\u00a0How to Get a Job at Google<\/strong><\/p>\n MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – LAST June, in an interview with Adam Bryant of The Times, Laszlo Bock, the senior vice president of people operations for Google – i.e., the guy in charge of hiring for one of the world’s most successful companies – noted that Google had determined that “G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless. … We found that they don’t predict anything.” He also noted that the “proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time” – now as high as 14 percent on some teams. At a time when many people are asking, “How’s my kid gonna get a job?” I thought it would be useful to visit Google and hear how Bock would answer.<\/p>\n Don’t get him wrong, Bock begins, “Good grades certainly don’t hurt.” Many jobs at Google require math, computing and coding skills, so if your good grades truly reflect skills in those areas that you can apply, it would be an advantage. But Google has its eyes on much more.<\/p>\n “There are five hiring attributes we have across the company,” explained Bock. “If it’s a technical role, we assess your coding ability, and half the roles in the company are technical roles. For every job, though, the No. 1 thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it’s not I.Q. It’s learning ability. It’s the ability to process on the fly. It’s the ability to pull together disparate bits of information. We assess that using structured behavioral interviews that we validate to make sure they’re predictive.”<\/p>\n The second, he added, “is leadership – in particular emergent leadership as opposed to traditional leadership. Traditional leadership is, were you president of the chess club? Were you vice president of sales? How quickly did you get there? We don’t care. What we care about is, when faced with a problem and you’re a member of a team, do you, at the appropriate time, step in and lead. And just as critically, do you step back and stop leading, do you let someone else? Because what’s critical to be an effective leader in this environment is you have to be willing to relinquish power.”<\/p>\n What else? Humility and ownership. “It’s feeling the sense of responsibility, the sense of ownership, to step in,” he said, to try to solve any problem – and the humility to step back and embrace the better ideas of others. “Your end goal,” explained Bock, “is what can we do together to problem-solve. I’ve contributed my piece, and then I step back.”<\/p>\n And it is not just humility in creating space for others to contribute, says Bock, it’s “intellectual humility. Without humility, you are unable to learn.” It is why research shows that many graduates from hotshot business schools plateau. “Successful bright people rarely experience failure, and so they don’t learn how to learn from that failure,” said Bock.<\/p>\n Interesting that they claim GPA is worthless in the recruiting process. When my 55 year old dad applied for a programming job at Google…<\/p>\n This peek at the future is terrifying to most corporate hiring execs. Too “soft and squishy.” It’s also business as usual among top tier…<\/p>\n It’s clear why most of the comment writers don’t work at Google, or any other interesting job. They’re clueless.Wonder if this is what…<\/p>\n “They, instead, commit the fundamental attribution error, which is if something good happens, it’s because I’m a genius. If something bad happens, it’s because someone’s an idiot or I didn’t get the resources or the market moved. … What we’ve seen is that the people who are the most successful here, who we want to hire, will have a fierce position. They’ll argue like hell. They’ll be zealots about their point of view. But then you say, `here’s a new fact,’ and they’ll go, `Oh, well, that changes things; you’re right.’ ” You need a big ego and small ego in the same person at the same time.<\/p>\n The least important attribute they look for is “expertise.” Said Bock: “If you take somebody who has high cognitive ability, is innately curious, willing to learn and has emergent leadership skills, and you hire them as an H.R. person or finance person, and they have no content knowledge, and you compare them with someone who’s been doing just one thing and is a world expert, the expert will go: `I’ve seen this 100 times before; here’s what you do.’ ” Most of the time the nonexpert will come up with the same answer, added Bock, “because most of the time it’s not that hard.” Sure, once in a while they will mess it up, he said, but once in a while they’ll also come up with an answer that is totally new. And there is huge value in that.<\/p>\n To sum up Bock’s approach to hiring: Talent can come in so many different forms and be built in so many nontraditional ways today, hiring officers have to be alive to every one – besides brand-name colleges. Because “when you look at people who don’t go to school and make their way in the world, those are exceptional human beings. And we should do everything we can to find those people.” Too many colleges, he added, “don’t deliver on what they promise. You generate a ton of debt, you don’t learn the most useful things for your life. It’s [just] an extended adolescence.”<\/p>\n Google attracts so much talent it can afford to look beyond traditional metrics, like G.P.A. For most young people, though, going to college and doing well is still the best way to master the tools needed for many careers. But Bock is saying something important to them, too: Beware. Your degree is not a proxy for your ability to do any job. The world only cares about – and pays off on – what you can do with what you know (and it doesn’t care how you learned it). And in an age when innovation is increasingly a group endeavor, it also cares about a lot of soft skills – leadership, humility, collaboration, adaptability and loving to learn and re-learn. This will be true no matter where you go to work.<\/p>\n Favorite weekend story:<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n In New York’s Strictest No-Parking Zones, Not Even the F.B.I. Is Exempt<\/strong> At the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s counterterrorism compound in the Chelsea neighborhood, the urgent announcement sends special agents rushing to the streets.<\/p>\n Has a secret terrorist cell been uncovered? A trove of bomb-making materials, perhaps?<\/p>\n The warning, it turns out, often concerns a matter far more mundane – even as it is universally alarming: “If you’re parked on the south side of 18th Street, they’re towing cars.”<\/p>\n For decades, the F.B.I.’s vehicles were off limits to New York City tow trucks, given the bureau’s authority. But over the last few years, the Police Department has towed hundreds of cars belonging to this and other governmental agencies. Not even police vehicles are exempt.<\/p>\n The cause of all this is a small towing unit of the department’s Internal Affairs Bureau, charged with enforcing certain parking violations against government vehicles that might otherwise enjoy some latitude.<\/p>\n It does not matter if the offending car is a Ford Crown Victoria equipped with antennas from the hood to the trunk, or has a federal government placard on the dashboard. The only thing that matters is whether the vehicle is parked in a no-standing zone in Manhattan; if so, the Vehicle Enforcement Unit will tow it — no questions asked.<\/p>\n A traffic enforcement agent inspected a placard from the New York State District Attorney’s office before towing the vehicle, which was parked illegally in the financial district. Michael Appleton for The New York Times<\/p>\n In 2013, the unit towed 1,855 vehicles that were illegally parked with a plaque displayed in the window, according to statistics provided by the Police Department. Federal vehicles accounted for 311 of them; 361 were Police Department vehicles, and 242 belonged to the Fire Department.<\/p>\n No fines are typically paid, but dealing with the tows is nonetheless a time-consuming nuisance. Agents must first go to Police Headquarters in Lower Manhattan to assert that the vehicles were being used on official business, and then go to the tow pound to retrieve the vehicles.<\/p>\n “Technically, they were good tows,” said George Venizelos, the head of the F.B.I.’s office in New York. Mr. Venizelos said that the towing had “calmed down” in recent months, and that he did not believe they were “harassment tows.”<\/p>\n Nonetheless, having a vehicle towed can often take four hours or more of an F.B.I. agent’s time, distract several police officers from their regular duties and keep the unit from generating tow-related revenue for the city.<\/p>\n At Police Headquarters on a recent morning, two F.B.I. agents showed up around the same time, trying to find their towed cars. They carried form letters seeking the release of their vehicles.<\/p>\n “This letter is to certify that said vehicle was being used in furtherance of official F.B.I. business,” one document said. “A valid police parking plaque was displayed in the vehicle.”<\/p>\n The letter noted that the vehicle had been towed during the workday, adding, “It would be appreciated if your office would release said vehicle.”<\/p>\n A police officer appeared sympathetic, telling the agents that on some days, as many as seven F.B.I. agents might come looking for their car.<\/p>\n “Why do they do it? Who knows,” the officer said of the towing division. “It’s not just you,” he said to the agents. “It happens to us, too.”<\/p>\n A police spokeswoman, Deputy Chief Kim Y. Royster, said: “We don’t just tow N.Y.P.D. vehicles. We tow vehicles from all agencies, the Fire Department and federal agencies, too.”<\/p>\n Chief Royster said the tows were for “safety hazard violations” that included being parked in bus stops, no-standing zones and elsewhere that parking was prohibited.<\/p>\n …The Police Department’s one-tow-fits-all policy can be traced to 2008, when an Internal Affairs Bureau sergeant was assigned to ride along with tow-truck operators to make good on Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s pledge to cut down on illegal parking by city employees.<\/p>\n Why I really don’t like the “cloud,” in general and Dropbox, in particular.<\/span><\/strong> Let’s start with “working in the cloud.” You’re at the mercy of your connection to the Internet.\u00a0 Type a word. Let’s say Francis. Though you’re on one line, the letters F-R-A-N-C-I-S will often arrive at your destination out of order. That can (and does) mess up numbers and create horrible typos. Second, sitting in the cloud means someone else protects your data. You have no idea how well they protect it, nor how easy it is to be hacked, or how easily it’s available to your competitors or the Feds. Judging by recent emails I’ve received from Dropbox, it seems they’re wrestling with requests from the Feds for your information. In short, be selective what you store in the cloud. Personally I prefer that little Apricorn Aegis Padlock shown in the right hand column. I have control of where I hide it (and lose it).<\/p>\n You gotta have backups.<\/strong> <\/span>WhatsApp<\/em> crashed in the last few days. And now Apple’ iMessaging (SMS between iPhones and iPads) has crashed. Server problems, I’m guessing. Reason to subscribe to both. Reason also to have multiple email addresses from multiple vendors.<\/p>\n Melanoma is awful.<\/strong><\/span> One friend has\u00a0 already died of it — because he didn’t have the mole on his back checked early enough by a competent dermatologist. By the time he got to one it was too late. The cancer had spread.<\/p>\n If you went in the sun when you were young, all the bad stuff is coming out now. I figure a trip to the dermatologist every four months is the minimum. He (or she) should go over all of you with a large magnifying glass. My philosophy is “When in doubt, cut it out<\/strong>.”<\/p>\n My insurance company is a scammer? <\/strong>I received a bill for home and car insurance. It contained:<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n When you send us a check in the mail as payment, you authorize us to use information from your check to make a one-time electronic funds transfer from your bank account.<\/p>\n Beware of Fake IRS Emails and Phone Calls. <\/strong>This morning, I received this email from the IRS. It’s good advice.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Tax scams that use email and phone calls that appear to come from the IRS are common these days. These scams often use the IRS name and logo or fake websites that look real.<\/p>\n Scammers often send an email or call to lure victims to give up their personal and financial information. The crooks then use this information to commit identity theft or steal your money. Some call their victims to demand payment on a pre-paid debit card or by wire transfer. But the IRS will not initiate contact with you to ask for this information by phone or email.<\/p>\n If you get this type of \u2018phishing\u2019 email, the IRS offers this advice:<\/p>\n If you get an unexpected phone call from someone claiming to be from the IRS:<\/p>\n Be alert to scams that use the IRS as a lure. The IRS will not initiate contact with you through social media or text to ask for your personal or financial information.<\/p>\n
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\nA Police Department employee towing a car on Liberty Street in Lower Manhattan.<\/em><\/p>\n
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