bentilly.blogspot.com/2010/01/things-ive-learned-at-google.html
Things I've learned at Google so far Well I've been an employee at Google for about a month. So this seems like as good a place to reflect for a moment. The first thing that I've learned is that internally Google is incredibly open, but externally there is a lot we can't say. I understand and support a lot of the reasons why it is so, but it can be frustrating. There is a lot of really cool technology at Google that people never hear about. The statistics of what Google deals with are astounding.
know I can say is that computations happen in our data centers with about half the power drawn for what is industry standard. I'm not allowed to say how we do it, but it is a rather amazing testimony to what smart people can accomplish when we put our minds to it. There was some confusion about where I was supposed to be when I started. ", "Hello Ben, this is Conner (that's my new manager), where are you?" This caused me to ask an experienced Googler, "Is it always this chaotic?" If you're unable to enjoy that kind of environment, then Google isn't the place for you. Seriously, the corporate culture is based on hiring really smart people, giving them responsibilities, letting them know what problems the company thinks it should focus on, then letting them figure out how to tackle it. And people pay little attention to it unless there is a problem. You are expected to be a self-directed person, who solves problems by reaching out to whomever you need to and talking directly. The result is an organization which is in a constant state of flux as things are changing around you, usually for the better. With a permanent level of chaos and very large volumes of email. It is as if an entire company intuitively understood that defect rates are tied to distance on the corporate org-chart, and tried to solve it by eliminating all barriers to people communicating directly with whoever they need to communicate with.
If you want to deal with a lot of email in gmail, here is what you need to do. The ones you'll use a lot are j/k to move through email threads, n to skip to the next message, and the space bar to page through text. And m to hide any active thread that you're not interested in (direct emails to you will still show up).
other shortcuts, but this is enough to let you skim through a lot of email fairly quickly without touching the mouse too much. Your labels are basically what you'd call folders in another email client. Anything that is context specific you should add a filter for, that adds a label, and skips the inbox. Nothing is lost, you can get to the emails through the list of labels on the left-hand side of your screen in gmail. But now various kinds of automated emails, lower priority mailing lists, and so on won't distract you from your main email until you go looking for them. When you combine all of these options with gmail's auto-threading features, it is amazing how much more efficiently you can handle email. In fact this is exactly the problem that gmail was invented to handle. Because this was the problem that Paul Buchheit was trying to solve for himself when he started gmail. It is worth pointing out that Paul Buchheit was a software engineer at Google. He didn't need permission to write something like gmail. Corporate culture says that if you need something like that, you just go ahead and do it. In fact this is enshrined as an official corporate policy - engineers get 20% of their time to do with pretty much as they please, and are judged in part on how they use that time. I found a speech claiming that over half of Google's applications started as a 20% project.
People just do things like start putting up solar panels in the parking lot, and the next thing you know Google has one of the largest solar panel installations in the world and has decided to go carbon neutral. And the attitude that this is how you should operate is enshrined as official corporate policy! Speaking of nice corporate policies, Google has quite a few surprising ones. For instance they have benefits like heavily subsidized massage on site (I've still got to take my free hour massage for joining), free gym membership, and the like. Policy says that if your immediate co-workers don't object, you can bring your dog to work. Nothing against cats, but Google is a dog place and cats wouldn't be comfortable. Don't show up when you're sick and tell people why you're not showing up. There is no limit to how much sick time you get if you need it. Official Google policy is that at all times there shall be good, free food within 150 feet of every Googler. That in Mountain View is better than anywhere else (the larger clientele base lets them have a much more varied selection). But you quickly learn why it is common for new Googlers to put on 15-20 pounds in their first year. Even if you're not bonding, having food close by makes short meals easier. And the temptation to continue working until dinnertime is very real. But Google stands behind that decision, and the people who work there treasure the company for it. Speaking of the people who work there, Google has amazing people. It is often said that engineers find working at Google a humbling experience. It took me less than a day to realize that the guy sitting next to me is clearly much smarter than I am, and he's nowhere near the top of the range of talent at Google. In fact, as best as I can tell, I'm pretty much average, though I'm trying hard to hold out a ray of hope that I'm slightly better than average. The closest thing that I have to an estimate for my IQ is scoring 2340 on the GRE exam in 1991. Based on conversions that I've seen, that puts me at about the top 001% in IQ. Now I was really "on" that day, happen to believe that there are problems with the measurement of intelligence by an IQ test (a subject which I may devote a future blog post to), but without false modesty I wouldn't be surprised to find that I'm as high as being in the top 01% in general intelligence (however that could be measured). Which in most organizations means that I get thought of as being very smart. However software development is a profession that selects for intelligence. By and large only good software developers bother applying to Google. And Google rejects the vast majority of their applicants. Granted the filtering process is far from perfect, but by the time you get through that many filters, someone like me is just average. I believe that organizations naturally evolve until they are as complex as the people in them can handle. Well Google is tackling really big, complex problems, and is full of people who can handle a lot of complexity. I've been told that I should expect that after 2 months I'll only be marginally useful. My initial learning curve should start to smooth out after about 6 months. And every year I should expect half of what I've learned to become obsolete.
All this is fine but: - IQ (brain processing speed) is not a panacea. Aside from Goog, there other stuff is over-engineered and under-appealing. Goo is also basking in it's billions and silly hubris, a young person's hubris as well. Nobody, or collection of bodies, is smarter than the markets.
Grow up dude, silicon valley is filled with tonnes of smart people and every good company has got lot of geniuses. Google has got 20K people and so it is no longer the most sought company.
It is true that Search, Gmail, Orkut, and other great projects came from a 20%, but how many projects today are from 20% vs. How about g Earth, g Maps, Writely/Docs, Presently, Spreadsheet, YouTube, AdSense, Voice, Sites, BLOGGER, Picasa, yadda yadda yadda. The best and brightest engineers no longer want to go there anymore.
Standardized tests are often not normed for the extremes, especially at the high end, so I find it a bit dubious that they could be rigorously interconverted with IQ. htm) That is to say, you could be even smarter than the conversion suggests, because the GRE was not designed to discriminate at the high end.
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