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

At one point during the pursuit of my BA in History, I was reading about 1000 pages of primary and secondary source material per week.

Reading primary source material is comparable to reading mathematical exposition in that you have to proceed slowly and carefully.

Then, I had to analyze the material using the various methods of historical analysis/criticism. You are not going to get an 'A' if you just regurgitate facts. You're also not going to get an 'A' if the analysis/argument is sloppy.

Math didn't really get that hard until the proof-based courses, and math degrees usually require only two of those (though I did four). The “computation courses” just consisted of exercises that are only difficult until you discover a small set of tricks.

Now, I'm not sure about what it takes to be a very successful English major, but my anecdotal evidence indicates that the high achievers are pretty smart: One did a math double major, one went from being a LaTex whiz to handling most of the IT at a mathematics journal, and the other is a better-than-average DBA.

Just wait until you see the headline: "Join our startup to disrupt the poetry industry!"

It's not that CS majors are magically people who love science and math and English majors don't. It doesn't even matter most of the time. The fact is Google wants CS majors because should be able to hit the ground running. That's not even the case for the average college of science major applying to the average job at google. Yeah, maybe they know matlab, maple/Mathematica, and enough C++ to implement the Newton-Raphson method, but they've never even touched a database before.

CS grading is not the same thing as just programs working (and often that's not even the most important part of it), and, in my (obviously limited and potentially not representative, I'll admit, but there's not a lot of structured evidence being presented on any side here), the variability between institutions and individual classes within institutions in CS grading is more alike than distinct from that in any other field.

The scope of the curriculum, OTOH, in CS is probably more consistent between institutions and individual students within institutions than is the case in most non-technical fields, particularly for CS taught within an engineering rather than liberal arts institution (e.g., at UC Davis, the difference between a degree from the College of Engineering and the College of Letters and Science), and, further, while there are certainly kinds of analytical skills that are central to most courses of study in English, its not at all unreasonable to expect that the kind of analytical skills that Google is more concerned about are more likely to be central in CS programs.

But, overall, I think people are generally overplaying this. The stated preference for CS over other degree fields even with a slightly higher GPA in the non-CS field isn't anything like an absolute bar. Its saying that a degree in CS is one signal that is relevant to the Google hiring director that has some weight, not that it overwhelms all other information.

As an aside, though, it is worth Google examining whether this signal is given more weight than it should, especially considering their recently-posted diversity numbers and their stated concern for diversity -- since their overall diversity matches fairly well the diversity of CS graduates but clearly doesn't meet what they want, they might want to consider whether part of their diversity problem is overemphasizing having a degree in CS in their recruitment material and selection processes. If it is overweighted -- and I'm not saying that it is -- that would be a lot easier for Google to fix than many of the other things they are trying to do to address diversity (not that those things aren't valuable to pursue even if addressing the weighting of CS degrees can address some of the problem more easily and in a shorter time frame.)

Full disclosure: I am programmer whose only degree is in Political Science.

I see this mode of thinking very often in people that I call "mud-minds" (shortly, people incapable of clear, cold, abstract and detached thinking, or at least incapable of performing thinking in a way that exhibits all these 4 attributes simultaneously, without loosing their intuition while they do this), even the well educated ones with probably high IQs: they totally fail to understand the real meaning of a message, and attack strawman ideas or follow dead-end reasoning paths, even if they do this with great skill and intelligence and the arguments they use may actually be very logical.

The sad thing is that seeing someone with a CS and math background think this way destroys my hope that exposing children early on to technical, abstract and logical thinking can prevent them from becoming "mud-minds". This even makes me pessimistic about humanity's future :(