Eric Schmidt on the controversial hiring rules that built Google, and the beloved "glue people" he says you don't need at all: Schmidt admits the early rules were unpopular, even inside the company. "One of the rules is that we didn't want to hire your friends, which always was... upsetting. We also didn't want to hire anybody from what were considered to be lesser universities. And so we also wanted to hire people who had very high GPAs." That meant saying no to people who, by most measures, deserved a yes: "So the constant problem was that somebody was a good employee, had someone they had worked with, who was very loyal, very hard working, who was not from a great university, did not have a very good GPA and we would not hire them." He concedes the policy has since been softened. But he doesn't apologise for it: "So that was controversial and we've relaxed that a little bit now. But the fact of the matter is it got us to where we were today because it produced these high IQ generalists from prestigious universities." Then there was the second rule, built on a lesson Schmidt learned before Google, at Novell. He calls them "glue people": "The glue people are incredibly nice people who sit at interstitial boundaries between groups and they assist in activity. They are glue and they're very, very loyal and people love them and you don't need them at all." The problem wasn't that they were bad people. It was that they cost speed: "At Novell, I kept trying to get rid of these glue people because they were getting in the way because they slowed everything down." And once inside, they were almost impossible to remove: "And every time I'd get rid of in one group, they'd show up in another group and they'd transfer and get rehired and all that." When Eric Schmidt raised this with Larry and Sergey, Larry's answer was to stop glue people before they ever got in: "And Larry said, yeah, let's just review all the hiring." "So guess what? From that moment on, we reviewed every offer packet. Literally everyone." The review was strict enough that even Schmidt's own preferred candidates got caught: "And anybody who smelled or looked like a glue person, plus the people that Larry and Sergey thought had backgrounds that I liked that they didn't, would all be flagged. And so anybody who sort of met the original profile, they'd go right through."show more

Most of Googles success was due to timing.

The issue with this successful hiring method was that it was a very specific group, for a specific time for a specific industry. Then other people apply it just like they did with Jack Welch's stack ranking, but it doesn't work. It worked for a specific purpose and time.

Some of the best engineers I’ve worked with didn’t even have computer science degrees. But you do you.

Ironic that Google is full of idiots that can’t build a product. Also dead last in AI.

Honestly working for this guy sounds like absolute misery

So none of these H1B hires know each other?.....Top Universitys?

Schmidt’s “glue people” are Scott Adams’ “talent stack” people. If you’re not the very best at A , but you’re good, and you’re not the very best at B, but you’re good, and if you’re the best A-B guy where that is useful, you have a career. I lived between groups A and B and added a lot of value that way.

And then we realized all the top university high GPA not glue ppl were lazy and getting in the way so we laid them off and replaced them with GPUs. Wait...

Behavioral research on “glue players” frames them positively as quiet multipliers with high emotional intelligence who raise everyone else’s game.

Where did Google outsourcing fit on that scale?

and all these super smart people from prestigious universities turned out to not be able to build shit

Filtering out all but recruits from top universities with very high GPAs means you miss out on some real talent and creative prospects. I saw excellent candidates passed up by big IT firms because they didn't match these criteria.

"At Novell, I kept trying to get rid of these glue people because they were getting in the way because they slowed everything down." Well, that worked out great for Novell.

That was 20 years ago when there was rigor in the university

Beam to today: hirinq is done through Indian body shops, H1Bs everywhere you look, ethnonepotism became the glue holding Google together, creativity went poof. Night vs Day.

That's a very long way of saying, we only hire people like ourselves.

So today 200000 geniuses Who can't debug 10 years of YouTube bugs.. Too busy counting the wages and the shares, from a desert island.

So what changed went the company went all in hiring h1-b Indians?

Seems he smelled too much glue

Full video from @GreylockVC:

Most of Tech is full of glue people. Especially after DEI.

Something tells me if you optimize for a specific personality type and background(this degree, this GPA), you'll eventually stagnate. Hedge funds try to avoid this exact issue, because you get the same person, with the same ideas/education and you underperform.

Hiring only from ivy League universities to guarantee rich ruling class types have stake in your company is their real strategy. Ivy League people aren't high IQ, maybe they're smart but school is a compliance filter, not an intelligence filter

Always got me that people whomdroppped out of college (no degree) would only hire high GOA college grads from prestigious schools. I always wonder would Steve Jobs hire, or even tolerate, a Steve Jobs? Would Gates hire Gates? No…they wouldn’t.

I worked in a different industry where our main competitor did the same as Google. Only top collages with the highest GPA. Our company crushed them in a few years. Their sales people came off as arrogant and cocky. Nobody wanted to work with them.

What Schmidt describes as glue people are also gatekeepers, and the holders of all the institutional knowledge. Getting rid of them only works if leadership is 100% committed to eliminating gatekeeping. They rarely are, in fact, they are frequently the ones who created it.

yeah, the company that renamed the gulf of Mexico and destroyed a boreal forest is plenty of idiots nowadays as a result. Dont pay attention to what this sociopath says

@svrnco

Jesus what a load of BS. Bet working for those cunts is insufferable

High hiring standards can help build exceptional teams, but filtering candidates mainly by university and GPA risks overlooking talented people with practical skills, creativity, and proven results. Strong teams need more than impressive credentials.

so google's full of retarded autists, cool

I'd separate coordination from permission layers. Someone who resolves ownership and gets a blocked release moving is doing different work from someone who adds another approval. In hiring, ask for an example of a handoff they improved and what changed afterward.

Let me guess, there’s no such thing as an Indian “glue person?”

Google interviews left me with a bad memory. Well maybe not bad, but not good. When Google bought Motorola where I worked. They killed our project ( JavaScript based phone OS ) and offered everybody severance of at least $70,000 . They asked who would like to stay and I was one of the few who wanted, all 80 -expletives or so left and took the severance. I was offered an interview with YouTube. Which was exciting for me , since I lived in LA and YouTube division was there. The interview was in mountain view though. It was 4 rounds I think, with the division head as one of the rounds. Round 2 was with that very young girl. And she wanted me to write an algorithm on how to traverse a labyrinth. Now I do front end, and am also self-taught. Now I am better with algorithms, then I knew nothing. It’s easy to learn them, it’s just when you self-taught, you focus on practical stuff, for you. I know an easy way to traverse a labyrinth is to just take right turn the whole way. So I was going with that. But she wanted me to write a specific type of pseudo code, with specific checks and such. Like from a text book that she just read. It was frustrating, 40 minutes of that. At the end she guided me to where she wanted, but I had no idea what she wanted still. The other 2 interviews were fine, in my wheelhouse of front end. And especially the interview with the boss went very good, I thought. Then, luckily same day or the next ( so no wait ), I was told I failed , that they needed a consensus and that girl failed me.. ;) I was sad for a sec.. YouTube was still small then, but I really thought I will learn a lot. Knowing what YouTube became , I am so glad it didn’t work out. I wouldn’t want to be part of enabling YouTube, in hindsight. They did offer me another position in the analytics department though, which I took. I was the only person from 80 people who stayed with Google, for another year or so. Until I switched to Apple. Where I was much happier snd busier and more productive. It’s all well that ends well.

Fascinating, glue people.