Google's hiring process is supposed to be a utopian system for identifying superhuman staff. Yet it needs a surprising amount of correcting. And we're trying to figure out if this "stage 2" interview test also needs fixing.
How selflessly cool is Google? Every now and then the company removes from consideration one of its superhuman job candidates, to avoid an over-concentration of brilliance. Google, you see, doesn't want to become a black hole of awesome.
Despite its celebrity chefs and razor scooters, Google's New York office houses a surprisingly disgruntled workforce, judging from one informal survey: of 14 Gotham Googlers profiled by Business Insider, more than a third are said to be eyeing an exit.
Google strives to hire "the world's best engineers,"and has crafted an "interminable" interview process dotted with puzzles and brainteasers to do so. One little problem: the process tends to give the worst scores to the best future employees.
Google used to say its lavish perks bolstered productivity and, if anything, would only grow more posh. But a recession changes things. Now the official line is more like, just be happy you're working, you ungrateful fucking pigs.
The annual "Google Dance," which drew thousands of search conference attendees to Google's Mountain View headquarters each summer, has been canceled this year, a victim of cost cutting. The outcry only confirms our early judgement of the event: hopelessly lame.
To feel like a big, happy family, Google used to take everyone on an annual ski trip. The company grew so big it switched last year to Disneyland. This year, though, the All-Google trip is dead.
Google is reportedly flooded with Yahoo résumés. We'd recommend an overtly modest approach to anyone who scores an interview: Google has lately been brutal in handling presumptuous, entitled transplants.
Blogger Joe Clark, still fuming over the mathematical mistreatment of Google designer Doug Bowman, explains that Google is populated by people with cases of "extreme male brain."
Google's top European salesman, Dennis Woodside, stepped in for New York-based sales chief Tim Armstrong after Armstrong left to become AOL's CEO. An anonymous Googler sent him this memo detailing the New York office's many problems:
Dorothy McGivney joined Google in 2003, before the company went public, when employees could make fortunes, quite possibly in the millions, for tweaking the text of search ads. And now she's writing a travel newsletter.
A tipster is hearing from inside the Googleplex that the company, which is set to report earnings today, could lay off 5 percent of its engineering staff.
The Magical Kingdom of Larry and Sergey has laid off 100 full-time recruiters, a tipster tells us. Inevitable, given the economy. But a crushing blow to Google's self-image as a kinder-than-thou employer.
In October, before Google's cost-cutting campaign began in earnest, the company had more than 10,000 contractors, founder Sergey Brin said. In a mid-December SEC filing, it reported only 4,300 temporary workers.
What will Google be like without Marissa Mayer, the glamour nerd whose goofy laugh so neatly captures the search engine's adolescent awkwardness? We'll know soon. We hear the company's 19th employee is planning her goodbye.
Google is throwing not one, not two, but three holiday parties for its New York employees this year. Such is the cash-flush search engine's definition of austerity.
"Up to 10,000 jobs could be on the chopping block according to sources," writes Daya Baran. Can I just say it? No. Google will not dump 10,000 of its roughly 30,000 workforce. "Sources" are wrong, although Baran's tales of Google shuffling its so-called temporary employees around to game SEC rules are true. Google's…
With a name like SearchWiki, you know it's going to be clever, yet stupid. Google has spent ten years and I don't know how many hundred million dollars refining a rocket-science algorithm for ranking Internet search results. Now, a few Google coders have whipped up a feature that lets you boost or cut the scores of…
It's been more than three years since the debut of Writely, the free, browser-based alternative to Microsoft Word quickly snapped up by Google. Nearly two years since the formal release of Google Docs & Spreadsheets, now known as just Google Docs. Let's admit it: Google Docs is no YouTube, Gmail or Google Maps. A …
Remember when Gmail first came out? Virtually unlimited email storage, free! A few people bitched about the ads, but even those were an improvement over Hotmail and Yahoo, which shoved ads into the middle of personal messages rather than alongside them. Nearly five years later, Gmail's new video chat feature is…
