Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google's first employee

mercurynews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–48 of 48 posts

Re: Google's first employee

#41

Post by seiji »

swah wrote: post #21
pg wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

After re-reading the post, this sticks out prominently:

"I've been debating whether to say this, since it'll smack vaguely of obsequiousness, but I've realized that one of the Google seed engineers (exactly one) is almost singlehandedly responsible for the amazing quality of Google's engineering culture."

Is it Craig?

Re: Google's first employee

#42

Post by poet »

jscore wrote: post #11

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

Test scores don't identify successful people, but our system is certainly set up to make it easier on those who do well on tests. I first noticed this as a freshman in college when (because of AP exams) I moved right into deep computer science while my classmates had to spend time on general education requirements. When I interviewed for my first internship, I knew algorithms and data structures while everyone else only knew basic sorting. Once I got to my internship, I was getting paid $3 more an hour than my colleagues because of the additional course credit I received from AP tests. What's hilarious is that someone who went to MIT with the same AP scores would actually have gotten paid less than me because MIT accepts almost no credit...

You can see how the above could snowball into a huge advantage upon graduation from college. Any correlation you notice between high tests scores and successful people is most certainly a result of this property of our system and not from tests themselves. The tests could be targeted towards an arbitrary skill set and those who did well would still be more successful because the system values those who do well.

Re: Google's first employee

#43

Post by nostrademons »

endtime wrote: post #38
nostrademons wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If I were to send you my resume (sans test scores), do you think you could guess whether I got a 1570 or a 1600? Or is it something you can only tell from personal interaction?

It's from working on a project with someone or sharing a class with them. If you have a casual conversation or quickly glance at a resume, it's quite easy to miscategorize. But if you're working with someone day-in-and-day out for 3 months or so, you figure out pretty quickly who knows their stuff and who's just pretending.

I suppose it's possible that someone could know their stuff and yet have bombed the SAT (if, say, they went to a rock concert the night before), or they could've aced the SAT and through sheer lazyness prove to be utterly useless. But the skills that make you do well on the SAT - quick reasoning, good short-term memory, a decent-sized store of background knowledge, and an eye toward detail that makes you go back and double-check your answers - tend to make them perform very well at a project as well. That's why people use the SAT: it may not be intelligence, but it correlates very well with it.

Re: Google's first employee

#44

Post by endtime »

nostrademons wrote: post #43
endtime wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I were to send you my resume (sans test scores), do you think you could guess whether I got a 1570 or a 1600? Or is it something you can only tell from personal interaction?

It's from working on a project with someone or sharing a class with them. If you have a casual conversation or quickly glance at a resume, it's quite easy to miscategorize. But if you're working with someone day-in-and-day out for 3 months or so, you figure out pretty quickly who knows their stuff and who's just pretending. I suppose it's possible that someone could know their stuff and yet have bombed the SAT (if, s…

So someone who only got a 1570 is "just pretending"?

Re: Google's first employee

#45

Post by nostrademons »

endtime wrote: post #44
nostrademons wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's from working on a project with someone or sharing a class with them. If you have a casual conversation or quickly glance at a resume, it's quite easy to miscategorize. But if you're working with someone day-in-and-day out for 3 months or so, you figure out pretty quickly who knows their stuff and who's just pretending. I suppose it's possible that someone could know their stuff and yet have bombed the SAT (if, s…

So someone who only got a 1570 is "just pretending"?

Speaking as someone who got higher than that and still feels like I'm "just pretending" on a regular basis, yes.

Re: Google's first employee

#46

Post by endtime »

nostrademons wrote: post #45
endtime wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So someone who only got a 1570 is "just pretending"?

Speaking as someone who got higher than that and still feels like I'm "just pretending" on a regular basis, yes.

Are you serious? If you did that well on the SAT, surely you see the fallacy implicit in your comment. But just in case, I'll spell it out - I can't imagine any justification for the assumption that the ordering of people by the degree to which they "know their stuff" is the same as the ordering of them by SAT score. I'm sure there's a correlation, but what you said requires something far stronger. You may not have meant it in such a precise sense, but even in that case I think my objection actually still applies.

Re: Google's first employee

#47

Post by swah »

seiji wrote: post #41
swah wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

After re-reading the post, this sticks out prominently: "I've been debating whether to say this, since it'll smack vaguely of obsequiousness, but I've realized that one of the Google seed engineers (exactly one) is almost singlehandedly responsible for the amazing quality of Google's engineering culture." Is it Craig?

Dunno, some folks in the comments also mention Jeff Dean.

Re: Google's first employee

#48

Post by swah »

s1rech wrote: post #31

I remember one article of Steve Yegge in which he wrote that for the most part the engineering culture at Google came from an early employee. Is this actually the guy?

One of the authors of the MapReduce and BigTable papers would be my guess: Jeff Dean.
Post reply on HN