business

What I Learned Doing 250 Interviews At Google – Moishe Lettvin

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Interview question

  • Favorite interview question: "Find all the words on a Boggle board"

"You could interview the same candidate twice with the same set of interviews and come to different conclusions each time."

Steve Yegge has an idea that each candidate at a perfect slate of interviews and a perfect slate of anti-slate of interviewers.

Google’s philosophy is "Missing someone who is good, is ok, compared to hiring someone who is bad." A false positive is much worse than a false negative.

Interviewing is a team effort, you might have one person that goes deep in one area, the other person doesn’t need to ask the same questions.

The hiring committee was cross teams. No one person had the power to say yay or nay.

Be prepared. Have a set of questions that you plan to ask, have an idea of your follow-up questions.

An interview is a conversation, you’re both humans, treat it as such.

Good interviewers are generous, they teach and even if the candidate isn’t the right fit.

Good questions are like onions

  • i.e. Conway’s law

Strive for higher bandwidth

  • prefer video to phone
  • prefer in-person to video

Strive for more signal to less noise, you job is to get them to show their best work.

The Fifth Discipline – Peter Senge

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To simplify the world, we break up ideas and tasks into smaller pieces, but then we fall into the trap that the smaller pieces are a reality, but they are small windows into the world and interact outside the boundaries of our perception.

A learning organization is a group of people who are continually enhancing their capacity to create what they want to create.

It’s important that organizations pick up the ability to learn to together on a reliable, regular and predictable schedule.

Traditional, authoritarian, hierarchical business organizations fail to tap the abilities of people. For years and years, we’ve acted as the workers have checked their brains at the door and we just wanted them to do “their work, not to think.”

The notion that people are interchangeable units is going to change. Knowledge and learning are always embodied in a person. This makes the person the organization’s most important asset.

Ultimately, it’s a change in ourselves; that will drive the change in our organization.

Systemic structures are the underlining patterns of inner dependencies.