mention espousing principles like data liberation:
<http://www.dataliberation.org/> . Overall, I think the web would have been
quite a bit worse without Google: slower, less organized, more closed, and
definitely spammier.

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mikehuffman
I am going to make a wild prediction right now. Taking into account that 2012
seems to be the year of the "legit" free online schools. I am going to predict
that within 5 years a person will be able to get a high-school or college
degree (possibly accredited) from Khan Academy...and it will be recognized as
legit by peers and employers alike.

~~~
mdonahoe
I hope they don't try for traditional accreditation.

~~~
geogra4
Why not? I would hope for some sort of certification program.

~~~
mdonahoe
To me, Khan Academy represents a break from the traditional educational model.
I would rather they focus on innovating than proving themselves as being just
like every other school.

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nickpinkston
Is this another sign that the new sought-after perk is meaningful work? The
time of beer and ping-pong tables maybe coming to an end?

~~~
sharkweek
I sort of see this as the natural progression of people's careers

~~~
nickpinkston
Totally - if the supply of talent becomes more: productive / wide applicable /
sought-after - it only makes sense that they'll move up Maslow's Hierarchy
into the highest fulfillment: meaning itself.

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benhatten
Absolutely amazing for the edtech space to see high profile, tech elite join
the industry.

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nchuhoai
Wow, First John resig and then This, salman Khan must have some great charisma

~~~
ChuckMcM
I think it is more the desire to have an impact. Seriously as you get older
and interact with more and more people you see the choices and opportunities
that lead them to the current space-time co-ordinates. And you get a little
bit sad sometimes that folks who could have been great have become de-railed
due to some addressable issue into crime, or poverty, or drug addiction.

It is hard to sit at a company working really hard to fill jobs and to listen
to all the folks who are out of work but not qualified for your jobs. Its hard
to listen to the stories of good, decent people who work hard and are
certainly capable, unable to break the chains of poverty because they can't
both get an education and stay off the streets. Its hard to listen to young
people, now young adults, who suddenly realize that it wasn't learning they
hated it was the school and now they are trying to make it as adults without a
solid foundation.

KA is has three things going for it, the founder is passionate about the cause
(so its not going to sell itself suddenly), the technological sub-pieces have
finally come into existence across a critical mass, the availability of 'self
funded' (which is to say folks who no longer have to work if they don't want
to) individuals to volunteer efforts for it.

So being remembered for lifting some fraction of the world (no matter how
small) out of poverty by providing educational opportunities, or being
remembered as someone who worked at one of the companies that formed the Web
as we know it. Easy choice.

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maeon3
I hope they can make learning biology, calculus and programming as hours-
consuming addictive as modern first person shooters are to teenagers.

