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What the Head of Hiring at Google Doesn’t Understand About Skills

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Re: What the Head of Hiring at Google Doesn’t Understand About Skills

#101

Post by philwelch »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #82
philwelch wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easier to find CS majors who can communicate effectively than English majors who have the logic skills to read, write, and debug code. Especially at the level demanded by a company like Google. If you're a consultancy that writes CRUD apps I can see emphasizing communication skills over technical skills but you're not Google.

> It's easier to find CS majors who can communicate effectively than English majors who have the logic skills to read, write, and debug code. Is it? I've met quite a lot of coders who think they're good communicators but really, really aren't.

And I've met--and work with--many developers who do communicate effectively. The only English majors I've met with any technical chops were CS double majors though.

Re: What the Head of Hiring at Google Doesn’t Understand About Skills

#102

Post by philwelch »

smtddr wrote: post #67
radmuzom wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technical people often underestimate the value of good communication. Technical does not necessarily refer to programming, but also to other fields like statistical financial modelling (which I do). And complain about the fact that people less qualified than them are in management. I'm not suggesting that communication should be the sole criteria for management - a lot of software companies need programmers at the he…

>>Technical people often underestimate the value of good communication. Not just underestimate, even outright condemn. Like the people who defend Linus's form of "communication" on the kernel mailing list as "to the point" or "efficient" . Anyone who thinks that's an acceptable style of communication from/to any human being is wrong and a perfect example of why the tech companies in general should probably make their…

Linus excels at communication. He makes it crystal clear what he's trying to convey and the standard he's setting, and has coordinated the development of the most widely-deployed kernel on earth entirely via email for decades. He communicates perfectly well.

He's an asshole on occasion, but that's not the same as communicating poorly.

Re: What the Head of Hiring at Google Doesn’t Understand About Skills

#103

Post by MisterBastahrd »

joelgrus wrote: post #39
mapgrep wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's not all that hard to complete an English degree without learning those things. How do you know this? (You know, since we're talking about logical rigor.)

Based on the English (and other humanities) courses I took as an undergrad, in which the key to getting good grades was not rigor but repeating back what I imagined the professor wanted to hear, and based on my friends who were English (and other humanities) majors, who were delightful people but (for the most part) not particularly rigorous thinkers in the sense that Google is trying to hire for.

Not much different than CS classes where you're learning methodology and showing that you can regurgitate it on a test, really.

Re: What the Head of Hiring at Google Doesn’t Understand About Skills

#104

Post by MisterBastahrd »

joelgrus wrote: post #39
mapgrep wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's not all that hard to complete an English degree without learning those things. How do you know this? (You know, since we're talking about logical rigor.)

Based on the English (and other humanities) courses I took as an undergrad, in which the key to getting good grades was not rigor but repeating back what I imagined the professor wanted to hear, and based on my friends who were English (and other humanities) majors, who were delightful people but (for the most part) not particularly rigorous thinkers in the sense that Google is trying to hire for.

Not much different than CS classes where you're learning methodology and showing that you can regurgitate it on a test, really.

Re: What the Head of Hiring at Google Doesn’t Understand About Skills

#105

Post by MisterBastahrd »

learc83 wrote: post #35
kennymeyers wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The fact is most English majors don't enjoy heavy duty math or science as much" These statements need data to back them up, Mr. Science.

You don't think it's a given that, on average, students who choose a degree that requires "heavy duty math" enjoy it more than students who choose a degree that doesn't require "heavy duty math"?

I chose CS after my university cancelled its computer engineering program. I chose computer engineering because it was a challenge in a way that english and history weren't. Much of my childhood was spent with my nose in a book because it was a way to avoid dealing with the religious schism in my family. As a result, my ability to read and write for an academic setting (and on standardized tests) made getting high grades a trivial matter.

Re: What the Head of Hiring at Google Doesn’t Understand About Skills

#106

Post by klunger »

I have one humanities degree (Japanese Studies) and one STEM degree (Aerospace Engineering), both from good schools in those respective domains. So, I feel in a unique position to comment on this.

I enrolled in the engineering program second, after I was sick of the poor employment opportunities associated with the first degree. During my engineering studies, it sometimes felt like my brain was being rewired, making it more suited to meet the rigors of the coursework.

I don't know if this was "in my head" or if something was actually happening on a neurological level. But, I know that the course work went from being ridiculously challenging in my first semester (pulled teeth to get B's and C's in the early days) to manageable and often fun in the last (mostly A's).

I am eternally grateful to the research and writing skills that I honed during my first degree. However, it was definitely the engineering courses that made me into the "analytical thinker" I am today. So, I think there is something to be said about what a STEM degree signals.

Re: What the Head of Hiring at Google Doesn’t Understand About Skills

#107

Post by gefh »

vehementi wrote: post #46
gr3yh47 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in fact, the author attempt to tear down an argument completely of his own invention: 'But then I read Bock’s rationale, and that’s when I nearly lose a mouthful of Cheerios: Unlike English—and presumably other non-STEM fields—computer science “signals a rigor in your thinking,” an ability “to think in a formal and logical and structured way.” He said what?' from this the author decided to read that ONLY CS majors ca…

This would be a legitimate critique if Bock were saying "Here's how I screen through 100,000 resumes". Your interpretation would serve as a good heuristic. But that's not what we're talking about: he implied that, all things being equal, he would hire a B student majoring in CS over an A student majoring in English because of "signalling" when comparing two candidates he had to choose from.

I'm assuming this is about engineering hires. If they both interviewed well they'd both get hired. Of course, getting past the resume screening is not equally likely, but I'd expect an English major applying for an engineering role to have something more than their not-entirely-relevant degree on the resume to make up for it.

Re: What the Head of Hiring at Google Doesn’t Understand About Skills

#108

Post by VikingCoder »

Iftheshoefits wrote: post #14
VikingCoder wrote: post #6

@joelgrus really nailed it. When someone at Google uses the verb "signals," you need to pay attention. Nothing is black and white in search. It's entirely about pulling together multiple sources of information, and deciding which ones signal the strongest and correlate with the results you're looking for. Guy Raffa is welcome to make his own search engine company staffed entirely with English majors to prove his poin…

Disagreeable or not, I find it amusing that he opens his piece with a rubric regarding what constitutes an "excellent" paper in his course, and your last sentence contains such a glaring fallacy that it seems entirely likely he'd dock you heavily for it (and rightly so). It's also incredibly ironic considering the context of the argument at hand.

> It sounds like he wants those topflight English majors after all: graduates adept at conceiving, articulating, and supporting their own ideas—not some “specific answer” the professor is looking for. Bock just doesn’t realize they are what he is looking for.

Guy Raffa goes so far as to claim that those topflight English majors are what Bock is looking for.

If that were true, then a team built on this core principal should clearly be better than one built without it.

If you see a fallacy in the last sentence of my first post, please explain it to me. Calling something a fallacy is your thesis. Now it is your job to prove it. Irony, indeed.

Re: What the Head of Hiring at Google Doesn’t Understand About Skills

#110

Post by agorabinary »

methodover wrote: post #100
agorabinary wrote: post #98

I used to be a philosophy major at a top 10 school notorious for its rigor. Now I am a CS major at my local university after transferring (for various reasons including cost). What the author doesn't understand is that when we says, "It sounds like he wants those topflight English majors after all: graduates adept at conceiving, articulating, and supporting their own ideas—not some “specific answer” the professor is…

> while getting an A is entirely at the mercy of a subjective grader with no clear grading rubric to distinguish a B+ from an A Huh? This is true in programming too. Getting something to compile can't be all CS professors are looking for, right? Programming is more about communication than anything else. You can write something a hundred different ways which will all run more or less fine -- but they all won't be equ…

CS professors do grade for clarity and not just "does it work/compile?" but as a matter of relative weight in a grading distribution I think it gets less attention, and necessarily so for the more challenging problems. Writing prompts have a simpler objective domain to test (grammar, word usage) so the bulk of the grade weight goes to interpretation and style, which is of course subjective.
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