Over Qingming Festival on the train I finished reading How Google Works.
I originally thought reading this book would improve my tech skills,
turns out it improved my HR knowledge (mind blown
What Does This Book Talk About
The book’s author is Eric Schmidt,
Google’s Executive Chairman.
However I don’t really know what this position specifically does.
Roughly translated into Chinese it’d be “执行总裁”,
feels like it involves lots of management-related work.
Regardless, this position doesn’t write code.
This book is extremely well-organized.
The whole content can be summarized by the chapter sub-headings:
- Work like a founder
- Empower employees
- Only hire people better than you
- Don’t confuse career development with performance management
- Focus on both ends of the team: the best and worst employees
- Be both frugal and generous
- Unfair pay
- Nudge this translation is crap
- The more capable, the higher the expectations
- Enjoy your work
After finishing the book my basic thoughts are:
- Damn, foreigners’ English is fluent
- Worthy of being Google. Some things only they can do like this. Scale effects are powerful.
- Before bragging, first you have to become awesome.
Hiring in the Book
The first few chapters all focus on hiring.
The author talks about a truth everyone agrees with:
interviews can’t accurately measure a person’s level.
So as a solution they adopt
hire the top 10% of talent, this way even if they perform poorly, they’ll only be mid-level.
Reading here,
I always have a feeling of I’ll buy the most expensive ingredients, that way the dishes I make won’t taste too bad
— the wasteful feeling…
Big companies really are big companies… (with bittersweet, jealous feelings
The author also talks about a term
called Exploding Offer still a crappy translation
Saying they give interview candidates offers with deadlines,
like if you don’t accept our offer by next Wednesday, it expires.
This way of giving offers is excellent from the company and management angle,
because controllable risk, prevents people from job-shopping while sitting on it.
But for individuals,
the author also feels this way of giving offers isn’t perfect.
I’m using “also” here
because I also feel this way of giving offers isn’t perfect.
Besides these,
the author also talks about some fun points:
- Interviews must maintain consistent standards, ideally using structured test questions
- No one likes the existing performance evaluation system, including HR.
- Even fewer people like any new performance evaluation system.
- In an organization, more often it’s a power-law distribution, not a Gaussian distribution.
In summary,
this book can be read for leisure.
There are quite a few stories in it,
but the methodologies inside might not be applicable to everyone.
After all, all these together make up Google’s unique culture,
just like the unique Valve culture in the Valve employee handbook.