Is Google Focusing On The Wrong Kinds Of Smarts?
from the getting-cocky? dept
Google has done an excellent job hiring a lot of very, very smart people, and giving them quite a bit of freedom to come up with new ideas for the company. However, some are beginning to wonder if the company is starting to get too focused on technical smarts, without the corresponding business smarts. Almost all of the talk about hiring at Google focuses on hiring the smartest engineers around. As the article suggests, Google appears to be acting as if their technology innovation will keep them ahead, and paying less attention to the need for business model innovation. That may or may not be true. Certainly Google does get a lot of publicity for its ways of hiring engineers, but that's because there are ways to give tricky engineering/math problems to candidates to see how they perform. It's not so easy to do the same thing with prospective business employees (though, you could ask some basic business model questions, and some still believe that consulting style interview questions are good for showing business sense as well). While Google may lean a bit heavily towards the engineering side, it still seems like they have plenty of people with strong business sense as well. In fact, many of the decisions they've made so far have suggested Google's done an especially good job on the business side as well. They tend to make business decisions that make better long-term strategic sense, rather than the short-term, desperation moves so many companies make when their business staff can't think more than a single step out.
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