
I Knew It - raganwald
http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2006/12/i-knew-it.html
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anewaccountname
Forget a down arrow; we need a trashcan icon.

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gruseom
Bleh, I agree. But he links to an old post by Aaron Swartz with an intriguing
Google critique that I hadn't seen before. Since I've slammed Aaron's blog in
the past my conscience wants me to point this out.

Edit: it's at <http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/googlife> in case anybody wants
to bypass the OP.

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swombat
I for one am a believer that once you let mediocrity in through the door,
you've screwed over your company. "Bad" people hire more like themselves, and
eventually the kernel of brilliant people doesn't enjoy working there anymore
and leave, and you end up left with all the ok and not-so-good people.

Yes, I'm elitist. I believe that you need elite people to achieve elite
things.

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MoeDrippins
This sounds like the Dead Sea Effect.

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swombat
Yep, but I believed that long before that article was published.

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abiek
Google may have lost some of its feel and culture as it has grown but for such
a large company it is a really cool place to work.

You mention since they can't find smart people to hire fast enough they can
either lower the bar or hire less. The third option is to work more on
recruiting people and that is just what they are focusing on.

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bayareaguy
Which in part explains their Traffic Acquisition Costs -
<http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/images/goog2q1.png>

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Xichekolas
Can you elaborate a bit?

I know I'm probably being dense but I'm not seeing what you mean by hiring
affecting their traffic acquisition costs. All that graph shows to me is that
ad revenue is growing faster than outlay for traffic.

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bayareaguy
In order to maintain that trend, Google has to both keep hiring and acquiring
the best people and also do what it can in a non-evil way to prevent the best
people from becoming serious competitors.

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MoeDrippins
So after being hyped to ridiculous extremes, Giles, in all his omniscience,
foretold that some people might not find it quite so rosy?

In other words, he predicted some people...changed their minds?

Quite the savant.

