Yep, those engineers they took on in the last ten years must suck, they've only managed to develop technologies that grew Google's annual revenue from 10 billion dollars in 2006 to 75 billion in 2015. That's the kind of track record that has to make you question the hiring process, right?

You seem to be confusing "I have a smug twitter-sized sound-bite response" for "I have a worthwhile counter-argument".

It's a common failing these days, but you should probably look into getting it fixed.

That said, yes, Google's hiring process is questionable. The Web is full of horror stories from obviously-qualified people who Google passed on, often very early in the process when no engineer had talked to them, and this suggests Google's success is not sustainable so long as that continues. They'll be able to hire fresh CS grads out of Stanford forever with this process, but the experienced/unconventional people they flunk out on the early screens are not going to come to them, and when their current crop of experienced/unconventional engineers retire or take jobs elsewhere, Google's finally going to have to fix this problem and stop pretending that it's better to pass on a thousand highly-qualified candidates than to give one unqualified candidate an on-site. That, or tumble back down into mediocrity.

(which, to be fair, is already mostly the case; Google is largely a mediocre company, with only a couple of externally-visible brights spots of talent or innovation clustered in a couple of particular teams, and otherwise Google runs on inertia and the hope that the 0.1% of interesting stuff they come up with will keep the 99.9% of mediocrity afloat)

I can expand beyond 140 characters if you like. The OP claimed that in the past ten years, as a result of their hiring practices, Google's product output quality has noticeably declined, presumably as compared to the search product on which their name was made, and gmail, which they launched in 2004. And it's easy and fashionable to knock Google because maps is not as good as you remember it used to be, or because they shut down reader, or because plus didn't manage to unseat facebook.

Well, in 2006 Google was a 10 billion dollar search and ad company with a fledgeling email business without a revenue model, who had just bought youtube. In 2008 they shipped a mobile phone operating system. That's now a thirty billion dollar business which has been built up through talent within google. They undermined Microsoft's office monopoly with an online office suite (okay, some acquisitions underpinning that). They have a credible seat at the top table in the cloud market. And they continued to develop their core ad platform to drive more revenue growth.

I've got no particular reason to stand up for Google, they're quite big enough to look after themselves, but the idea that their product flops in the last decade outweigh those product successes, and can be held up as evidence that there is something deeply rotten in their hiring model, seems to be cherrypicking to me. 70% mobile OS share, 70% search share, and 50% of global online ad revenue... that's a pretty good kind of mediocrity.

It's still the case that other than search and ads, most of Google's biggest hits were acquired rather than the result of in-house initiatives (even Google Analytics, which is probably one of their more heavily-relied-on products, was acquired). Google doesn't hire people who will create stuff like Android; they hire people who can pass their interview process, and get new product and service lines mostly through acquiring teams of people who probably can't pass their interviews.

It's also the case that Google is acquiring a reputation for bad interview/hiring processes, and for hiring people who have a Ph.D. in CS and putting them to work on CRUD web apps that any random coding-bootcamp grad could build, since there's just not enough interesting in-house work to keep all those top talents occupied.

Google internally-initiated successful products that come to mind: Cloud (2nd or 3rd in market, lots of revenue and growth), Play Store (also lots of revenue and growth), TPU chip, SDN, Photos, Chrome, ChromeOS.

Google (vs Alphabet) often acquires companies that have a seed of a useful product. Android for example was apparently not in a usable state when it was acquired. 99% of the creative work is making the thing actually work, not in having the prototype.

To say Google's own engineers didn't create Android because they didn't commit the very first line of code is doing them a disservice.

>I can expand beyond 140 characters if you like. The OP claimed that in the past ten years, as a result of their hiring practices, Google's product output quality has noticeably declined, presumably as compared to the search product on which their name was made, and gmail, which they launched in 2004. And it's easy and fashionable to knock Google because maps is not as good as you remember it used to be, or because they shut down reader, or because plus didn't manage to unseat facebook.

I don't necessarily blame them for plus (facebook was clearly a marketing success, not a technology success), but maps' decline isn't anybody else's fault. It has declined in quality and that is plainly an engineering failure not a product failure.

>Well, in 2006 Google was a 10 billion dollar search and ad company with a fledgeling email business without a revenue model, who had just bought youtube. In 2008 they shipped a mobile phone operating system. That's now a thirty billion dollar business which has been built up through talent within google. They undermined Microsoft's office monopoly with an online office suite (okay, some acquisitions underpinning that).

Well, yes. Acquisitions underpinned all of that success.

>I've got no particular reason to stand up for Google, they're quite big enough to look after themselves, but the idea that their product flops in the last decade outweigh those product successes, and can be held up as evidence that there is something deeply rotten in their hiring model, seems to be cherrypicking to me. 70% mobile OS share, 70% search share, and 50% of global online ad revenue... that's a pretty good kind of mediocrity.

All predicated upon outside purchases or the original self-reinforcing search monopoly developed before 2004.

What's worse is that they've often used their search monopoly to try to break into other markets (flights, shopping, etc. - plenty of stuff like this got preferential SERPs treatment) and failed because what they released was crap. That is, they failed even with a huge home ground advantage - the kind of monopoly advantage that let Microsoft make IE6 (IE6!) the industry standard for years and got them slapped by the DoJ couldn't even be put to good use by Google.

I'm not denying that they have some good engineers but the idea that they're the creme de la creme of the industry with the best hiring process is way way off base.

There are a lot of assumptions being made here. Sometimes companies grow despite poor hiring decisions. I think you need a finer-grained view than just revenue to really tell whether you're doing a good job or not. Lots of terrible decisions have been justified by this "the revenue went up so we must be doing a good job" line of reasoning.

And Comcast has some of the best customer service and engineering because they don't seem to be losing any customers.

Right?

> There's another measure I use to measure the quality of their hiring process. The output. Namely the track record of products Google has developed in house in the last 10 years.

That's a poor metric to evaluate the rampant complaints about a high false negative rate. I don't think that many people are disputing that the people who do get hired are qualified most of the time.

When the in house engineers come out with products like Wave and Glass while things like Maps and Android are purchased you have to wonder.

Psst: the Rasmussen brothers were behind both Maps and Wave.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Rasmussen_(software_devel...

I think you're neglecting the continuous improvement of successful projects, which take quite a bit of engineering effort.

Was it software quality that killed Wave and Glass, or was it more of the market not wanting either of those things? (To digress, it seems like both of those products came too early. Do you think that wearable computers will _never_ exist? And Slack seems to be the Wave-like thing that the market wanted.)

Funny you should mention that. I was just using maps and thinking "this is worse than it used to be".

From what I've heard from insiders, the adwords code base is an enormous mess. Not surprising for a product that old perhaps, but this points to their engineering practises being about as mediocre as the industry average.

I don't honestly know why people want slack. It seems to just be in vogue - one of those weird network effect things. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with their feature-set or engineering quality because it's not noticeably better than, say, hipchat.

>To digress, it seems like both of those products came too early. Do you think that wearable computers will _never_ exist?

They already exist.

Slack is in no way like Wave. Now you're just over reaching with your comparisons. Wave's flaw was showing you what the other person was typing as they were typing it. You try to separate quality from functionality and stick that to market's fault because it doesn't want Wave's functionality. That is not mutually exclusive. Wave's quality was egregious.

Not sure what you're saying here. Wave was great technically; the market fit just wasn't there.

Why is it a poor metric? Isn't the point of hiring employees to ideally build and launch successful products?

I think Google is pretty good at hiring "qualified" engineers who are very good at maintaining and scaling existing systems, but the process definitely selects against entrepreneurial product-focused engineers. Maybe Google thinks that's fine though: they can always pick them up through an acquisition later, albeit at 100x the price.