Moore was right. It’s over the top.
But playful office design alone does not make a company exciting. Google Cambridge is the number one medium company in this year’s Top Places to Work survey because employees believe they are among the brightest minds in technology, working together in a supportive environment to change the way the world communicates.
Across the globe, the Google talent pool is legendary, with ground-breaking developers, Ivy League brainiacs, and plenty of millionaires.
Moore, who joined Google soon after it expanded to Massachusetts almost six years ago, recalled hiring some of its first engineers and saying they were the best he’d ever recruited. And then he’d hire some more - and they seemed like the best.
Google’s approach to getting that talent is the stuff of technology lore.
“Raw intellectual horsepower is important here, but I don’t think people should see that as the only thing that could get you here,’’ said Todd Carlisle, Google’s director of staffing, who works at its corporate headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.
Google’s hiring process is exhaustive. For software engineers, it involves solving hard problems (on white boards and in real time) and five in-person interviews (mostly conducted by other engineers) once you clear an initial phone conversation. The idea is to involve other Googlers, who will help hire other sharp, creative people.
As you might expect from a company whose dominant product - Internet searches - is driven by algorithms, the decision on the number of interviews was data-driven, said Carlisle. In Google’s early days, prospective hires could face more than 10 different interviews.
And questions can be real mind-benders; according to one book about Google interviews, candidates might be asked to describe a chicken using programming language, or to design an evacuation plan for San Francisco.
