
CS183C Session 8: Eric Schmidt - Titanous
https://medium.com/cs183c-blitzscaling-class-collection/cs183c-session-8-eric-schmidt-56c29b247998
======
weinzierl
"I went to Novell under the mistaken goal of being a CEO. I didn’t do the due
diligence, and if I had, I wouldn’t have gone. Our basic goal was to get out
with our professional reputations intact and not end up in jail. The books
were cooked, and people were frauds. But it turns out you can overcome that,
and the skills I developed helped at Google."

I'm quite surprised that he would say something like that in public. I
understand that this is a transcript made in a class in which Eric Schmidt was
being interviewed. I know the chances are slim, but can anyone confirm that he
really said this?

~~~
firasd
As far as his reference to Google, it seems the next sentence is what he
means: “I understood the rule of cash, so we did everything we could to manage
for revenue, and the rest is history.”

~~~
weinzierl
That's how I understand it. I just think what he said in the sentences before
is potentially slanderous. Doesn't he basically accuse Novel's management at
the time of fraud?

~~~
kelukelugames
It's not slander if it's true. "the books" is a permanent record and can be
easily verified if it goes to litigation.

~~~
rancur
> not slander if it's true

but that's trade secret!

no seriously, I wonder if that's been tried.

~~~
kelukelugames
It's literally the law. At least that's what my lawyer told me. I hope she's
not lying?

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ilurk
> At Novell, we had what I called “glue” people. They sit at the boundaries,
> and help everyone work together.

What does he mean by this? Social people that make a good environment? Or
generalist that know a bit of everything?

> You don’t hire generic people — you hire people who have had stress and
> achievement.

Isn't this bias inducing towards good storytellers?

> Once we decided to review all the tactics, we put in a scoring system.
> Sergey said, the problem is, these scores are biased.

How does google evaluate performance?

~~~
kelukelugames
The world is biased towards good storytellers. I highly recommend reading
Lauren Rivera's Pedigree. It's published in 2015 and resonates with my friends
in consulting and finance.

[http://www.amazon.com/Pedigree-How-Elite-Students-
Jobs/dp/06...](http://www.amazon.com/Pedigree-How-Elite-Students-
Jobs/dp/0691155623/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1445190973&sr=8-2&keywords=pedigree)

~~~
ilurk
Does the book teach you how to be a good storyteller?

BTW, thanks for this one [1]. I'll be reading it, and similar material, really
soon (had it bookmarked here.)

Regarding my comment, I should have explained myself better in any case.

I suspect all software developers have experienced some amounts of stress in
getting things done on time. My problem is that I don't keep a track record of
it.

Just a few days ago on a phone interview they asked me of any interesting
problem I had solved. My honest non-impressive answer was "nothing in
particular, I just go at it and keep going".

I have faced countless problems and when I do: I fix them. I don't write them
on my diary. But now I know I should have.

One thing I do keep track are my programming and linux notes because I've
dealt with so many different technologies.

And will be moving those to github and blogs since nowadays you need to be a
social coder.

[1] [http://kelukelu.me/interview/](http://kelukelu.me/interview/)

~~~
kelukelugames
Thanks! Hope it helps.

Yes, the book helps. She wrote it to expose unfairness in American society,
but unfortunately some people read it as a "how to break into the elite." One
section explains how storytelling works in an interview context.

------
Pyxl101
> 6 months after we went to auctions, we had to merge three different
> databases. I asked if I should be in the datacenter, and the engineers said,
> what are you talking about, we never go to the datacenter.

Hah! Good one. The best datacenter is one you never see, and never have to
see.

However it does make me wonder if Schmidt knows less about software than I
thought he might. The random scattered mentions of machine learning present
the same image. Then again, I assume this is a person taking notes which are
snippets of conversation potentially out of context.

~~~
dekhn
Eric Schmidt was one of the authors of Lex (not the original version) when he
was an intern at Bell Labs.

He has a deep understanding of software. I've met him, he asked about my
project, and his level of detailed questions showed he understood a great deal
about software.

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krat0sprakhar
> Q: Hiring? > A: One of our rules was, we don’t want to hire your friends.
> Another rule was not to hire people from “lesser” universities. Another rule
> was to only hire people with good GPAs. It was frustrating, but it meant
> that we ended up with a lot of really smart people from great universities,
> and that served us well.

I wonder what led to Google changing their minds and not considering the GPA
as a part of hiring decisions.

~~~
srtjstjsj
They ran out of perfectly pedigreed people to hire, when they got big and
competitors offered better prospects.

~~~
bordercases
This is my guess. Recently Google began to aggressively recruit at my
university over the last two years or so. The cynical question is, of course,
"why only in the last two years?" when our particular CS program has been
around since the 80s.

The recruiter claimed that it was because more people started to be hired out
of my school. But that still isn't sufficient to discount this possibility.

Granted I'm living in a country that isn't the U.S., that could have played a
role. But I'm not confident either way.

------
srtjstjsj
"Gnome" is actually Noam Shazeer

~~~
dekhn
Thanks, I was wondering about this.

Noam was a very successful early googler. He was one of the feel people at
early Google who actually did fundamental work in machine learning (George
Harik was the other).

------
jzwinck
> The teams are far larger than they should be. It’s a failure of architecture
> — the programmers don’t have the right libraries. I hope that machine
> learning will fix that problem.

This may have been a transcription error, but as written I can't make sense of
it. Can anyone else?

~~~
dekhn
It is now understood that products can be built with far fewer developers, who
leverage machine learning on large data sets. Much less code has to be
written, and the ML does most of the work in tuning the product behavior.

~~~
codecamper
Sounds good to me! Where can I learn about these techniques. I've got a 4 CPU
Ghz machine sitting waiting for my keystrokes. Please tell me how I can get
this thing to help me write software.

~~~
dekhn
It is best learned by working at companies who are practicing this art.

~~~
codecamper
Hrm. So the revolution will be closed source? No, seriously... are there books
on the subject? Open source libraries? Which companies are developing such
tools? Googling is not turning up a whole lot.

~~~
dekhn
I'd say that Facebook, Google, Twitter, and a few others are really good at
this.

Many of them release a fair amount of their code as open source, but these
sorts of capabilities are generally dependent on having absurd amounts of
data, which is prohibitively challenging for anybody who doesn't run a website
that sees massive traffic.

~~~
codecamper
Are we talking about the same thing? I was referring the point in the
interview when Eric says that ML will help make software development teams
smaller.

I was imagining some bit of AI that had figured out the best way to download
asynchronously. Or the best way to layout a UI with code. You could maybe
describe a process using natural language & it would just create a best
attempt for you. You could then modify or steer it.

Seems doable, but I don't see how you'd need big data from massive numbers of
users. And seems very interesting given that APIS and what they can do is much
more finite than the physical world.

~~~
dekhn
Finding the best layout of a UI using a machine learning algorithm is an
example of what I meant. In theory it means you don't really need a UX team or
a UI team alongside an engineering team.

I went back and re-read the interview and I believe I'm channeling Eric
properly.

~~~
codecamper
I'm very much interested in these things. To remain competitive indie
developers and the open source community will need to apply these methods as
well. I hope to see some publicly available tools soon.

------
johansch
That last part about antitrust is weird. European (antitrust) law is biased
against large companies? Huh.

~~~
icebraining
Well, the point of antitrust law is to prevent cartels and monopoly abuses;
companies of all sizes can be guilty of such. My guess is that he's saying
that EU law tends to crack down on large companies even if they are only the
largest (not single) player in a competitive market, while leaving alone the
SMBs that collude to corner a small market.

~~~
digi_owl
While IANAL, the monopoly part is a misnomer. It is really about abuse of
market position.

When Microsoft got into hot water during the browser war with Netscape, it was
about abusing their position in one market (computer OS) to gain a position in
another (web browser and web server). This by bundling Internet Explorer for
free with Windows, that in turn had special binding to their IIS web server.

So when EU is looking into Google, they are looking into how their position in
one market gets used to affect other markets (like say when they re-jig their
search algorithms).

------
wodenokoto
Does anybody know why the playboy interview put the IPO in jeopardy?

~~~
marcus
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet_period](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet_period)

~~~
desdiv
To add to that, here's an article about this particular case:
[http://www.marketwatch.com/story/will-playboy-article-
delay-...](http://www.marketwatch.com/story/will-playboy-article-delay-google-
ipo)

------
viahartdotcom
Definitely looking forward to watching the video.

------
wyclif
This is filled with punctuation errors. When I saw the first one, I just
regarded it as a typo and kept reading. But it wasn't a typo, which is
annoying—it's as if this interview was done by someone allergic to question
marks.

~~~
shuzchen
I think what happened is these are notes some person took during a class in
which Eric Schmidt was being interviewed. So the questions and answers are
whatever the notetaker was able to get down in real time. The entire content
likely paraphrases only the most salient things being said.

~~~
wyclif
So this material was valuable enough to blog, but not valuable enough to
proofread? I don't follow that logic. I can't imagine posting writing or an
interview that hasn't been proofed. I think an interview with Schmidt would
demand at least a first-pass edit.

~~~
srtjstjsj
So proofread it yourself, or stop complaining about stuff people give you for
free.

~~~
wyclif
Your logic fails. I should proofread someone else's blog post because they
didn't, or else I shouldn't complain? Mmmmm. Got it.

You obviously don't even understand what writing is, on the internet or
anywhere else. Writing is done as a service to the reader. If you can't be
bothered to do an edit and correct obvious spelling, grammar, and punctuation
errors, you're telling your readers that what you've written isn't very
important, interesting, or worth reading.

