Google's Young Brainiacs Go Globe-Trotting

theodp writes "To train a new generation of leaders, Google sends its young associate product managers on a worldwide mission. Newsweek's Steven Levy tagged along and reports on the APMs' activities, which included passing out candy, notebooks and pencils to poor Raagihalli children, a 'Rubber Ducky' group sing-along at 2 a.m., and competitions to find the weirdest-gadget-under-$100 in Tokyo. The APM program, which seeks brilliant kids and slots them directly into important jobs with no experience necessary, was formed after Google's attempts to hire veterans from firms like Microsoft had awful results. 'Google is so different that it was almost impossible to reprogram them into this culture,' says Google CEO Eric Schmidt of the experienced hires."

This just in

Google is an awesome company and google google google!

Top-flight journalism from Slashdot again

'Google is so different that it was almost impossible to reprogram them into this culture,' says Google CEO Eric Schmidt of the experienced hires."

Great, provocative quote ... except it doesn't appear anywhere in the linked story. Apologies for RTFA, but it's about a lawsuit by a 50-something who insists he was fired from Google for not working 14 hour days and/or having spiky hair and rollerblades. Interesting story, and I'd love to hear more about it ... but it has no relation to the main story.

There's lots of stories on Slashdot about "citizen journalists" and how professional journalism is obsolete blah blah blah ... here's a hint: people who are "professional journalists" (and I was one, before I realized tech marketing paid much better) actually believe it is their professional responsibility to read and/or verify things before posting them. Just a thought.

Re: Schmidt's Quote is in the Newsweek Article

Schmidt's quote appears on Page 2 of the Newsweek article [newsweek.com] (first linked article).

Re:Top-flight journalism from Slashdot again

Far be it for a professional journalist like yourself to read all the way to page 2!

Google Master and Apprentice

The Google Master said to the Apprentice: "To truly learn the Google Way, you must first learn not to think of Windows Vista."

The Apprentice nodded and went back to his cubicle. For three days and nights he tried his best not to think of Windows Vista, but every time he tried, he couldn't help but think of it. Finally, he gave up, went home, and played with his Nintendo Wii.

When Monday came, the Google Apprentice excitedly burst into the Google Master's office. "Master, I did it! I finally succeeded in not thinking about Windows Vista!"

Google Master: "And what were you thinking of when you weren't thinking of Windows Vista?"

The apprentice paused. "I don't know," he said. At that, the Google Master snatched an old S100 Bus he had hanging on his wall, and smacked the Apprentice upside the head.

And thus the Apprentice was enlightened.

The enlightenment lasted for a full three days, right up until the Apprentice was transfered to marketing.

(And if anyone from Google is reading this, and has an opening in the Austin area...drop me a line. ;-) )

Hiring and capital expenditures

Newsflash:

When you've overspent on hiring and capital expenditures quarter after quarter, it's a no brainer to see that it's cheaper to hire a bunch of young, cheap talent and send them around the world to get them all gung ho and Mouseketeer-y about working 80 hour weeks, than it is to hire senior product management with families and less mental plasticity who turn in mediocre-to-decent performance 9-5 at a $150k base (almost 2x what these APM's are getting).

So what if the APM's fuck up now and then, when your raw productivity is 4-5x that of "adult" talent, you can afford the occasional product airball.

And the reality is they probably even fuck up less.

Re:Hiring and capital expenditures

When you've overspent on hiring and capital expenditures quarter after quarter, it's a no brainer to see that it's cheaper to hire a bunch of young, cheap talent and send them around the world to get them all gung ho and Mouseketeer-y about working 80 hour weeks, than it is to hire senior product management with families and less mental plasticity who turn in mediocre-to-decent performance 9-5 at a $150k base (almost 2x what these APM's are getting).

So what if the APM's fuck up now and then, when your raw productivity is 4-5x that of "adult" talent, you can afford the occasional product airball.

As a freelance software developer who often is brought in to clean up the mess which results in having overworked, inexperienced, bright (and cocky) young people designing and developing whole systems, i can tell you that the total costs (including maintenance costs and system improvements costs) of having a system designed and developed by these "cheap young people" far outweighs the savings you get from not including at least one or two experience persons in the team. And this is not even including hard to measure costs such as indirect business costs due to under-performing software (such as the ones you get because the system is 10x slower than it should be at doing time-critical, essential business functions, 'cause the guy that designed it didn't understand database indexes or thought that using remote calls in every layer would be "cool").

Now that i think of it, often enough, even before the project is delivered, the initial development costs when using cheap young people outweigh the cost of having more senior people in the project.

Unfortunately, mediocre managers often fall into the trap of confusing "hours worked" with productivity. Proper measures of productivity - such as: business functions implemented per man hour - actually require having things like requirements specifications and mediocre managers don't use tools like requirements specs ... or any other advanced form of project structuring or planning beyond pretty MS Project graphics.

And the reality is they probably even fuck up less.

Actually, for any piece of software which is in production for more than 6 months, they will keep fucking the support, maintenance and extendability of the software long after they've left the company.

If you're inexperienced:

• You never had to maintain any software so you will have no clue about how design and development decisions affect problem tracking and software extendability
• You will not expect the common sorts of improvement requests you get just after going live, such as the "monthly system usage report" that the Business Unit manager is bound to ask about 1 or 2 months after the system goes live.
• You have never worked anywhere else so you only know one way of doing things. You will not have experience in working in enough environments to know "theres a better way of doing X" or "if we do it this way we'll have to risk Y"
• You will not know on which parts is performance important and on which it is not important. You will spend time optimizing the speed of the monthly report (which takes 1 hour but happens once a month) instead of the data retrieval for the GUI main screen (which takes 5 minutes, and is done average once an hour, per user)
• You will go down design dead-ends and chose under performing technological solutions 'cause you blindly believed the industry hype (and forgot that vendors are in it for their own profit, not yours), only to find out one month into the project that because of that choice the software won't be able to meet agreed performance targets
• You will overextend yourself, going into overdrive and overwork mode early on and, due to being tired, introducing bugs and making wrong design and development decision which result in too much time being wasted in bug-fixing and back-tracking out of wrong design/implementation structures, thus meaning you will have to overwork even more to try and meet the deadlines (and will probably fail)

Sorry to burst your bubble, but without at least one "wise old hand" influencing the direction of the design and development of a project you'll end up with a project which is everywhere over the map except where it should be.

Then again, I'm guarantee plenty of extra well payed contracting work fixing this kind of thing.

Reprogramming?

So how does reprogramming people sit with "don't do evil"?

Reprogramming is what they are doing.

TFA describes non-stop group activities, no privacy and sleep deprivation. Sounds like standard reprogramming to me. In addition, they were not spending time with the local folks trying to understand their lives and culture - instead they were doing a whirlwind tour of a bunch of seriously different places than the US. This kind of experience is more likely to build group-think and reinforce the idea that outsiders are totally alien than build any sort of real inter-culture understanding or empathy in the participants.

    Parent was mod'd troll at the time of this posting, a little erroneous given that more than a few folks consider using indoctrination techniques to be abhorrent - evil, even. As described in the article the world-tour sounds like a standard 'retreat' that so many cults use to strengthen the training of their members.

    Most high-indoctrination businesses have a very hard time retaining creative and engineering types without destroying their abilities to be creative and think critically, respectively. If google has found a way to do so, we have reason to be very afraid. It might be that they are only seriously indoctrinating the management, but trying to keep them technically literate so that they can be used to liase between the developers and the senior management. By hiring only very social young tech graduates they can at least ensure that their management layer will be able to speak the same language as their developers - something most companies have a serious problem with.

    I kinda hope this is true, as I don't particularly like the idea that they can do much more than get their folks to work insane hours every day of the week. The net bubble of a few years ago certainly showed at least that much was possible to get out of developers without breaking them too immediately.

Reminds me of all of those spy stories

like Alias where the kids are trained to be spies by playing games, etc.

To whom it may concern

Dear Google,

You are infringing on the copyright of our business model by assimilating it into your own and must demand that you stop using it at once!

Sincerely,
The Dot Com Bubble Companies of 1999

Googleserfs

Is Copeland going to write a sequel to Microserfs [wikipedia.org]?

SERFs

Irony is difficult to project. We're using a metaphor here, not a literal parent-child relation. I was referencing the current media lionisation of Google. It's a nicer place to work than many, I know this because some of my friends and ex-colleagues have worked there for years now and they are, for the most part, happy. However, it's a long way from Nirvana, and it gets lots of stuff wrong (like, say, why make people wait five years for IMAP?). However, all the sycophantic portrayals of this idealised Google with its *zany* workplace remind me of similar Microsoft hagiography in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Back then MS was becoming the world's largest software company, was gaining an impressive monopoloy, and was beginning to use more and more of its power unscrupulously. However, you couldn't really hear any of that from the mainstream media because they were full of stories about MS as a fun place to work, an unstoppable brilliant idea factory, a new kind of campus for the smartest-of-the-smart college grads, and a machine for turning these wunderkinder into millionaires. As it happens, much the same way Apple from a few years earlier had been portrayed by, woah, Steven Levy.

Inbreeding

> The APM program, which seeks brilliant kids and slots them directly into important jobs
> with no experience necessary, was formed after Google's attempts to hire veterans from
> firms like Microsoft had awful results. 'Google is so different that it was almost
> impossible to reprogram them into this culture,' says Google CEO Eric Schmidt of the
> experienced hires.

This will come to a bad end.

Re:Inbreeding

Yeah... it actually reminds me very strongly of Enron - because of their cult of talent, they had a similar program where the best and brightest were encouraged to transfer from disparate area to disparate area, regardless of how little competence they actually had in the new area. This Google program isn't identical to Enron, AFAIK, but I find myself wondering what other similarities there might be between the two companies.

Brilliant kids

the APM program, which seeks brilliant kids and slots them directly into important jobs,

Translation:Rich kids from rich colleges get cool jobs. Man, I hate when they use intelligence-based euphemisms for money.

Re:Brilliant kids

so you really don't know anything about what it's like to be from a poor community do you? I can count on my hands the number of families that could even hope to help with the other 20% + expenses of a Stanford education. 80% of tuition is about 28k now at stanford, so 7k per year + 15k per year for regular expenses according to their website. that is about 90k. I know lots of parents that couldn't afford 3 dollars to rent a movie once a month and their only goal was to see their child go to college(first ever for some). Some never got to go to anything beyond the Community college. If their parents could have afforded to pay for it, they would have got to a state university but they weren't naturally talented enough for a full scholarship or aid that could get them there.

You seem to have a distorted view about what options you get being from where most places are. We had students graduate with an AA from the community college with a high school degree and rock star SATs and still didn't get scholarships enough to pay for a university out of state. Those 80k dollar loans don't just appear and many people can't get them. Worse are the summer programs some have access to. I did. turns out 3k for a 4 week summer program isn't an option when you are working so you can buy clothes.

Try to remember lots of more qualified people(far more than you or I) would dominate the top tier colleges if money was so easy to come by or pay off. Few college degrees offer you a cash flow deep enough to afford to pay off your loans(the highly qualified writer still makes far less(probably 5x) than the highly qualified financial engineer at 22).

Now I'm not trying to blame stanford for being expensive or to blame the government for not giving everyone a chance. Stanford is a luxury good. you pay for a great name on your resume(for as long as that matters) and in a small subset of fields, the possibility of working with a professor that may mean something to you. But don't act like it's magically affordable for everyone qualified enough to be accepted. There is a wide range of talent that gets accepted and few are in such a cushy position to be able to acquire the money for that place. Regardless of whether this is the fault of the parents for not caring is immaterial; there are qualified students that can't go due to money.

as an aside, a big reason why Asians have come to dominate the to tier schools is because as immigrants, the parents are generally top tier students from their schools which means they do have strong genetics. If Asians had lower average income families and higher acceptance your end result could be a function of parent involvement levels. But given that they have higher average family incomes and family income is a major predictor of college success, it is doubtful it is unproven that it has anything to do with culture.

OT: please stop handing out pens

I realize it's very much an American thing to go to a poor country, and assuage your guilt by handing out pens, etc. to poor kids, but please stop it.

I travel around a bit (about halfway through an approx 18 month trip now) and it drives me nuts having kids demanding pens. Here's a free clue: the kids don't use them for schoolwork, they just sell them to buy lollies.

If I ever meet the person who started this damn thing, I'd like to give them a sound kicking.

Age discrimation is rampant in our society.

Companies have changed over the years. Instead of having a large staff to service the company; they save money by having a skeleton crew. This skeleton crew is either a group of veterans who aren't going anywhere(especially if the pay is good and they can't get it anywhere else) or it's a group of young people desperate to make it in an industry. Usually it's the second option. Young people cost less, put up with more bullshit, and can easily have the wool pulled over their eyes by more experienced liars(managers/owners,etc.).

I feel for this gentelman. I, myself, am getting older and want to have more in life than busting my hump for a career. Companies don't see it this way and never will. This begs the question?; when did it get so hardcore driven? And why did we go along with it? There was time when we used to point our fingers at "those Asians" and say "well never have to work that hard". Now it's normal to go to work for long hours, leave, and go home to some more work. I'm not blamming Asia but I am blamming that type of business model(I'm unsure if it even originated there and I know it didn't come from Europe, right?).

Older workers are useful. They come to work on time. They're usually more experienced. They make less mistakes. They're also more responsible for the company. They're also less likely to ditch the job on a whim. This isn't a competition or a talk down to the young. This is a declaration that youth worship and all the things associated with it are just one aspect of life that "mainly" get outgrown(not by some people). We all get older. There comes a time when in your life when you can definitely say; "I'm just a little old for this shit!". In any event, I feel for this man. He should either get his job back or be compensated for his loss. Shame on companies that support age disrimation! Google? I love your search engine but FUCK YOU!

Here's my theory on Google's hiring...

Here's my theory on Google's hiring plan up until today.

1) Hire anyone who seems to have any technical talent, lives only for work and/or could be useful to any competitor.

2) If an employee is not part of the core search project, give them some random B.S. to do. Also provide benefits out the ying-yang so competing offers look silly. Just make sure the B.S. provides our minions with no useful experience, exposure to real-world requirements or any tools outside the Google universe. This way, if they do decide to leave us, they will be unable to set up viable companies on their own or provide any value to our competition.

3) If anyone from the core search project (our only source of profits) tries to leave, kill them.

...the APMs' activities, which included passing out candy, notebooks and pencils to poor Raagihalli children, a 'Rubber Ducky' group sing-along at 2 a.m., and competitions to find the weirdest-gadget-under-$100 in Tokyo.

Yeah...I still like my theory.

Google has been trying very hard to hire folks...

Google's recruiters have been quit busy calling people. It's obvious what sorts of things that they're working on from the people that they've been calling. Not only that, but they call back at regular intervals after being told no ("has anything changed?").

The problem for them is that everybody has heard about what happened to Brian Reid. What's worse, many of us know Brian Reid. That sort of behavior by an employer has repercussions in this industry.

So Google wants to pick my brains for a few months, promising stock options they have no intention of granting, then dump me like trash once they got what they needed. No thanks. I'd sooner go to work for Microsoft; Microsoft is evil but not that evil.

Re:Google has been trying very hard to hire folks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Reid_(computer_scientist) [wikipedia.org]

For god's sake the man has his own wikipedia entry!

1) The first firewall
2) Altavista
3) the Alt hierarchy on usenet

and they fire him 9 days before the IPO announcement...

COME ON!

 

Say that again?

The APM program, which seeks brilliant kids and slots them directly into important jobs with no experience necessary

So I click that link, and I read the following:

If you have a proven track record of excellence...

They specifically point out that you need experience. What's with the obvious lie in the Slashdot summary?

What type of reprogramming?

...reprogram them into this culture

What type [slashdot.org] of reprogramming [wikipedia.org] are we talking about here?

News stories vs. reality

I have learned to take news stories like this with a grain of salt. I'm sure it's true that Google has a program like this, and I'm sure that Eric Schmidt thinks it's pretty cool. But the company is really big, and I'll bet you can find pockets of conventional thinking and surprisingly traditional business practices. (After all, the traditional practices become traditional because they work much of the time.)

I remember reading another news story where Eric Schmidt said Google has a completely non-traditional recruiting system. He said, approximately, "we don't care what your background is, if you are really smart we'll hire you and find something for you to do." This made me really excited, because I'm really smart, and I really wanted to work at Google. (I can show evidence to support my claim that I'm really smart. My SAT scores were not only really high, but I took the SAT before they dumbed it down. Would I be the smartest person at Google? Heck no; they have Rob Pike and Vint Cerf and Guido van Rossum and all sorts of top-echelon guys. But I think it's fair to call me "really smart".)

I applied at Google (the Kirkland office, near Seattle). I signed a non-disclosure agreement, and I will honor that by not discussing the details of the process. But I think I can say, without violating NDA, that I did not observe anything about their recruiting process that was markedly different from any other technical company that has interviewed me. Indeed, I'll go further: about half the people who interviewed me were really good at interviewing... but half weren't especially good.

Before I even applied, I did a whole bunch of stuff to try to make myself stand out. I wrote up short proposals describing new businesses that Google could enter. I wrote up code samples, showing that I am competent with several of the four official languages Google uses for everything. (If you are wondering, the four are: Java, C++, Python, and JavaScript.) I studied Google from the outside, so that if they asked me "What do you know about Google?" I could give non hand-waving answers. (And wow -- they run their business on some truly great software. MapReduce and Sawzall, and Google File System, are brilliant! I really would have enjoyed a chance to work with them.) None of my extra work did any good at all, as far as I can tell. I didn't meet anyone who mentioned reading my code samples, or had any questions about the open source projects I worked on. Few even gave me any evidence they had read my resume. I'm not sure anyone ever read my business ideas.

Some of the interviewers actually asked me about my work history. A single one asked me to describe what I had been doing in my previous job. But some just asked me trivial stuff that a recent university graduate might have memorized. The good interviewers would ask questions that were interesting and required competence in computer science to answer; others would ask things that you could answer if you memorized a data structures textbook, and in some cases I didn't have the answer memorized. (I was tempted to answer "um, that is always available as a library function, and if I needed to write that, I would refer to one of my books first." But I never did; I just answered my best.)

I very nearly made it, I believe. But one interviewer asked me a question that just baffled me, and his unfriendly manner, combined with the time pressure, left me spinning my mental wheels. My answer was quite unsatisfactory, to me as well as to him. (I don't think I can describe the problem without violating NDA. I will say it was abstract and not related to any work I had ever done for any company.) The person immediately following him was one of the good ones, and asked me one of the interesting questions, and I think I did quite well with him, despite being rattled by the previous interview. But I think the unfriendly one likely told everyone I was some kind of gibbering idiot, because after that I got the phone call that said "thanks for your time, but we're not pursuing you any further."

Not long after that, a recruiter called me and set me up for interviews at another large company in this area. Every one of the people who interviewed me did a competent job of interviewing, every one of them asked questions that indicated that they had actually read my resume first, and every one of them said "hire" rather than "no hire". That company made me a very generous offer right that same day, and I took it. I'm now developing under Linux in Python and C++, and it will be years, if ever, before I apply again at Google. (I would have accepted much less money from Google, so they did me a favor by not hiring me, I guess. It didn't really feel that way though!)

I'm not bitter, not really. Google gets so many resumes, from so many people, that they can afford to turn away good people and they will still be able to hire enough people. Indeed, as Joel Spolsky pointed out, it would be far better for them to miss out on ten good developers than to hire one bad one. So the Google process is working well enough for them, and they have no huge incentive to change it; they are getting enough good people, and they are insanely profitable. I just don't matter to Google, one way or the other.

But there is a huge gap between Eric Schmidt's words and the way it actually worked in my experience. Maybe things are different at the world headquarters in California. But maybe they aren't.

Take news stories with a grain of salt.

Soggy biscuit

Come on everyone, let's convince ourselves we're unique and important through trivial acts. It's corporate "culture," since we're killing every other form of culture. Repeat after me: Google is not the new world order, it's Progress, sainted progress and soon we will dominate the world. If you want to be part of the Good and not the Evil, you'll eat that soggy biscuit and like it, or no bonus and no free cafeteria!1!!

MS and Google Culture... separated at birth?

I think this is sort of interesting (ironic?) because I'd say the corporate cultures of Google and Microsoft (at a developer kind of level -- not necessarily CEO etc.) have or had a lot in common.

I interviewed for a job at the Microsoft campus back in the 90's, before the dot com era made pampered developers more of a common phenomena. This is also before any of the MS monopoly suits -- the company just wasn't seen as an evil empire by most people in the kind of way it can be now. The whole first round of interviews was composed of logic problems and puzzles to test your ingenuity/creativity. They had a hell of a campus and all kinds of unusual perks I wouldn't see again until the dot com boom. It was pretty clear that their strategy was to try to pull bright people straight out of college, give them 'fun' and pampered environments, and basically work the hell out of them. Not that anyone would demand an 80 hour week from you, exactly, but more: you've taken this new job in a city where the only people you know also work at Microsoft, you see your job as something kind of cutting edge / geek-cool, you're provided with this office and cushy work environment and any meals you care to eat at the office (and their cafeteria was pretty much the best I've seen anywhere before or since, not that they wouldn't also order out as appropriate)... you're with this team of people all fired up about how great Windows 98 is going to be, and they're all working late, and maybe you'll just stay long enough to get that free dinner...

Anyway, damn near everything I remember from that visit and everything I hear about the interview process and corporate culture at Google today is very, very similar.

Does Microsoft still try to do this? I have no idea. Of course, time does strange things to a company's culture despite its best intent. I know a guy who took a job there out of school and lived that kind of culture; today he's still there, married (his wife also works there), is a manager, and has kids. Even though a guy like that may have worked under a very similar culture to modern-day Google for years, he's not going to be the same guy and he's not going to see that kind of glorification of young genius the same way. Most likely he's seen projects where it helped a lot but also projects where it went horribly awry, and his inclination as a manager is probably not going to be to allow everything he had.

Say What You Will About the Kids

At least they won't instinctively duck every time the CEO puts his hands on the back of a chair...

Jonestown 2.0

So, Google doesn't want to hire Microsofties and apparently any other adults from any other area (no sense providing jobs in their own backyard - it's Microsoft or nothing). But young minds! Ah - there's an angle! Not since a group in Oakland made people drink the kool aid have I heard anything more insane. Perhaps they found out that the people in their own backyard are tired of Google thinking themselves as so self-important that there's better jobs to be had.

Of course - Google can't be to blame. Bring on the kids.

What flavor kool aid will go down this time?

Older workers and IT jobs

I've been reading some of the comments regarding this article, and for those who say older IT workers can't compete with younger ones, just wait till you're in your 30s and 40s. Your outlook will probably change at that point.

The startup culture at Google works very well with young IT talent. In the beginning of a business venture, you have to have that "force it through, just get it done!" attitude towards your IT projects. Once you're established, however, that craziness has to be turned down a notch. Otherwise, you have situations like I've seen, with people rolling untested code into production systems, no testing at all, etc.

Older IT workers tend to build systems that don't randomly blow up in the middle of the night. This is because they know the business units they support don't want to hear about new, cool stuff when the systems are down 2 hours before close on the last day of the quarter. The older types also tend to have lives outside of work. (This isn't an unfair stereotype -- a lot changes once you get married and have a family. They expect you to be around once in a while...)

Innovation and new thinking definitely has its place, but it should be totally separate from day-to-day operations. Personally, I want to be building new stuff until I retire. This involves a lot of personal investment in my career, learning new things as they come up, and using my experience with things that worked/didn't work in the past. Not all of us old-timers coast along in management when we get sick of learning.

reminds me of the intelligence biz

your life = Google, it's a life long obligation.

Sounds like another business (wink)... with the US gov't.

Some folks will love it, some won't. It's not about reprogramming from different cultures, it's about people making choices from their experience--which for the young googlers they hire--pretty much have nil. Obviously google would rather sculpt people than leverage their strengths and weaknesses from their experience... No right or wrong, just 2 different approaches. You don't see GE, which has been around for +100 yrs, following the same style...

Re:No experience necessary?

True, but the question becomes, what experience? Working at Microsoft, or being a child? I know which one I'd value more. YMMV.

Re:No experience necessary?

Experience is important!

      Of course it is. You can't level up without it.

Why take university graduates?

By the time they've been through University, their thinking processes have been moulded. Wouldn't Google do far better getting them even younger than that?

Re:I did some globe trotting, too

What the holyshitfucking nutsacks of academia was THAT?

Re:No experience necessary?

Yes, and I can see why the hospital has older folks who can handle the project.

Re:Not Really

I always thought it was a bad idea to try and hire microsoft veterans. Thats not necessarily a dig at microsoft, but from talking with friends that work there it doesn't seem to be the best idea. They have such big teams working on their core products, that they have difficulty bringing it all together. There seems to be a story every windows or office launch about how the product team was so large, difficult and complex that they had a huge all hands on deck meeting that ended up revolutionizing the way they worked together. Its as if every time they just tell 100+ developers to go do it and then try to stitch it all together. That having been said, there are many more companies that have had similar struggles and didn't survive that release, so they manage to hold it together. Thats the amazing management of microsoft. If you aren't a company that has a huge complex product that gets huger and more complex every 3-5 years, you might not want a microsft manager. They just might ( consciously or unconsciously ) try to make everything fit their level of expertise by making everything huge and complex.

Re:Rubber ducks

If Google can make Steve Ballmer right... They really ARE amazing!

Re:No experience necessary?

While your boss may not know how to take out an AGP card, I'm sure he knows a heck of a lot about policies and procedures... specifically when it comes to user IT management. IT is more than just a field of working with computers- it's about working with users to help them and show them how technology can impact their jobs.

And while some of those people may not be in exactly the correct position, some of them are there (as you mentioned) because they can handle a project. They can't plug/unplug AGP cards, but they can make the system work well.

Re:No experience necessary?

Unfortunately, you are too right. A while back I started subscribing to some of the more popular e-mailed network magazines. I honestly didn't see too much content there that was newsworthy (or new, for that matter). The reason I subscribed was because these were the magazines I saw on the desks of the older management... the policy creators. I would read the magazine on a Tuesday, and by the Friday meeting I would know what insane user or network policy was going to be put in place. If the magazine had an article on how fingerprint scanners were the only secure way to get on the network, one manager was insistent on the need for those on everyone's laptops and desktops (including our customers, since we were a consulting firm).

I think you are right, though- the merit for the job should not be solely based on experience or age. It should be based on the ability to do the job and do the job well. I just think that because someone is unable replace an AGP card does not mean they do not know how to design a good system for the end users (or for the people administrating the system).

On a similar personal note, my mother has been programming for the better of 25 years now. I do not think she would enjoy doing hardware support or tech support, but she can manage a coding project from start to finish better than people half her age that have more knowledge of the hardware her systems are going on. From what she's told me, the people that can't do their jobs are the ones that do not know how to ask the important questions to get the job done...

Re:Really....

http://www.gazetteonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2007711040001 [gazetteonline.com]

Re:No experience necessary?

i lov howZ you noes hot to speel. I hoep you progrem betar.

Fuckwit.

Re:No experience necessary?

An 18-year old knows things a 10-year old cannot conceive of. And a 40-year old might well be able to understand complex big systems in a way a 20-year old cannot because of lack of experience. There's a difference between a mere IT technician grease monkey who replaces bad hardware, and an IT manager who has the wisdom needed to make complex decisions keeping a corporate IT infrastructure running. Not that all managers are wise; I know of no-nothing Dilbertian IT managers too.

Om the other hand, a 20 year old's auto insurance rate is often higher than that of a 40-year old, usually for good reason.

Re:Rubber ducks

I think you missed a key word there, nascent. In other words, Google is ripe for turning into a monopoly in the future. I don't particularly think that they are or will be a monopoly, but in any case, I do believe you're mistaken in thinking the OP said that Google is a monopoly right now.

Also, there's delicious irony in accusing someone of being a troll, and calling them a retard in the same breath.

Re:No experience necessary?

Old guy here (fifties) and the disadvantage with having technical computer knowledge is that you endlessly have to relearn the same old stuff but in a different way; when you're young it's fun but as time goes by it becomes increasingly boring. On your boss's lack of AGP-pulling ability I suggest either he never did know how to open up a PC or he did but now got burned out and just doesn't care. After the 358th iteration of "relearning how shit works this week" it's hard to be like "wow look at these new type of card gotta try this" any more.