Google’s hiring philosophy involves always raising the bar. They strive to find people who are better and smarter than the ones already working there, so that the average level of intelligence and ability across Google employees actually increases over time. This should be contrasted against a more traditional model where the smartest people start the company and the next set of hires is below their intelligence or skill level, filling necessary gaps in the workforce but offering no overall gain in intelligence. The eventual result of this typical hiring philosophy is a decreasing curve of company intellect as middle managers hire new people who are not as intelligent as they are and so forth.
What if Google’s hiring methods were used to pick our president? Google doesn’t maintain its high quality hiring by holding a majority vote on who should be hired. Very specific candidates are weeded out through phone interviews and rigorous on-site interviews before they can be hired. The cook’s opinion of a database programmer has nothing to do with the programmer’s merit and should not factor into the final decision in the least. Period.
Why should politics be any different? It seems reasonable to say that we want high quality candidates in office who have the necessary skills and experience to guide the country. Why then do we let the public control the process? We’re talking about a population whose majority barely has a high school education. These people are the ones making decisions about who should get hired as president. The cook knows nothing about what it takes to be a database programmer and the Alabaman barber shop owner knows nothing about what it takes to be president. Why then do we give the people the power to decide the candidates through primaries and then decide the president based on those candidates? What is our hiring philosophy for the president and are we enforcing quality standards on the process?
In my cursory view, it seems that the philosophy is “vote on these politicians; plurality rules”. How then can we even measure quality of the candidates before they enter office if they are essentially brought in as candidates through a nondeterministic process every time? Those candidates for president in one election might all be of high quality, but it seems equally plausible that the candidates for the next election could all be of mediocre or low quality. There is no universal unchanging standard to measure candidates against, much less a process that excludes those who fail to meet such a standard.
What if we weed out the incompetent candidates first, then let the people vote? Like Google, we could knock out the candidates who fail to meet a certain standard and then use a democratic process to elect a president from the pool of highly qualified candidates. Some would argue that such a filtering process is already in place with the intermediate levels of politics a candidate usually goes through to get on the presidential ballot, but I think that reasoning is dubious. It is not a well-defined process and there is no specific set of obstacles every presidential candidate must overcome. The merit of the candidates is nowhere directly tested and scrutinized against a universal standard so that quality can be assured.
The Framers were intelligent people and planned a nation based on certain criteria for quality (The Constitution, The Bill of Rights). We should adhere to the core principles that they set forth, but the quality of leadership must be maintained as well. Google can have the core principle “don’t be evil”, but unless the people working there are intelligent and competent enough to recognize what is evil and how to properly avoid it, the principle cannot be adhered to. This nation needs a high quality president and high quality people in government, legislating, adjudicating, and leading with the use of intelligence and tact to adhere to exactly those principles set out by The Framers. After all, the primary goal of the nation is to give its people the opportunity to lead good lives. How can it possible meet such a goal if there are no standards for quality?
Now the question is: what are those standards?
So, the general populace isn’t qualified to pick candidates in the primaries, yet they’re somehow gifted enough to choose between people who have passed this yet-to-be-determined gauntlet of political ability? If our nation of cooks and barber shop owners fail to recognize intelligence, tact, etc. at the beginning of the process, who’s to say that they’ll be able to differentiate based on an even subtler set of criteria in the final round? If your goal is to up the intelligence bar so the system spits out more qualified individuals, while not addressing the root problem: education (which you hurriedly mentioned, in a rush to fill your quota on the instances of the word ‘philosophy’ in your article). Then your idea is essentially that since people are idiots, let’s give them a more ‘qualified’ pool of potential leaders, since they’re incapable of making any informed decision anyway. The blind-folded, retarded kid at the birthday party will actually hit the pinata some of the time, right?
Also, since you’re so comfortable pigeon-holing the population, if it’s so incapable of choosing able leaders, then what’s your incentive to elevate only the cream of the crop? A benevolent soul, seeking to wash away the depression of ignorance by empowering a Philosopher King!
Nice article.
You’re dead on. The root of the problem is definitely education. I should have qualified this with a time period. In my head, this is a short term solution for a problem that needs to be solved in the long term with better education for everyone. Though still there’s the problem of people having the right to ignorance and the right to vote simultaneously, but the magnitude of that worry isn’t clear.
My thinking on people not being qualified to choose candidates is the following: if people were only choosing from high quality candidates, they would base their decision on other dimensions of difference (such as a position on a certain social issue or conservative leanings, etc.). In fact, I think this is exactly how the system functions now. There is no coherent quality dimension in the overall popular election process, so the stopgap solution is to preemptively maximize the quality dimension while letting the population decide based on the same criteria they have been.
The solution definitely has potential to go the wrong way (philosopher king), but I don’t see any other obvious small steps that would immediately improve the state of the current government. This is something I’ve talked about before and am still interested in. Any ideas about other types of change to achieve immediate effects while education is slowly improved would be great.
Millions of voters every year vote in elections about which they know very little. The problem isn’t that the voters aren’t educated enough in order to make more informed votes. Voters are simply being rationally ignorant; given that the cost of voting is very, very low, it simply doesn’t pay to waste your time learning about the issues in order to make an informed vote.
Count me in for a futarchy. :)
The major problem I have with a select group of people deciding who the president is the question of who decides who _those_ people are. How many levels of intelligence do we have that allows (or even encourages) someone to hire another who is smarter?
Even today, I’m not so sure that it’s as simple as people being stupid and voting with ignorance. I think it has more to do with priorities. And, how we prioritize is what determines who we vote for. If we’re unable to tell if someone is not telling the truth when it comes to what they will do in office (assuming they could even know what would be coming in those 4-8 years), this problem would be compounded by the fact I’d have to vote for a group of people who are supposed to be smarter than me. Then, I give my power of voting to them?
I seriously doubt a group of individuals who retain my right to be smart or ignorant when it comes to voting would be better. In fact, I would propose it would be far worse.
Nate, what you’ve addressed is definitely an issue worth devoting thought to, but it’s different from the one I identified in the original post. I meant only to show the need for a more intelligent and tactful government. How those people are selected is another question entirely, and frankly I would hate to be the guy moderating that debate.
People don’t want to be stripped of their right to be ignorant, yet they reap the benefits of living in this country and expect the country to improve while they bask in their ignorance. The solution to this smaller problem is simple: make it a privilege to vote, not a right. It should be based on merit and intellectual ability. Whether or not that is fair to the less intellectual people is not an issue in my mind. It is more important to run a successful and free country than it is to give each lazy citizen the right to nullify his thoughtful and careful peer’s vote at every turn.
The people who care where the country is headed and who are able to contribute to that direction should be at the helm, not the inferiority-complex-ridden, careless, self-righteous, and ignorant people who abuse their right for the simple reason that they can.
Since when is Google so great at hiring? I interviewed there once. It was a travesty. Blatantly discriminatory, uttery disorganized, unprofessional, not to mention several of the interviewers behaving like spoiled, ignorant brats. The whole experience was like being immersed in a party atmosphere where if you weren’t a) under 22 and b) from Stanford you were clearly not worthy of their time. One of the few non-arrogant interviewers admitted during the interview that their process was a total disaster, and he apologized for it; said there’s no hope, all kinds of good people get turned down. I came away thinking their selection process boiled down to “would I want to be seen talking to you at a dorm party, yes or no?”
I’ve seen some writeups on their hiring and interview processes. Obviously it’s all second-or-greater-hand, but the idea behind my original post doesn’t necessitate that they actually employ these methods, but rather just that the methods are well-defined.
I’m not sure if things have changed with them since you interviewed or if certain parts of the company are worse than others. In any case, the factual reality is irrelevant to my claims.
I completly agree on the point that the populace shouldnt be the one to decide since in all honesty the majority vote religiously for a party without questioning it.
Although I do tend to pefer the idea of an aristocracy/intelligentsia choosing the president I think that this can go too far, since those will only choose someone from their rank hence giving no chance for the masses to have their views heard in the long term since these intelligentsia “know” all.
However I would more than happy to see a small group of inteligentsia along with some representatives of the masses.
PS: I know some will disregard my comment after reading some of the terms I use.
Yesterday was February 12, an extremely symbolic date when your objective is covering past presidents and their hiring.
Yesterday, February 12, was also the date that ABC 7 News in San Francisco/San Jose/Oakland (Google’s geographic vicinity) aired a piece on the newest piece within Google’s hiring arsenal, a questionnaire that looks at a candidate’s past performance, believing that’s an indicator of future success. Featured in the piece was Google’s current Vice President of People Operations, Laszlo Bock. His concern, along with a professor in the piece was Google’s missing out on promising candidates.
So on February 12, I also wondered about one particular candidate. I thought about what that [C]andidate’s resume would look like, especially when submitted to Google. As an extremely above board applicant who wouldn’t fabricate, he’d have to honestly list the following failures and dreaded resume gaps:
at 22, he had a startup and failed
at 23, he ran for legislature and was defeated
at 24, he tried another startup, also failed
at 25, he did make the legislature, only to retreat at 26 because his girlfriend died,
and at 27, he suffered a nervous breakdown (obviously unable to cope with modern-day pressures)
then in his 30’s, he tried and retried for Congress — he failed many times, having only very short stints
no more luck in his 40’s, losing out
at 46 and at 49 for the Senate
at 47 losing out for Vice President,
all to actually win something of value
Oh, and one last element that resulted in his “fatality”:
at 51, he got the U.S. Presidency.
Who was that loser? The above summary of qualifications belongs to the 16th President, the one born February 12.
So that’s I wonder about February 12 when it comes to Laszlo Bock and other contemporaries who want to see “intelligent” Google hiring practices become so standard nationwide. Are they smart enough to not pass up on the next Abraham Lincoln?
The big fear hiring managers have today of hiring the wrong person is overblown. It is a far greater corporate sin to let the right person slip through the cracks of an imperfect hiring system merely because he can’t pass some test that really rewards conformity instead of true revolutionary competence.
Glenn, thanks for the awesome monologue. You bring up several good points, a few of which I think I should elaborate on.
First, I think it is a completely valid for Google to worry about missing out on competent all-star candidates with their screening process. Their GPA requirements specifically have always struck me as a bit silly. Some of the smartest hackers I know didn’t perform spectacularly in school precisely because of their genius and frequent boredom with school.
There are several considerations behind recruiting and some of them are obviously going to diverge between business and politics, but I think the general goal should be the same: find and recruit one of the best people for the job.
In business, there is a sizable penalty for hiring the wrong person — you can go for months without fully realizing the extent of damage or hindrance the person is causing, both in work completed (or botched) and coworkers bothered.
In politics the outcome is probably worse — a bad candidate might spend enormous amounts of money that the country doesn’t have, start ridiculous wars for all of the wrong reasons, degrade the quality of life for people in the nation or one of any number of other things.
There are certainly (and there will probably always be) good candidates who are overlooked or somehow screened out, but I think that comes as a simple result of probability. I think I am pragmatic when I say that having a mediocre president is a lot better than having a terrible president for eight or even four years.
That said, Lincoln was elected and he did serve as president. Somehow he made it through the system. Galileo survived the Italians and published his science for the world. We probably overlook or snuff out fifty times as many geniuses as we embrace, but that might be a prudent penalty to avoid disastrous reigns. Then again maybe it isn’t.
I’m not convinced that it’s an entirely valid and tested line of reasoning, but it seems to make sense on a large scale.