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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: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday March 05 2014, @03:31PM

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Wednesday March 05 2014, @03:31PM (#11361)

    I never said I don't understand it, but how often do you write stuff like this? The things you refer to aren't little tasks some engineer wrote out in 10 minutes and called it done; they were researched and analyzed at great length and then implemented with plenty of time, and then tested greatly. In a Google interview, they expect you to cough up working code for some arbitrary sort algorithm in a few minutes.

    Finally, I asked for device driver examples, not hard drive controller firmware examples. Device drivers aren't this complex. There's not much more there than basic code communicating with hardware registers. The most complex thing about them is generally handling interrupts in a low-latency fashion, usually by dividing the work between top halves and bottom halves.

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