

Google Will Add 1,000 New Employees In Europe - madewulf
http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/25/eric-schmidt-at-dld11-google-will-add-1000-new-employees-in-europe/

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Jun8
"I’m a computer scientist, so I think computer sciences can solve a lot of
problems – I may be a little biased." A little? Look, I'm a EE and sometimes I
get carried away (OK, most of the time), e.g. one of my pet theories is
applying control theory to societies, to change them from one state to another
(how would you write the state transition matrix?)

But this gung-ho, "have hammer, will pound on any problem" approach has its
limits. When Schmidt says "How many wars have started because of
miscommunication? Now we can try and solve that." about the future of voice
translation technology, that's not only laughable (for the foreseeable future)
but it comes off as horribly arrogant to people working in other disciplines
and has a bad effect on collaboration.

I have seen people on HN pragmatically applying their technical knowledge to
fields ranging from healthcare to economy to the stock market. Using your non-
domain expertise to get a fresh look at a hard problem is a great thing to do.
As long as you know your limits.

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alexgartrell
I agree completely. I think the thing that's going to "kill google" [1] is
that they tend to look at everything as a. A,gorithmic problem. This approach
works great for web search, and pretty well for email (gmail really beats
everyone else with their thread view of email, which can only be achieved with
really smart algorithms), but groupon has showed that there is still value in
traditional sales, apple that there is still value in good design, and
facebook that there is still value in being cool.

[1] And by kill I mean potentially slightly slow profit growth. Google will
keep being google for a long time.

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stanleydrew
"gmail really beats everyone else with their thread view of email, which can
only be achieved with really smart algorithms..."

Really smart algorithms like comparing subject lines without the Re: or Fwd:
and matching to and from email addresses?

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alexgartrell
I would bet something along the lines of my first born that the algorithm is
significantly more complicated than you make it out to be.

jwz's threading algorithm from the 90's -
<http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html>

But, if it's so easy, I urge you to write and open source it, so that other
products might take advantage of it :)

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stanleydrew
Oh come on. The standard "if it's so easy why don't you just build it yourself
and open-source it" is a meaningless reply. There are tons of things in the
world that are pretty easy to implement if you are provided the supporting
systems and environment. If I had already put in the tons of hard work to
build an email client I would write the threading piece the way I suggested
above. But I haven't.

My point above is that the algorithm probably isn't terribly difficult for
_someone_ to implement. I don't think the fact that I will never implement an
email threading algorithm precludes me from making that assessment.

The algorithm may be more complicated. It may not be. I doubt that it is
significantly more complicated. I certainly wouldn't bet my first born on it,
but then I doubt that you actually would either.

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hessenwolf
9,000 interviews, at €30.00 an hour, times two interviewers, is €270,000 x 2 =
€540,000.

If through recruitment agencies, assuming a 10%-of-first-year's-salary fee and
average salary of €40,000, €40,000 x 10% x 1000 = €4,000,000

I hear that you should multiply x two the gross salary to get the annual cost
of an employee. €40,000 x 2 x 1000 = €80 million.

Assuming they are permanent staff, and the risk free rate is 3%, then an
additional liability of €80,000,000/.03 = €2.7 Billion Euro is created for
Google. This figure makes the previous two immaterial so I am going to forget
about them.

Current market capital of Google is 144.079573 billion Euro. (and somebody
should tell Google's search calculator folks that it's Euro, not Euros, as 's'
does not pluralise in all languages)

2.7 divided by 144 = 1.8% of market capital (or overall current share value
based on most recent market price) that this should cost them. Says nothing
about what this could or could not earn them.

Just thinking out loud. I probably made a mistake somewhere.

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pygy_
Any details on which sites are recruiting? Zurich? Datacenters?

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cdibona
Zurich, Dublin and Paris (OR nerds, Chromium, and others) come to mind. We're
always looking for solid people for our Datacenters, but they're Sekrit. Ssh!

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smiler
I see the most significant change that AOL have implemented thus far at TC is
full page interstitial ads - anyone else getting those?

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hammock
"Google Will Add 1,000 New Employees In Europe " Score one for the US
recovery?

