House of Eratosthenes

This interview with Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.
:
Q. Other insights from the data you’ve gathered about Google employees?

A. One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything.

What’s interesting is the proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time as well. So we have teams where you have 14 percent of the team made up of people who’ve never gone to college.

Q. Can you elaborate a bit more on the lack of correlation?

A. After two or three years, your ability to perform at Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school, because the skills you required in college are very different. You’re also fundamentally a different person. You learn and grow, you think about things differently.

Another reason is that I think academic environments are artificial environments. People who succeed there are sort of finely trained, they’re conditioned to succeed in that environment. One of my own frustrations when I was in college and grad school is that you knew the professor was looking for a specific answer. You could figure that out, but it’s much more interesting to solve problems where there isn’t an obvious answer. You want people who like figuring out stuff where there is no obvious answer.

Interesting way of phrasing it, with the “artificial environment.” I’ve often noticed that this special intelligence that is involved in anticipating expectations in other people, is quite different from that other special intelligence leveraged when puzzles are being solved and there is “no obvious answer.” I see it in my own experiences. I tend to achieve my greatest sense of confidence and comfort when I’m solving puzzles, but through the years my efforts have been almost entirely derailed by the artificiality. Just knowing someone is “back there,” expecting a certain response or a certain type of resolution, is enough to break my concentration entirely.

It seems like these two intelligences are more or less diametrically opposed. People who are head-and-shoulders above me in this special group activity of sitting in a room, figuring out what “everyone” is thinking or wants to see — they’re first to anticipate it, I’m the last — team up with me to solve a problem, a no-obvious-answer problem. I invariably find that after I’ve solved the problem on my own, I have to back up and explain to them the basic concepts. And there, more often than not, I fail; they can’t quite grasp what I’m talking about. But the solution works, and a sense of “let Morgan handle this whatever-it-is from now on” sets in. And then we have a meeting about it, and I go back to being lost. Out in front of the crowd, or else falling way behind, but never shoulder-to-shoulder. I suspect I’m far from alone in these experiences.

re: “…that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless”

What did you expect? The SATs have been “re-normed” to death and the test itself has been dumbed down by removing nearly all intelligence quotient markers, e.g, Analogies, and adding the subjective “Essay.” As to G.P.A.s there has been colossal grade inflation since the 1960s. The expected result is that both items are would be worthless in screening. And so it is.

An IQ test would be a rational move for an employer to screen prospective employees. But that of course is illegal.

Dan Kurt
- Dan Kurt | 06/22/2013 @ 14:37
All the matters is you political affiliation.
- Larry Sheldon | 06/22/2013 @ 23:39

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