"Google's Broken Hiring Process"

Ryan Tate of Silicon Valley Insider quotes Google's director of research Peter Norvig:

One of the interesting things we've found, when trying to predict how well somebody we've hired is going to perform when we evaluate them a year or two later, is one of the best indicators of success within the company was getting the worst possible score on one of your interviews. We rank people from one to four [one being the worst], and if you got a one on one of your interviews, that was a really good indicator of success.

Tate notes elsewhere in his piece that the Google interview process involves crazy questions. Tate doesn't connect the dots, but asking those sorts of questions in a job interview is essentially a way of giving a prospective employee a de facto IQ test (giving actual IQ tests to prospective employees has been legally problematic since Griggs v. Duke Power). Back to Googler Peter Norvig:

Ninety-nine percent of the people who got a one in one of their interviews we didn't hire. But the rest of them, in order for us to hire them somebody else had to be so passionate that they pounded on the table and said, "I have to hire this person because I see something in him..."

My guess at what's going on here: creativity probably increases directly with IQ up to a certain point, at which it peaks and then declines. So if you are looking for an employee who's going to come up with the next killer app or new line of business for your company, and you hire only the candidates with the highest IQs, you are probably overshooting the IQ sweet spot where you'd find the smart, creative types.

The Economics of Blogging

A Wall Street Journal column last week by the Democratic Political consultant Mark Penn, "America's Newest Profession: Bloggers for Hire", alleged that 452,000 Americans made their living by blogging. One professional blogger, Megan McCardle, explained on her Atlantic blog why this estimate was "addled" ("Blogging for Big Bucks"):

The estimates of professional bloggers seem wildly inflated--if you help update the company blog once a week as part of your marketing internship, you are not a paid professional blogger. And the numbers they themselves link to tell a much different tale from the article: most blogs bring in pitiful amounts of money for their owners.

This seems to follow the model of Mark Penn's book: find some bizarre number and mindlessly extrapolate it to an absurd conclusion. Yet I still don't understand why common sense did not keep him from publishing this article. Anecdotal evidence would suggest that almost all of us know many more computer programmers than professional bloggers--this is true of me even though I am a professional blogger, as are half my friends. Or he might have called some professional bloggers, who would have (sorrowfully) told him that no one is making $75K a year off of 100,000 pageviews a month, that being about how much traffic I pulled when I was starting up in 2002. Or, hell, he might have noticed that in the very BLS survey so nicely transformed into a table for his article, there is not entry for "blogger"--but that if you add up every writer, reporter, editor, PR person, technical writer, or "media and communications worker, other", there are only 499,890. Since Penn says that there are 452,000 paid bloggers, this implies that 9 out of every 10 communications workers are professional bloggers.

There may be one guy with some incredible niche--or moronic employer--making a ton of money with a modestely well-trafficked blog. But the plural of "anecdote" is not data.

Believe me, I'd love to think that blogging is a surefire path to riches and job security--but I'm afraid all most people get out of their blogs is the satisfaction of a job well done.

Coincidentally, a few days after reading Megan's post, I discovered the newest blog by Daniel Wahl, The Nearby Pen ("helps you live a happier and more productive life by sharing good art, reviewing good books, and explaining good thoughts") which included a post ("AdSense Pennies Make Dollars") that unintentionally supported Megan's point about the paucity of bloggers who make significant money from their blogs. In his post, Daniel mentioned the revenues he had generated from his three blogs over the last few months:

Not only will I not be making loads of money with Adsense, but at this stage of the game I should not expect to.

So why use Adsense? Quite simply, because--as the title suggests--pennies make dollars. Or to put it differently, a little bit of money adds up, even if little by little. And who knows, perhaps those pennies will grow faster with traffic at each site. In my view, it pays (at least a little) to learn more about how advertising on one's blog works while the blog is growing. I also think it is interesting. Here's the data for my first three months:

January...........4,291 page impressions...........$1.97 earned
February..........4,242 page impressions..........$3.62 earned
March.............4,411 page impressions..........$11.15 earned

This is no knock on Daniel -- I'm sure if I were using Google AdSense my ad revenues would be as low or lower (which is one reason why I never signed up for them) -- but it underlines Megan's point about why Mark Penn's estimates seem dubious. As for Daniel's point that pennies make dollars: sure, but time equals money, and, for most of us, there are much more remunerative uses of our time than blogging. So why do it? I mentioned one reason in my first post: to attract a few commenters I could get feedback from and bounce ideas off of. Another reason is the same reason most callers call talk radio stations, or letter writers write letters to the editor of newspapers: to express opinions. I have gotten a couple of ideas from writing this blog (or, more accurately, from observing the responses to a handful of posts), and one or two of those ideas could lead to a business opportunity down the road, so, in that sense, this blogging might end up being profitable as a form of brainstorming, but that remains to be seen.

Intelligence, Education, and Earning Power

In a couple of recent posts (e.g., "Lessons from Brooklyn's New Economy" and "An Atypical Perspective on Health Care in the NY Times") we touched on the politics and economics of education. An article in the business section of Sunday's New York Times, a somewhat fawning profile of Google executive Marissa Mayer (pictured above) included a brief, tangential bit of candor on the subject ("Putting a Bolder Face on Google"). The main responsibility of Ms. Mayer at Google is controlling the "look and feel" of the company's search engine, but the article notes that she also has personnel responsibilities:

At a recent personnel meeting, she homes in on grade-point averages and SAT scores to narrow a list of candidates, many having graduated from Ivy League schools, whom she wanted to meet as part of a program to foster in-house talent. In essence, math is used to solve a human problem: How do you predict whether an employee has the potential for success?

How indeed. Why would Ms. Mayer, who holds a masters degree in computer science from Stanford, be interested in the SAT scores of college graduates? Presumably, because SAT scores are a more objective measure of intelligence than a college degree or grade point average, since the later two can be distorted by admissions preferences and grade inflation. This suggests some problems with President Obama's "college for all" initiative. Some advocates of education as tool for economic advancement seem to confuse the correlation of education and high earning potential with causation. Many high-paying employers (such as Google) demand highly-intelligent knowledge workers. The law since Griggs v. Duke Power restricts the use of broad aptitude tests, so employers often rely on other indicators of intelligence, such as SAT scores, or diplomas from elite schools (that generally require high SAT scores).

What would change if college degrees became as common as high school diplomas? Presumably, the use of college diplomas as a proxy for intelligence would decline, and employers would look more closely at SAT scores, or demand a higher degree to replace the signaling function of a college degree (e.g., jobs that now require bachelors degrees might require masters degrees). That would be a boon for the education industry, but it's unclear how it would help the average American worker increase his earnings potential.

I suspect that the focus among elites in government and punditry on the potential of higher education as a ladder to economic advancement is partly the result of most elites having gone to exclusive private high schools, where virtually all of their classmates were relatively bright and college bound. Had more elites gone to public high schools, where not every student was on a track to college, there might be more skepticism in public policy discussions about the broader utility of higher education.

The photo above accompanied the NY Times article.

Update: for the benefit of new readers of this post, I am now blogging at Steam Catapult and Shadow Stocks.

Singularity U.

From yesterday's Financial Times, "Google and Nasa back new school for futurists". Excerpt:

Google and Nasa are throwing their weight behind a new school for futurists in Silicon Valley to prepare scientists for an era when machines become cleverer than people.

The new institution, known as “Singularity University”, is to be headed by Ray Kurzweil, whose predictions about the exponential pace of technological change have made him a controversial figure in technology circles.

Google and Nasa’s backing demonstrates the growing mainstream acceptance of Mr Kurzweil’s views, which include a claim that before the middle of this century artificial intelligence will outstrip human beings, ushering in a new era of civilisation.

To be housed at Nasa’s Ames Research Center, a stone’s-throw from the Googleplex, the Singularity University will offer courses on biotechnology, nano-technology and artificial intelligence.

The so-called “singularity” is a theorised period of rapid technological progress in the near future. Mr Kurzweil, an American inventor, popularised the term in his 2005 book “The Singularity is Near”.

Proponents say that during the singularity, machines will be able to improve themselves using artificial intelligence and that smarter-than-human computers will solve problems including energy scarcity, climate change and hunger.

So much for the good news. The article continues:

Yet many critics call the singularity dangerous. Some worry that a malicious artificial intelligence might annihilate the human race.

After numerous sci-fi movies and TV shows have dramatized this scenario, from 1970's Colossus: The Forbin Project (the subject of the movie poster above) to current TV shows Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles^1,2 and Battlestar Galactica¹, we won't be able to say that we weren't warned.

The image of the movie poster above is from Rodney-Martin.com


¹Critically acclaimed.
²Consistently entertaining.

TV Recommendation: Startup.com

If you want to see an entertaining documentary about the rise and fall of a dot-com (GovWorks.com), and you have Showtime, set your DVR to record Startup.com tomorrow at 9:45am on Showtime's Showcase channel. I first saw the film a few years ago, and I'm looking forward to watching the whole thing again. One (out out of many) entertaining moments occurs when the GovWorks principals walk out of a meeting with Kleiner Perkins -- the storied venture capital firm that backed Google and Genentech among other companies -- and one of the twenty-something GovWorks employees says of the Kleiner Perkins partner they just met, "That guy just doesn't get it".

The GovWorks story reminds me of Aaron Edelheit's point in a post last month ("Thinking of Investing in China?") that "Sometimes large economic trends do not make great investments". The GovWorks founders were clearly ahead of the curve on a trend: the trend of individuals paying parking tickets and otherwise interacting with local governments online. The question they may not have considered was why the local governments would need to rely on the private sector to provide this sort of service for them. Here in the wilds of New Jersey, for example, the state has its own website where you can pay parking tickets online.