
The Bozo Event Horizon - strlen
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/waldo/2012/07/27/the-bozo-event-horizon/
======
barrkel
_the Google process reminded me of the time, more than 20 years ago, when I
interviewed at Microsoft. And we saw how well that worked_

Microsoft from 1992 onwards? I guess we did; 20x increase in adjusted share
price; in OSes alone, the release of Windows 3.1 (IMO the breakthrough move to
GUI on PC, away from DOS), NT 3.1 (the original seed that grew to NT 3.51, NT
4, Win2K and all current kernels), breakthrough success of Windows 95. Looks
like it worked pretty well, and made a lot of people very wealthy.

~~~
stcredzero
_> Looks like it worked pretty well, and made a lot of people very wealthy._

The same could be said of [Insert great company here]. The same could also be
said of many criminal enterprises and a variety of industries that were
abusive before regulation and reform. Conclusion: The ability to say this is
of no particular worth in determining if an enterprise is or isn't evil.

EDIT: Downvoters: see grey-area's granchild comment. I find it incredible to
be downvoted for observing that a statement is essentially neutral.

~~~
Karunamon
Evil? This isn't a conversation about making moral judgements, why are you
dragging moral constructs into it?

~~~
grey-area
From the article:

 _All of the great companies I have worked for (Apollo and Sun in various
incarnations) or heard about (DEC, PARC, Bell Labs and the like) started
around a core of incredible people. These were people who are or were legends
in the field._

Since the article talks of success and greatness in moral or intellectual
terms, the conversation should not just be a simplistic comparison of money
earned... that's not a measure of greatness.

~~~
viscanti
"Legends" is partially dependent on luck (being in the right place at the
right time). The stories of the "legends" are told, in part, because of their
successes. We hear the stories about the right people in the right time/place.
We don't hear about the right people in the wrong place.

~~~
rbanffy
If you are legend material, you'll, eventually be in the right place at the
right time.

Odds are wherever you are has a greater chance of being the right place.

------
grandalf
The most absurd thing in my opinion is self-promotion. Let's be honest, some
of the most influential people in HN, Github, etc., are accomplished, naked
self-promoters.

Many rants posted to HN could simply be entered as text on HN but end up being
blog posts one someone's blog. Lots of creative ideas turn into blog post
rants that point to code on github with no history, no evidence of the messy
process of creation, only the illusion that the author typed it all as if by
divine inspiration.

I wish more of the elites among us would let us see their ugly commit history,
their discarded design ideas, their untested, uncommented code.

In some circles, this is called keeping it real. Open source should not
require such artifice if we have a meritocracy.

On the other hand, maybe all great luminaries started out as aggressive self-
promoters (picture accomplished performers busking on the street in their
younger days).

~~~
rachelbythebay
How about posts describing times when the author has screwed up? I try to
learn something from my mistakes and then share that knowledge in the hopes it
will reduce incidences of that same mistake in the wider world. I don't care
that it means admitting that I did something stupid or was ignorant of some
particular technique at the time.

It's going to happen to everyone, so I just figure, why not turn it around and
use it as a learning experience (for me) and then a teaching opportunity for
others?

Case in point: I did something really stupid with MySQL's client library
without realizing it when I designed my own interface to it, and it bit me
hard enough to bring down a bunch of database-backed stuff on my systems. In
fixing it, I discovered both a thing to make sure I never do again in my own
code, and also uncovered a possible way to launch a denial-of-service attack
on a MySQL daemon

Then I turned it into a post. So I screwed up. It happens. What I found out as
a result more than makes up for it.

~~~
protomyth
I wonder if the current environment where HR googles everyone leads people to
not give post-mortem stories of failures. Even if a technical person would see
the wisdom of your post, HR might use it to discard your resume.

~~~
rachelbythebay
What you're saying here reminds me of a short conversation I had once. Someone
said to me: "this post might make it hard for you to work with <specific
people> in the future." My response was: "if I have to work with <specific
people>, then I will have failed."

In this case, <specific people> are the ones in HR who somehow think that
skipping over someone like me is warranted because I'm honest about mistakes
I've made in the past. Just what kind of company would that be, anyway? What
would my coworkers be like in that environment?

If you accept that everyone makes mistakes, would you rather work with the
ones who discover them and deal with them ably, or the ones who conceal them
and/or don't learn from them?

That said, I do see what you are getting at. If you haven't gotten to a point
where you can say "to hell with this corporate misery" and live with the
consequences, maybe you don't want to rock the boat. It might impact your
ability to get into yet another miserable place.

~~~
protomyth
In a lot of places HR does a first filter on people, and the local job markets
(where some people might be stuck) aren't exactly doing great right now. HR is
often not a reflection of the rest of the company for some strange reason.
I've worked at fun, great places with absolutely horrid HR.

------
agentultra
A constrained elite does seem useful within an organization. I like the idea
of distinguishing those engineers who go above and beyond and really create
something new. However it can also become a gerontocracy easily and can limit
the adoption of innovative ideas in the long run.

The problem I have with these sorts of social structures is that it assumes
that one person out of a hundred is some how "gifted." After reading Coders at
Work and listening to interviews with "gifted" artists I think most of these
people do not in fact consider themselves such. AFAIK they just worked really
hard and the right people at the right time took notice. I assume this is why
I often hear these "gifted," people say they feel really lucky to be in the
position they're in -- luck did have a small role in it and that seems to be
where the "gifted," term comes from. The important part is the hard work these
people put into improving themselves, their skills, and the state of the art.

However these DE titles can have a negative passive-impact on hiring
practices. In order to avoid, "bozos," organizations will try to, "only hire
the best." However the "best," is a highly subjective threshold that is
constantly in flux. What is state of the art today will be laughably archaic
in 5 - 10 years (especially so for technology companies). The harmful effect
is that every company will adopt this policy in order to compete and hope that
the other companies will adopt the "bozos." What then will happen to the
average programmer who is learning the ropes and doing their best to become a
DE some day? Should they get filtered out?

There are some things about the event horizon that make sense ("one of us is
not as stupid as all of us"). However one must be careful when distinguishing
their fellows. While it may encourage the best of the best to join together it
can also breed an elitist attitude that is counter-productive to innovation.

Interesting article and a good read! It's something that I toy with in my mind
now and again. Personally I think DE's should form their own groups outside of
the organizations they work at. Let people lead by reputation rather than
hierarchy.

~~~
jmtame
This reminds me of part of an essay PG wrote (context: it was intended for
high school students, but seems relevant):

"People who've done great things tend to seem as if they were a race apart.
And most biographies only exaggerate this illusion, partly due to the
worshipful attitude biographers inevitably sink into, and partly because,
knowing how the story ends, they can't help streamlining the plot till it
seems like the subject's life was a matter of destiny, the mere unfolding of
some innate genius. In fact I suspect if you had the sixteen year old
Shakespeare or Einstein in school with you, they'd seem impressive, but not
totally unlike your other friends.

Which is an uncomfortable thought. If they were just like us, then they had to
work very hard to do what they did. And that's one reason we like to believe
in genius. It gives us an excuse for being lazy. If these guys were able to do
what they did only because of some magic Shakespeareness or Einsteinness, then
it's not our fault if we can't do something as good."

~~~
knewter
This is huge. I once dated a girl who absolutely believed that there was some
inherent skill with math / programming that I possessed, and consequently felt
that my making good money was just a function of my genetics. This _entirely_
undermines the fact that I spent years upon years forgoing any sort of social
life to learn more about computers. The only 'inherent' thing wasn't skill -
it was an inability to not want to learn more about computers and programming.

It took sweat, and there's an entire category of people who believe in
inherent genius versus really effing hard work. That category of people will
never put in the work necessary for others to inappropriately categorize them
as inherent genius. I hate this problem and don't know how to convince people
when they've fallen into that trap :-\

------
kevinalexbrown
The requirement to "only promote A-players" is difficult to ensure, but I
think one requirement is to teach people how to tell the difference between A
and B work, and what the effect is. This difference takes a long time to learn
to spot, and the ability to see it is something I've seen the technical elite
take for granted. When you can't tell what a difference A versus B makes, it's
hard to see why fairness shouldn't play a larger role.

This goes along with the well known effect of over-confidence from lack-of-
knowledge when making judgements, or the way newcomers to a community are
often overly-vocal in their judgements. I think it takes some sobering first-
hand lessons to be able to see the difference between A-work and B-work.

It wasn't until I tried to code that old Windows star-spreading screen-saver
in high school that I got even an inkling of how difficult it was to make all
of Windows work, and it wasn't until I actually had to write something as a
composition of partial recursive functions that I even began to appreciate the
A++ work it took to conceive computing machines at all. Even now, I wouldn't
consider myself capable of really distinguishing between A and B work except
in a few very select fields.

------
tytso
The original poster wrote:

> The other is their hiring process (full disclosure; I’ve looked at Google a
> couple of times and it never worked) which has gotten pretty process-bound
> and odd. The last time I went through it, the site manager admitted that I
> was plenty smart, but they didn’t know what they would do with me. Given
> what they were obviously looking for, I wasn’t sure what I would do with
> them, either. But the whole process seems to indicate that they are looking
> for people to fit a pre-defined mold, which the top performers generally
> don’t do all that well.

My observation would be that the primary goal of Google's hiring process is
that there is a very strong bias towards _not_ hiring any bozos --- even if
that means that not hiring someone who might be a top performer. It's better
than you miss out on a top performer than it is to hire someone into a senior
position who turns out to be a bozo. That may be the cause of the OP's
perceived "oddness".

The fact that Google's promotion system is done exclusively by peers (i.e.,
the people who decide whether someone at level N should progress to level N+1
are composed of engineers at levels N+1 and N+2; the manager can give input to
the promotion committee, but it's not the manager's call) is a good way to
hopefully prevent bozos from getting promoted from within.

Is it perfect? No human-created system is. But I think it's pretty good....

~~~
sown

       It's better than you miss out on a top performer than it 
       is to hire someone into a senior position who turns out 
       to be a bozo. 
    

Is it possible that this model stops working when you get to have tens of
thousands of employees and you've scoured the planet looking for people that
you end up empty-handed, so you have to increase your risk tolerance for bozos
if it means you can hire a top performer?

I guess google knows better than I about their hiring practices but it seems
like they have probably taken more risks in these later years than they did
when they had only 1000 employees.

------
paulsutter
I've seen startups with rigorous hiring processes, places where only top
employees are hired. But then when it comes to hiring execs, they get so
focused on luring in a "superstar", that they do little to no screening. The
idea is that the person is so great, all you need to do is sell.

And thats how great startups hire a bozo exec team. And we all know where that
leads.

~~~
stcredzero
Much of the poster's concern is over their hiring process generally:

 _>...the whole process seems to indicate that they are looking for people to
fit a pre-defined mold, which the top performers generally don’t do all that
well. In fact, the Google process reminded me of the time, more than 20 years
ago, when I interviewed at Microsoft. And we saw how well that worked…_

Hiring processes can become infected from the top-down, however, as high-level
employees exert influence over the process to fit their own comfort levels.

I also suspect that there's a point at which hiring like-minded people loses
whatever benefit that accrues from increased group cohesion in a company, or
that there's a point where such benefits start to get swamped by the effects
of groupthink.

------
dudus
In my personal experience being a bozo or not has less to do with the
technical/non-technical skill and more to do with motivation.

Motivation is what drives people even dummies to excel. And that's sometimes a
coin flip. You will see stars perform poorly because they don't enjoy the
environment or the specific task they are given.

When there's no motivation even a "star" will just procrastinate and be
unhappy until he either quits or conform. When conformed unmotivated people
outnumber the motivated ones that's when you are doomed.

~~~
wisty
I see them both as multipliers, at least in the short run.

Perhaps Facebook is going to hit a motivation black hole, as stock options
will no longer matter and so employees won't care about what's good for the
company. Instead, they will care about bonuses and resume-padding.

Google has had poor motivation for years (employees who don't really care
about the success of the company), I think, but they have enough good products
that it doesn't really matter.

------
ChuckMcM
Steve Kleiman, another Sun alum, had some international 'no bozo' stickers. I
still have one stuck to a filing cabinet.

Its possible for someone who was once quite good to become more of a bozo,
sometimes its an ill advised step outside their comfort zone, sometimes they
get pushed there by well meaning management. Like many things, and perhaps
related to the nostalgia effect, it is 'obvious' in hindsight when the bozos
came, but often times their initial arrival is silent and unheralded.

I saw some of that going on at Google just before I left, I mentioned it to
Eric (who had seen it at Sun when we were there and was well familiar with the
effect). It isn't at all clear to me that its something you can stop.

~~~
gruseom
Can you stop it by staying small? I don't mean a small business, I mean a
small team.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Perhaps, which is to say that yes if you don't change you can avoid this fate,
but not changing is its own form of death.

One of the amazing things of being at a successful company is that each
passing quarter increasing revenue brings a bigger pool to spend on doing
things, and there are so many things you want to do. But you can't do
everything yourself, and growing means hiring, and hiring means getting
larger.

Perhaps if you chose to fork the company at that point, I always wondered what
would have happened at Google if they chose to 'slice off' the part that built
platforms into its own universe. There are fairly natural dicing and slicing
points.

But at Sun there was a huge chasm between the 'systems' folks (aka the SunOS
creators) and the 'windows' folks (aka the SunTools guys and gals) and the
'language' folks and of course Sun Labs. Competition between how many DE's
came from Systems (old boys club) vs other groups, and such like. I do know
that one of the contributors was that Sun had a financial year that went July
1st to June 30th. Budget meetings happened in February for the upcoming fiscal
year. Inevitably people would panic in April or May that Sun wasn't going to
'make the year' (meet expectations of Management or the street) and there
would be wide adjustments (like hiring freezes). What we noticed was that
_everytime_ managers would panic and hire anyone they had interviewed if they
could 'fog a mirror' just before the freeze because they knew if they didn't
they wouldn't be able to hire for another 4 - 6 months. There were some
quality issues with those hires.

~~~
gruseom
What I like about your answer is how you kind of say that's not possible and
then immediately hit on one way it might be possible.

Why should the only kind of growth people recognize in companies be the kind
that terminates in ossified monoliths? Isn't this a failure of imagination on
our part? Life doesn't usually offer only one way to grow. I'm excited by the
idea of a small organization whose revenue grows much faster than it does.
Seems to me that this hasn't typically been thought of as the goal. What might
happen if it were?

~~~
ChuckMcM
"What I like about your answer is how you kind of say that's not possible and
then immediately hit on one way it might be possible."

Its an engineering crutch, like people walking around in a building cannot
cause it to fall down, but if everyone jumped at the exact same cadence they
could. Any thing is possible, sometimes the requirements to get there are so
difficult the solution becomes _effectively_ impossible.

If you consider Google as an example, the roughly 1,500 people who are in the
search and ads teams make all the money for the company. Everyone else is,
rounded to the nearest billion dollars, a non-contributor. But rather than
accumlate cash faster than the Federal Reserve can inject it into economy,
they spend it on projects which might get them into other markets. Or
sometimes create entirely new markets. But that gives them size. And at both
Sun and Google its pretty clear that the Bozo Event horizon hits somewhere
between 10K and 15K non-sales employees. I don't know _why_ that is, just that
it has hit there two times. If Jim's reading he can pitch in DEC's number.

I agree with you're assessment that there are always other growth strategies,
and I can identify things that contribute to the incursion of bozos, but that
is a long way from the experiment that can show a bozo free stable
organization with growing revenue.

~~~
gruseom
_that is a long way from the experiment that can show a bozo free stable
organization with growing revenue_

Agreed, but let's look at it from the other side. Suppose one such experiment
did succeed. How significant would that be? (I say very. Because it would
change people's thinking about what's possible.)

Also worth pointing out: such an organization wouldn't need to stop growing,
just hire at a slower than traditional rate. Seems to me you could grow for a
_long_ time before hitting "between 10K and 15K non-sales employees".

------
hcarvalhoalves
"Others, like James Gosling, quietly change the world by building something
(the core Java language and libraries) _that make so much sense and are so
elegant that you just smile when you use them_."

I'm afraid everybody says this about whatever is new. Nowadays people would
say this about Guido, Matz, etc.

~~~
wonderzombie
Man, I'm sort of with you. In the last few years, I've spent time in a variety
of languages --- Python, Ruby, JS, Java, and lately Go and Haskell --- and
Java just seemed completely terrible: bureaucratic, staid, and just plain
mediocre by many standards.

Then I started reading a lot of C++. And I mean no disrespect to the many
brilliant people who use and enjoy C++, but it wasn't until then that I really
got why Java exists.

~~~
trhtrsh
> bureaucratic, staid, and just plain mediocre by many standards.

Josh Bloch called it a "blue collar" language: a language for building things,
not for looking smart.

~~~
wonderzombie
Yeah. And as above I'm kinda sorta with you. People tend to criticize Go along
similar lines, that it's not particularly innovative, and my reaction is
similar. It's not meant to make you look smart or blow your socks off or
whatever; it's meant to help you be productive in no small part by being very,
very straightforward.

As such, I'd actually criticize Java for not being simple _enough_. It's well
and good to be staid, but excessive bureaucracy is problematic. Arrays are
thoroughly un-idiomatic in Java. Exceptions play hell with attempts at
control-flow analysis. Lack of type inference increases repetition. The
language is embarrassingly devoid of literals. Pick your poison, really.

And people should feel free to disagree, but I don't think such as type
inference, literals, or multiple return values are anything _particularly_
flashy. If anything, they tend to make code simpler and/or cleaner.

------
WildUtah
Irony: complaining about bozos and then writing this sentence:

"Others, like James Gosling, quietly change the world by building something
(the core Java language and libraries) that make so much sense and are so
elegant that you just smile when you use them."

~~~
ansible
Yeah, I saw that too.

I would never, ever describe James Gosling as a bozo, but he doesn't make my
top 50 list of language designers and researchers. Java started with a
laudable goal to improve upon C, but they didn't take enough risks at the
start.

------
SCdF
Am I the only person who feels woefully inadequate whenever I read articles
where phrases like "10 or 100 times as productive as the average engineer".

Sorry guys, I'm trying my best! :-(

~~~
felipemnoa
Such people do exist. Notch, creator of Minecraft, is a good example. The guy
virtually developed it himself. I'm currently developing a game myself and I
can tell you, it is a lot of work. At minimum I would say the guy is at least
10 times more productive than the average developer/engineer.

~~~
groby_b
I'm willing to bet that a lot of Notch's productivity is based on things he
learned in previous projects. According to Wikipedia, he's been programming
video games since 86. That's 26 years of experience.

If you use those 26 years wisely, you'll learn a lot of different things - and
more importantly, you can draw on 26 years of mistakes that you now know to
avoid.

I'm not saying he's not _also_ a talented programmer - but all "superstars" I
know are as good as they are because they have worked hard for a long time,
and they keep working hard.

(She says while posting on HN... I probably should head back over to my code
;)

------
stcredzero
_> A number of you asked...what I’m seeing happening at Google (and what I
mean by a bozo)._

The subjectivity of this is the core of the problem. One man's Zen Master is
another man's Bozo. Often, they look indistinguishable to the uninitiated.

 _> Others, like James Gosling, quietly change the world by building something
(the core Java language and libraries) that make so much sense and are so
elegant that you just smile when you use them._

Another example of how one man's X is another man's Y. (EDIT: In putting it
this way, I mean to respect both directions of opinion.)

 _> The indicator is when process and fairness becomes more important than
judgement, and when it isn’t ok to say that some people have reached their
limit._

Process and fairness are often used as proxies for meaningful relationships
and understanding among coworkers. Often they are used as a means of avoiding
taking such responsibility.

------
tylermauthe
This article was fantastic! Thanks so much for linking it.

Steve Jobs always said that part of his job was to keep the bozos out and this
article explains exactly why.

Every single company I have worked at has been on or past the Bozo
Threshold... The author notes that this phenomenon may be limited to technical
companies, but I would like to argue that it is not limited to technical
companies and may not even be limited to companies at all! This same sort of
stupidity can be seen any organization that is around long enough.

A great product is not built by comittee, because committees care too much
about FAIRNESS!

------
bonobo
Isn't this the Peter Principle[1] in action? I noticed this halfway the end of
the post, but nobody cited it here yet…

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle>

~~~
nazgulnarsil
Very much so.

------
ekianjo
I have been in organizations where there are two ladders (in a very large
company). One for technical people and one for management. Needless to say,
all the bozos clearly went to the Management ladder, while the technical
ladder kept the people with more depth in their field, the ones who actually
made stuff in the first place. However, I felt that the technical ladder had
flaws as well. The higher titles (principle scientist, research fellow,
etc...) were simply provided based on these people's past achievements. Once
you are such levels there is very little incentive to work hard to go to a
higher level, and there is virtually no risk of being fired either. So, you
end up with relatively senior people who reapply what worked for them instead
of trying new things and pushing new technologies or new ways of doing things.
And many times when I was in touch with these people in the higher technical
ladder, making presentations and all, I did not find much of what they were
talking about to be very impressive or innovative either.

------
recroad
Two cases:

1\. You work for a tech company which produces a tech product (e.g., Google,
Microsoft)

2\. You work as a tech person in a business company (e.g., bank, insurance)

This article fully applies to #1 where the core competency is technology. For
#2, there's debate.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
For #1 you are front-office. For #2 IT is back office. Bozo explosions still
happen at investment banks' front offices, e.g. when smart traders are
sidelined in favour of politically savvy traders.

------
waynecolvin
This reminds me of mushroom cap[1].

[1] [http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/work-
relationships/9781...](http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/work-
relationships/9781564147042/chapter-4-idiot-procreation/89)

------
api
Simpler definition: when politics eclipses merit. When "it's not what you
know, it's who you know," the organization (or society) is doomed.

------
larsberg
The old hiring slogan, which they used in the MSFT hiring and hammered even
harder in hiring manager training was, "As hire As; Bs hire Cs."

~~~
drcube
Who hired the Bs?

~~~
larsberg
The better question is who failed to keep the As engaged? For a variety of
reasons, people stop growing and sometimes even move backwards.

There are few things more destructive to a team than smart people who've
completely checked out.

------
stephengillie
These companies seem to suffer brain-drain and increasing mediocrity in the
same way that online communities suffer the constant erosion of their best
users.

~~~
001sky
viz, "evaporative cooling"

[http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-
sundays-2-the-...](http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-
sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect/)

------
moldoutside
Is there anyone else that thinks Harvard is now spewing out "bozos" for
writing this type of piece? Are you that arrogant? First of all "B class"
employees are generally speaking still highly intelligent and educated. Second
off, you seem to dismiss the reality of the business world in replacement for
technical achievement.

To me all this article displayed is the clear distinction between the
technical and the business side (that which employs the technical).

Degrading "B class" people as "Bozos" is quite frankly disgusting. You can
have all the brightest minds in the world that create the next progression of
technology, but without the "bozos", they will be stuck in a room
congratulating themselves into perpetuity...

~~~
anonimo
I'm really surprised that yours is the only comment pointing this out.

Note that the author implicitly defines "bozo" as anyone who's not a world-
class programmer or researcher (or possibly, any such person that rises above
a certain level in the hierarchy). So, 99.9% of programmers, including even
some programmer-entrepreneurs who have built valuable companies without being
world-class technically.

------
squonk
It's really about management. Companies evolve as they grow and the magic
sauce that took them from Start up to Successful is not the same sauce that
takes them from $1 Billion to $10 Billion and then $10 Billion to $100
Billion.

Moreover, the techno-guild at Exxon is going to have a different mandate than
Cisco's or Disney's.

Managing growth, competition and markets is the job of management (CEO) and
understanding the role that technology plays in their business, and then
ensuring that foresight is available (CTO) to them to act on, is what they get
paid for.

A Bozo at Amazon might be a god at Delta Airlines.

------
slurgfest
It probably isn't safe to assume that the word "bozo" is applied in a remotely
objective way. Or even that it has any kind of consensus definition.

So in any given case there is a good possibility that the "bozo detector" goes
off mostly on people who don't like you, or whose lunches smell bad, or even
people who might be competition, or people who are doing better than you are.

------
maked00
I have seen the effect of an appointed organization head, hiring and promoting
only those less competent than them selves. Even after the head retires, the
infected organization may take a lifetime to recover.

The whole Jobs A thing is just pure BS ego speaking.

------
rachelbythebay
I am a fan of the word "bozo", and even used it in a book title. It explains
so many bad things in our industry. The fact that this author is associating
it with Google is just the icing on the cake for me.

~~~
jsilence
Gary Larson thought it's a good thing:
[http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v479/alanganes/HSM_Board/B...](http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v479/alanganes/HSM_Board/BozoneLayer.jpg)

SCNR

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shoham
Uh... Google and Microsoft are really successful companies, though!

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gm34
How to recognize during interview if company is run by bozos?

What to look at? What question ask? About process? structure?

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dogprez
There are no bozos, just elitists. I prefer a respectful anarchy to an
oligarchy.

