On What Makes Google Tick
“Rule Number Four: Great People Can Manage Themselves
Google spends more time on hiring than on anything else. It knows this because, like any bunch of obsessive engineers, it keeps track. It says that it gets 1,500 resumes a day from wanna-be Googlers. Between screening, interviewing, and assessing, it invested 87 Google people-hours in each of the 300 or so people that it hired in 2002.
Google hires two sorts of engineers, both aimed at encouraging the art of fast failure. First, it looks for young risk takers. “We look for smart,” says Wayne Rosing, who heads Google’s engineering ranks. “Smart as in, do they do something weird outside of work, something off the beaten path? That translates into people who have no fear of trying difficult projects and going outside the bounds of what they know.”
But Google also hires stars, PhDs from top computer-science programs and research labs. “It has continually managed to hire 90% of the best search-engine people in the world,” says Brian Davison, a Lehigh University assistant professor and a top search expert himself. The PhDs are Google’s id. They are the people who know enough to shoot holes in ideas before they go too far — to make the failures happen faster.
The challenge is negotiating the tension between risk and caution. When Rosing started at Google in 2001, “we had management in engineering. And the structure was tending to tell people, No, you can’t do that.” So Google got rid of the managers. Now most engineers work in teams of three, with project leadership rotating among team members. If something isn’t right, even if it’s in a product that has already gone public, teams fix it without asking anyone.
“For a while,” Rosing says, “I had 160 direct reports. No managers. It worked because the teams knew what they had to do. That set a cultural bit in people’s heads: You are the boss. Don’t wait to take the hill. Don’t wait to be managed.”
And if you fail, fine. On to the next idea. “There’s faith here in the ability of smart, well-motivated people to do the right thing,” Rosing says. “Anything that gets in the way of that is evil.”