Re: [tlug] FWIW: Google Japan Interview Experience

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Shakthi Kannan writes:

 > ----- On 11/19/07, Nguyen Vu Hung <vuhung16plus@example.com> wrote:
 > | I think they are! Japanese HR won't hire "good" people who can *think*
 > | and research.
 > | Japanese HR won't see creative people.
 > \--
 > 
 > AFAIK, that is true for any HR, present anywhere.

North American universities are a counterexample: their HR practices
are at the foundation of all the reasons why almost anybody bound for
grad school who can go to grad school there does.

If you want to understand what has happened to Google, go read Curt
Sampson's posts on Starling's HR practices, and then scale them up to
Google's size.  Voila!  You get the OP's report.

This obviously won't work, and you surely need drones to keep track of
various government requirements such as reverse discrimination
(shitsurei shimashita, equal opportunity) in the U.S., so you get an
HR Department, but it has no real power because all of the people
making decisions about what power to give to HR remember their
experiences (same as yours).

Then the top guys realize that this is going to kill them if they
don't kill it first (where Google is right now), and you get
post-interview questionnaires and eventually a bureaucratic HR with
real power.  All predictable, all hard to prevent.

The formal documentation is in _Parkinson's Law_ (with bonus chapter
on bikeshedding), and _The Peter Principle_ (and sequels).  For a
HOWTO on what you can do about it, read _Up the Organization_.  The
edition that contains the "Guerrilla Guide for Working Women" is
especially relevant (anybody who does not have the same race, gender,
first language, and social background as the ruling clique in their
employer counts as a working woman for this purpose, although the
techniques required to deal with the issues may differ and some
problems and techniques will just plain not apply).