Which is unfortunate, because objectively Google doesn't actually have a very impressive track record of creating successful products and services given its size and resources. It has a goose that lays golden eggs (the on-line advertising business), two strong on-line services (search and mail, both over a decade old) and two well-established platforms (Android and Chrome, both nearly seven years old). Other than those, most things Google tries seem to land somewhere between unremarkable and complete failure, with Google+ surely the most obvious example of the latter. They also seem to be developing an unenviable reputation for killing things off as a result, which is going to make it more difficult for them to succeed with future endeavours. Whatever workforce their hiring process is producing for them, it doesn't seem to be one that is very good at creating successful new projects.
Google Maps is certainly widespread, but it's hardly the only on-line mapping service available. They keep messing around with the UI, often not for the better. I often find the data itself and the live route planning/traffic news to be inaccurate.
Maybe it's better for those in the US, but here in the UK it's exactly what I meant by unremarkable. The local data from OpenStreetMap seems to be just as good for general mapping purposes and sometimes more accurate and/or current, and for car journey planning and real-time traffic news the dedicated satnav devices still seem to do a far better job.
I've been at Google for 3.5 years (in the NY office) and have never heard this. I don't think I've ever even seen anyone wear a college t-shirt/sweater.
> These aren't Googlers I'm talking about, except the boyfriend.... remember that most of these conversations happened when I was actually in college (a few even before then, while applying to schools), and I just have a really long memory
Sounds like someone who's just into remembering people's SAT scores?
I do wear my college t-shirt though. My graduating CS class was three people, so have to have a little pride there!
I jest.
But if you're Google, why wouldn't you aim for the top 0.0001%? It's not as though you have a shortage of candidates.
And even if there were such a thing, you're not going to find the top n% by asking questions from an undergraduate textbook.
And you're certainly not going to find them by pissing off people with proven practical achievements. Acting like that is evidence of anti-intelligence, not a sign of being smarter than everyone else.
It's one of those "gift/curse" things. It's good they can challenge assumptions, but they don't realize how wrong they are when they are wrong.
There are some notes at http://www.amazon.com/In-The-Plex-Google-Thinks/product-revi... and it's also drawn up nicely in the book itself.
Nothing says Google must accept sub-par technical people, but Google fails to realize you don't have to be the top 0.0001% in absolute algorithms intelligence to do great work.
Google's basic theme seems to be "you must be low latency ultra smart in our narrow interest areas" to pass an interview (or well-connected in other ways to lower scrutiny), but Google's main problem these days isn't lack of smart people — it's lack of projects with meaning and lack of how to organize smart people into anything resembling a coherent world-moving force.
In The Plex is great read for insight into their entire process. Basically, Google is run by people who have never been told "no" to anything in their lives, so they continue to think they are the best at everything until reality forces them to reconsider their delusional assumptions ("montessori naivety").