
Re:work – tools and lessons to make work better - kelukelugames
https://rework.withgoogle.com/
======
bane
Re:hiring

I've been through various pieces of Google's hiring apparatus a few times and
have come away pretty unimpressed that they have it any more figured out than
anybody else. In fact I'd wager that tossing all the resumes they receive down
the stairs and picking whoever ends up at the top of the stairs for any given
position would probably work as well as the broken process they have in place.
Google's process is so bad from the applicant standpoint that I've had to
short circuit and kill the whole process, twice, from my end it had gone so
off the rails on Google's side.

This isn't a particular criticism of Google's process in particular, hiring in
general is pretty broken for every company, but it comes across as a bit of
hubris that Google is going to bring something new to the table other than
dysfunctions that are unique to Google.

Here's an interesting anecdote, I've applied to Google directly, for specific
positions I would be qualified for, about a half dozen times and gotten
crickets each time. Then out of the blue, months later, I'll get contacted via
Linkedin by a recruiter who ends up funneling me into filling a position I
couldn't possibly fulfill -- and I'm very open about that up front. I've even
sent open job reqs back to the recruiter that I thought I'd be better for, but
some kind of internal momentum has dictated that I'm now in the queue for some
job I don't want and wouldn't qualify for anyways.

I'm sure I'm just a number to make sure the hiring manager passes some
internal threshold so that they can hire the person they want anyways, but
given the number and length of phone and in person interviews Google demands
of candidates, it's a big time waste for everybody.

These days I just tell the recruiters what I'm looking for and if they aren't
hiring for that job in that location I'll pass.

~~~
asuffield
(Tedious disclaimer: not speaking for anybody else, my opinion only, etc. I'm
an SRE at Google.)

> I'm sure I'm just a number to make sure the hiring manager passes some
> internal threshold so that they can hire the person they want anyways

This is definitely not the case, because we don't have hiring managers (at
least in engineering; there are parts of the company that this post doesn't
apply to). The system has been designed to definitively prevent that sort of
thing from happening. Nobody can say "I want that person" and hire them. You
feed people into the hiring pipeline, they get interviewed by a series of
calibrated peers, and then a separate committee of people who have never met
the candidate reviews the interview feedback. There is no way for any single
individual to get somebody hired. This largely removes personal biases from
the outcome.

As for your own experiences, the key thing to understand here is that our
hiring processes are designed to have a high false negative rate and a near-
zero false positive rate. It is explicitly a goal to pass up on many capable
people in exchange for not hiring any bad ones. It's not perfect, and there
are ways in which people are working to improve the system, but for the most
part it's doing what it's designed to do.

~~~
cubano
> As for your own experiences, the key thing to understand here is that our
> hiring processes are designed to have a high false negative rate and a near-
> zero false positive rate.

So why in the world would you create your Rework site, espousing the "amazing"
insights you guys have about HR and management processes, _knowing_ that only
a tiny select few others could survive with this model?

99.9% of companies cannot afford your rather snobby attitude of "were cool
with losing 100 very good workers as long as we don't hire 1 wrong one".

~~~
euyyn
I mean, it's not like the guy was involved in that site :) But in any case the
hiring tips in it seem applicable to a good range of companies to me.

------
vonmoltke
Also on hiring, I find the following passage wrongheaded and insulting:

 _The average employee received thirty-one hours of training over the year,
which works out to more than thirty minutes each week. Why not front-load the
investment and spend the majority of time and money on attracting, assessing,
and cultivating new hires? If you are better able to select the right people
up front, then you can spend less time on training bad hires and dealing with
the consequences._

So, only bad hires need training, and by extension anyone who needs training
is a bad hire? That's preposterous. Training is a good thing, and 31 hours is
right about where it should be. It is the minimum required in most states to
maintain a PE license[1] and many _real_ engineering companies expect their
engineers to take ~20 hours of job-related (as opposed to compliance-related)
training every year. That increasing numbers of companies are pulling funding
for this kind of training is terrible, not something to be applauded and
encouraged.

[1]
[http://www.nspe.org/sites/default/files/resources/pdfs/educa...](http://www.nspe.org/sites/default/files/resources/pdfs/education/state_ce_requirements.pdf)

~~~
s73v3r
I don't believe that's what they're saying. They're saying that if you're
better at selecting people, you won't have as many bad hires (really?). You
then will be giving the training to people who will be better helping your
company.

~~~
vonmoltke
They specifically said "front load the investment". That says to me, "move
money from training to hiring and reduce the total of both". Combine that with
the Google SWE's comment that Google hires for "skills not experience" and
that tells me Google sees non-compliance-related training as a net negative.

------
donnfelker
Rework. This version is much better:
[https://37signals.com/rework/](https://37signals.com/rework/)

~~~
genericresponse
I find it an amusing irony that one of their issues with meetings is that they
are about "abstract concepts" not "real things", but the entire book is about
abstract concepts.

------
gdulli
I've seen nothing to convince me that I should pay attention to Google's idea
about what makes a good workplace. The more Google reaches, the less of my
engagement they've kept. At this point Google has reverted to being nothing
more than a search engine for me. And a couple other services I use grudgingly
or unenthusiastically.

~~~
Omnipresent
The most amazing service after their search engine has been Google Photos. The
way their deep neural net can identify objects in images is going to be
unmatched for a long time to come.

~~~
gdulli
I liked Mail and Maps once, but feel like after endless redesigns they got
less useful, less responsive, less straightforward to use, etc.

~~~
dougmany
Have you found a maps replacement that you like?

~~~
MikeTV
I've switched over to using Here Maps[1]. It's fast and doesn't hide controls,
unlike the new Google Maps, and you can get fully offline directions in its
app by downloading map sets ahead of time.

[1] here.com

------
zenogais
I'm actually quite optimistic about this. Finding good, high-quality advice on
hiring best-practices is difficult. We're currently looking to re-tool our
hiring process at the place I work as we look to expand, and this could not
have come out at a more opportune time.

------
belzebub
Why is google doing this?

~~~
CardenB
The posted this under "Why Rework?"

[https://rework.withgoogle.com/about/](https://rework.withgoogle.com/about/)

Looks like they just want to improve their own work environment by learning
from others

------
davnicwil
On the _recognize and learn from great managers_ section:

I apologise in advance for the negativity, which is total on these points, but
it's just my genuine opinion from experience that there are some truly bad
ideas here.

> Having identified eight behaviors of great managers at Google, the research
> team wanted to recognize the role models who demonstrated these behaviors
> and helped define what great management looks like.

In my opinion this is a really, really flawed way of viewing and evaluating
management. Management is about human relationships, and every team of humans
and their interconnected web of relationships is completely different in
myriad ways from every other team of humans. This applies even when you change
a single member of a team: the new team now usually functions and interacts in
a very different way from the old one, assuming the new member is actually
embraced and included.

I know this from experience of managing teams with frequent turnover (both
intra and inter company) - the way you manage the team and even your
relationships with people you already know changes every time a member joins
or leaves, or even when people get promotions or slightly change their job
focus, sometimes in very unpredictable ways.

Sure, there are commonalities between good managers, just as there are
commonalities between great athletes. You can intuit these and copy them, try
new things and see what works in different situations. But trying to strictly
categorise these behaviours across a massive, constantly changing organisation
and build a quantitative analysis framework on top of these categorisations is
a huge mistake and will never work. Humans are humans, and trying to map human
behaviour and relationships to aggregate models is an approach now widely
discredited by research in behavioral economics and psychology. Don't try to
do it.

> Who better to identify those great managers than the Googlers they manage?
> In 2009, the annual Great Managers Award (GMA) program was created to
> recognize some of the best managers across the company. Any Googler can
> nominate any manager for the award.

Yes, this sounds like a great idea in theory, but see above - humans are not
_homo economici_ \- I've seen schemes like this have the opposite from
intended effect in previous companies where the votes and subsequent prizes
break down and become basically a mix of an enforcement of the (often
disliked) politics of the organisation and a popularity contest, as opposed to
the meritocratic, democratic recognition mechanism they are intended to be.

Everyone likes the theory, 80% of people in the organisation will probably be
disgruntled by the reality of the implementation. Again, knowing how humans
and organisations behave by default, it may be a huge mistake to even attempt
this kind of thing.

------
Hengjie
What is this wack interpretation of Material Design? I can't remember the last
time MD was meant to have such high radius for corners.

------
skorecky
Uhhhh [https://37signals.com/rework/](https://37signals.com/rework/)

~~~
endergen
While we're at it, Medium is just a ripoff of:
[https://svbtle.com/](https://svbtle.com/).

~~~
wlesieutre
Except Svbtle spent too long as an invite-only platform marketing themselves
as an exclusive group of thinkers, and instead came across as kind of
pretentious. By the time it opened up, they weren't the only minimally
designed blogging platform and nobody cared.

    
    
      Svbtle is a new kind of magazine.
    
      It’s part of an invite-only publishing network that brings some of the
      best things from newspapers and magazines to a network of great 
      people. We focus on the people, the writing, and the ideas. Everything 
      else is secondary.
    
      Our goal is to make it easier and more natural for interesting people
      to write down their thoughts. In the process, we also hope to help our 
      members become better writers. To accomplish these goals, we provide 
      benefits that aren’t usually associated with blogging, like 
      copyediting, to all members, for free.
    
      Think you should be a part of the network? Apply for membership below.

------
mikeyanderson
It does suck that their using 37signals brand—but the idea is awesome.

------
swagv
Only slightly ego-mad.

------
allsystemsgo
I'm sure Basecamp is going to be thrilled about this. It's ironic since google
is the antithesis of all that is preached in Rework.

------
n7c3c1
This is just a PR stunt.

>There's a lot of room for unconscious bias to color the information. Research
tells us that subtle indicators - names, clubs, addresses, school, previous
employment, race, parental status, socio-economic status, etc - may
unconsciously affect expectations and assessment of a candidate.

"Here at Google, we're independent, free-thinkers, and we're definitely not
influenced by the militant leftist crowd that plagues the Bay Area. That's why
you're not allowed to take anything about a person into consideration before
hiring them. Literally nothing. We're all the same person in every way and
everyone is as talented and special as everyone else. Everything is a bias and
should be expunged from your evaluation process."

These companies will let the PC police ruin them.

~~~
delinka
"We're all the same person in every way and everyone is as talented and
special as everyone else."

That pretty much sounds like "hire whomever walks through the door."

