Scott: Early Google hiring lacked direction, leading engineers to zero-impact projects
Kevin Scott · No Priors Ep. 18 | With Kevin Scott, CTO of Microsoft · May 24, 2023 · at 6:33
Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott reflects on joining Google New York in the early 2000s and observing how early Google's unstructured hiring model affected engineer productivity.
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“We were hiring these brilliant, brilliant people at the time, and the way that we did hiring was kind of crazy. It's like, all right, well, if you're smart, just come work here. And like, we have no idea like what exactly it is you're going to do. And you like came in and you sort of sorted yourself out. And we had these people who were so accomplished and so brilliant, and they would come in and choose to work on things. That, that just were going to have no impact at all. Like they were intellectually very interesting, but they were just sort of silly in that they were never going to connect with anything that moved the needle for the company”
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