Re: Google is Hiring

[Bill Huey (hui) <billh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Feb 10, 2007 at 12:14:45PM -0800, Matthew Dillon wrote:
. ..
>     Ultimately the lesson that has to be learned (especially by the younger
>     people on our forum) is that there has always been and will always be
>     a fairly severe disconnect between people like us and the companies
>     that actually pay enough for one to make a living. 
> 
>     Computer science is one of the few areas where degrees and accolades
>     are virtually irrelevant when it comes to evaluating someone's actual
>     ability.  Most HR departments simply cannot get a handle on it.

It's been flooded with a lot of so called "business" oriented folks
that only care about the short term bottom line. It's a good mentality
to have to produce and release product without infinitely long
development cycles, but our industry is getting pretty distant from
the computer science fundamentals that both me and you grew up with
before the venture capital folks started pushing their monkeys around
doing this and that.

They've substituted sensibility with a kind of conformity, various
indirect personality tests, etc... that constrain people to doing what
they are told versus doing what is actually cool, interesting and will
actually get your career going quicker. That why I do open source since
a lot of these companies are completely corrupted by that mentality and
would have locked a person like me out otherwise. I use to think that
Microsoft was the worse of the bunch, but my experience was actually
worst and seemingly more arrogant with Silicon Vally companies in which
Google is one of the worse offenders.

Googles CEO's comments about "techno-arrogance" virtually guarantees
that none of the folks I know that are high achievers with any kind of
creativity in this industry are locked out from companies like that.
They simply aren't interested in intelligent folks per se but they love
having the "image" of having the smartest and brightest, much like
Microsoft, to get cheap labor for folks that don't know better. They
consciously exploit this lack of "critical thinking" to achieve those
goals. They'd probably end up like Microsoft with Vista and blow out
if it wasn't for their hold on search currently.

Proper, non wussie ass managers would try to get different intelligent
folks to work together, not filter them out because they are little
bored about what's going on in the industry and would like to do
something better. It's one of the more upsetting things I've seen in
the valley over these last few years. Fortunately this varies quite
a bit from company to company and you do get managers that understand
the above and get grew groups of engineers together doing interesting
things.

Unfortunately this is carried by the current batch of CS kids that are
brainwashed by the glory of how Java is going to save the world by
preventing you from touching the bare metal, as they say, so you don't
actual learn the true "fundamentals" any more so that you don't anything
that's pioneering. That mentality, unfortunately, has really corrupted
the UC campus system and I'm afraid much of the current trend of
computer science throughout the United States, therefore the world,
just to produce code monkeys.

bill