Google's first employee • Hacker News Board

Re: Google's first employee

#21

Post by swah » Mon, Oct 11, 2010, 5:18 PM UTC

pg wrote: post #4

dirtyaura wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think stories by early employees of successful companies are often the only way to see the messy truth of early stages. Founders are so involved in many aspects that constant self-observation is not possible. At least books by founders highlight the big lows and the big highs, but there are many insights to be gained from smaller daily decisions or way of making them, and I think employees can remember better how w…

I've found this too. We also had Shel Kaphan speak, the first employee at Amazon (and really de facto cofounder), and he was very good as well.

Reminded me of http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/done-and-gets-things...:

"It's modeled on the early successes I've witnessed at Geoworks, Amazon, and Google, all of whom had one thing in common: they hired brilliant seed engineers."

Re: Google's first employee

#22

Post by freejoe76 » Mon, Oct 11, 2010, 5:19 PM UTC

dirtyaura wrote: post #8

colbyolson wrote: post #6

I'm not sure if the parent link works or not, it didn't work for me. I believe this is the article linked. http://www.mercurynews.com/portlet/article/html/fragments/pr... Edit: Nevermind, now it wants to work. Although I did link to the print version, incase anyone wants that instead.

Odd, yeah site seems to require registration with a random(?) pattern. Maybe someone with enough karma can edit the original link to point to printed version, seems that I can't.

If you append a source param to the URL it will always work (I'm familiar with the CMS):

http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_16291970?source=tupac4eva

Re: Google's first employee

#23

Post by stevenbedrick » Mon, Oct 11, 2010, 5:20 PM UTC

jscore wrote: post #11

He got 1600 (perfect score) on SATs. I wonder what the relationship of SAT scores and highly successful people is.

There's probably a correlation, and it might even be significant, but I doubt that it's particularly strong.

I wonder if there'd be a stronger GRE*success correlation?

Re: Google's first employee

#24

Post by synnik » Mon, Oct 11, 2010, 5:29 PM UTC

ardit33 wrote: post #5

"A There are these cultures you see in some companies -- they are just very negative, where the way that you show you are the hot shot engineer is by showing how stupid everyone else's idea is, or how bad everyone else's code is. And honestly, we see that more at Google now then we used to when it was small. And part of it is we've got people who were used to these other cultures; it's a very prevalent, sort of alpha…

I think this is changing.

Corporations are not the blind, mindless creatures that people seem to think. They do see their own problems, and do want to change them. They are starting to recognize the needs and desires of a younger workforce, and changes are starting to occur. They also have been hard hit by the recession and cannot waste their energy on their own politics.

I would predict that in 10 years, corporate culture will be more like the startup cultures of today, but with some added discipline to meet the risk tolerances and business continuity needs of a large company.

Re: Google's first employee

#25

Post by pg » Mon, Oct 11, 2010, 5:30 PM UTC

revorad wrote: post #15

pg wrote: post #2

I took more notes the first time Craig spoke at YC than I've done with any other speaker. Most of the time I only write down one or two sentences. The first time Craig spoke I took 4 pages of notes.

Can you please share the notes?

Unfortunately I don't think I could. If speakers knew that even notes from what they said were going to get published, they wouldn't be so candid. I talked about that here:

http://ycombinator.com/atyc.html

What I do do though is incorporate their insights into the general advice I give in essays. That's not just based on my experience with YC-funded startups, but also on things I've heard in talks at YC.

Re: Google's first employee

#26

Post by nostrademons » Mon, Oct 11, 2010, 5:36 PM UTC

smanek wrote: post #14

jscore wrote: post #11

He got 1600 (perfect score) on SATs. I wonder what the relationship of SAT scores and highly successful people is.

Most smart people I know got a 'good' (say, better than ~1400ish) score on the SAT. I can't tell the difference between someone I work with who got a 1450 and a 1550 though (unless they tell me, of course).

Most smart people I know also got a better than ~1400ish score on the SAT, but a disproportionate number are also in the near perfect range (~1570-1600). I can definitely tell the difference between a 1400 and a 1570, and can usually tell the difference between a 1570 and 1600.

Re: Google's first employee

#27

Post by JMStewy » Mon, Oct 11, 2010, 5:53 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #26

smanek wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most smart people I know got a 'good' (say, better than ~1400ish) score on the SAT. I can't tell the difference between someone I work with who got a 1450 and a 1550 though (unless they tell me, of course).

Most smart people I know also got a better than ~1400ish score on the SAT, but a disproportionate number are also in the near perfect range (~1570-1600). I can definitely tell the difference between a 1400 and a 1570, and can usually tell the difference between a 1570 and 1600.

I find myself very skeptical of your last claim. According to the research my friends and I did when taking the SATs, the difference between a 1570 or 1580 and 1600 was often a single question.

The scoring scale varied a bit based on the difficulty of the particular exam you sat, and as we were aiming for scores near the top of the scale we hoped to get an exam that allowed a question or two wrong to still get a 1600. Often one question wrong on verbal would still score 800, math was less forgiving of a single mistake.

I have trouble believing there could be any distinguishable difference in practice between the population of students who got two questions wrong on the exam and those who got one wrong.

Re: Google's first employee

#28

Post by michael_nielsen » Mon, Oct 11, 2010, 5:57 PM UTC

Silverstein's old Stanford homepage is here: http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~csilvers/ Interesting to get some idea of what his background was when he went to Google.

Re: Google's first employee

#29

Post by gaius » Mon, Oct 11, 2010, 6:51 PM UTC

jscore wrote: post #11

He got 1600 (perfect score) on SATs. I wonder what the relationship of SAT scores and highly successful people is.

The SAT correlates well with how well you do in your freshman year, but it's not a(s) good predictor of lifetime success.

Re: Google's first employee

#30

Post by kermit_de_fro » Mon, Oct 11, 2010, 6:53 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #26

smanek wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most smart people I know got a 'good' (say, better than ~1400ish) score on the SAT. I can't tell the difference between someone I work with who got a 1450 and a 1550 though (unless they tell me, of course).

Most smart people I know also got a better than ~1400ish score on the SAT, but a disproportionate number are also in the near perfect range (~1570-1600). I can definitely tell the difference between a 1400 and a 1570, and can usually tell the difference between a 1570 and 1600.

This just seems unlikely. The difference between 100 points at the top end of the scale is minute -- a few problems swing -- and the change in a 1570 to 1600 is quite literally an issue of missing just a couple problems in either section.

The SAT is a horribly noisy measure of excellent in either verbal skills or math, much less actual intelligence. I can tell you I managed to never peak over 700 on the math section only to get a perfect score on both the Math IIC and GRE Math sections (much harder tasks).