

Has Google Hired Too Many People? The Food Line at the Googleplex Did Seem Rather Long - dpapathanasiou
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/07/19/the-food-line-at-the-googleplex-did-seem-rather-long/

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staunch
The vast majority of the developers at Google don't produce anything great.
Lots more of them could, but not inside a huge bureaucratic company.

Holding 90% of the best engineers in the world "hostage" with six figure
salaries and great perks is a good way to slow them down. I think they're
scared of being blindsided, since that's what they did to Yahoo & co.

Google should be more brave and set them free. They can easily stay the best
at snapping up early-stage startups. They already do this, but it should be
their only strategy. Google should almost completely stop hiring direct.

I guess this is really just "Hiring is Obsolete" from a slightly different
perspective. That it might be evil of Google to jealously "horde" hackers out
of fear.

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geebee
I agree. It may seem funny to think that google is better off paying them 100M
for their company instead of 150K in salary - but presumably, google pays that
much for startups because they're worth it. Hard to believe that a 150K house
plant does all that much direct damage to google (wall street expectations
aside, their numbers were pretty excellent) - but the opportunity cost of
keeping an office fern from growing into a redwood may be very high.

assuming google gets to buy them out...

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menloparkbum
FYI Google doesn't pay incoming engineers anywhere near 150K.

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geebee
Yeah, it was just a guess. But I figure that after someone has had enough time
to get complacent, he/she's probably at a pretty senior level and is making
more dough.

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menloparkbum
If you live in SF or Silicon Valley, it is obvious that Google's hiring was
out of control last year.

I'm sure everyone living here, and working with a startup here can give an
example of at least 1 person Google has hired recently whom they would never
call in for an interview at their startup. Since I do a lot of the hiring work
at my startup, I've seen 20+ such people get hired by Google last year.

~~~
hello_moto
Isn't that people in Silicon Valley (especially those who work at Internet
companies) never stick with their companies more than 3-5 years? (except the
execs)

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icky
That's 'cause execs get pay raises by staying (regardless of their impact on
the company), whereas nerds get pay raises by leaving (regardless of their
impact on the company).

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amichail
Maybe the idea is to keep excellent people away from their competitors, even
if they don't really need all those people in the near future.

~~~
zach
Sure, if you accept that there are engineers that are 5, 10, 20 times as
valuable as their salary requirements, then that makes sense. You might as
well scoop up those under-priced assets, even knowing that you can't
necessarily measure them perfectly.

Since engineers love the product more than the marketplace, you keep them
happy by paying them well and letting products flourish on their own technical
merits. You do that and you don't have to worry too much about driven
engineers leaving for startups.

And you have to provide them with a stimulating and rewarding environment,
like, some kind of... super-college.

That's all pretty much conventional wisdom, but they're executing well on it.
It worked for Bell Labs and Xerox in a simpler time. Of course, their
underlying companies had too limited a mandate to take the technologies their
"radical researchers"[1] created and bring them into the marketplace. But as
we know, Google's mission statement is a less succinct but more exacting
restatement of "do computer science," so they're good there.

I don't know, it still seems fundamentally sound to me. Maybe Google is bound
for the "eternal September" effect, or maybe they're getting better at teasing
out the engineers out there who are a better fit for the company. Mere hiring
numbers don't really tell the whole story, I think.

[1] -
[http://equityprivate.typepad.com/ep/2006/04/what_spaceward_....](http://equityprivate.typepad.com/ep/2006/04/what_spaceward_.html)

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abhijit
check out this one at swivel.

<http://www.swivel.com/graphs/show/8977818>

very interesting. :-)

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daniel-cussen
Why hire so many people? How much value could a 10,000th hire add to a
company? Google won't tank, but it may have to lay off a lot of people. It
stands to reason that may contradict their "don't be evil" philosophy.

