George Dinwiddie pointed me this post, I got rejected by Google - woe is me. Read through the comments; they are as illuminating as the post. Here's the stated Google hiring strategy, Hiring: The Lake Wobegon Strategy.

I don't see Google's stated practice of hiring above the mean as congruent with what's happening in practice. It looks as if their strategy as implemented only looks for specific functional skills--not domain expertise or the interpersonal skills that really make an environment work. Sure, they may be hiring above the mean in some small ways, but they're creating a mono-culture.

Whether or not my conclusions are correct about Google and their hiring strategy, the one thing you can learn from this is to make sure your hiring strategy does not create a mono-culture. If you look for people who can work all hours of the day and night for months on end, you will hire young people, some of whom do not have the maturity to know when they're creating technical debt. If you ask theoretical computation questions, you'll get people who aced their Theory of Computation classes, but may not know how to release software. The riskier the work, the more diverse a team you need--not a mono-culture. (I discuss this in Successful Project Management.)

We'll have to watch Google (and other companies that hire narrowly), to see what happens. Be aware that the more narrowly you define "smart" for your environment, the more likely you are to build a mono-culture.

Labels: culture, hiring strategy

posted by Johanna Rothman at at 11:49 AM | link |