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posted by janrinok on Monday March 03 2014, @08:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the so-that's-how-it's-done dept.

Papas Fritas writes:

"Tom Friedman writes at the New York Times (NYT) that Google has determined that GPA's are worthless as a criteria for hiring, test scores are worthless, and brainteasers are a complete waste of time. " They don't predict anything," says Laszlo Bock, the senior vice president of people operations for Google. "The No. 1 thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it's not IQ. It's learning ability. It's the ability to process on the fly. It's the ability to pull together disparate bits of information. We assess that using structured behavioral interviews that we validate to make sure they're predictive [Login required]." Many jobs at Google require math, computing and coding skills, so if your good grades truly reflect skills in those areas that you can apply, it would be an advantage. But Google has its eyes on much more and the least important attribute Google looks for is "expertise." "The expert will go: 'I've seen this 100 times before; here's what you do.' " Most of the time the non-expert will come up with the same answer "because most of the time it's not that hard, "says Bock, "but once in a while they'll also come up with an answer that is totally new. And there is huge value in that."

Finally Google looks for intellectual humility. "Without humility, you are unable to learn." It is why research shows that many graduates from hotshot business schools plateau. "Successful bright people rarely experience failure, and so they don't learn how to learn from that failure," says Bock. "What we've seen is that the people who are the most successful here, who we want to hire, will have a fierce position. They'll argue like hell. They'll be zealots about their point of view. But then you say, 'here's a new fact,' and they'll go, 'Oh, well, that changes things; you're right.' " You need a big ego and small ego in the same person at the same time.""

 
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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by snick on Monday March 03 2014, @09:23PM

    by snick (1408) on Monday March 03 2014, @09:23PM (#10243)

    What a maroon.

    Reality:

    The expert will go: 'I've seen this done wrong in this way, this way and this way, and I've had to live with the consequences, so lets not make _those_ mistakes again.' Most of the time the non-expert will pick a naive solution that down the line (when they are an expert) will lead them to say: 'I've seen this done wrong in this way, this way and this way, and I've had to live with the consequences, so lets not make _those_ mistakes again.'

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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by zimmer on Monday March 03 2014, @10:34PM

    by zimmer (3255) on Monday March 03 2014, @10:34PM (#10292)

    And the expert will go, "Who needs a shitty underpowered tablet with no keyboard that's too heavy to hold comfortably?"

    There's certainly value in expertise, but I tend to find the real experts have a good "feel" for which direction to go in on new problems. There's a lot of experts around that have no clue what to do with a misbehaving appliance because "that's not possible" since failure cases are never covered in training.