Insofar as both Google and EA are quite range-restricted in terms of people having very high intelligence, conscientiousness, & openness, organizational behavior lessons from the former might transfer to the latter, if they’re empirically solid.
I would quibble with your claim that Google doesn’t select much on ‘conscientiousness in the Big Five sense of hardworkingness or orderliness’. I think there’s a tendency of people who are moderately high on conscientiousness to compare themselves to the most driven, workaholic, ambitious people they know, and to feel like they fall short of what they could be doing.
However, everyone who’s taught students at a large state university (like me), or managed a business, or hired contractors to renovate a house, will be better-calibrated to the full range of conscientiousness out there in the population. Compared to that distribution, I would bet that almost everybody selected to work at Google will be in the top 10% of conscientiousness—if only because they’re often selected partly for achieving high GPAs at elite universities where you have to work pretty hard to get good grades.
Also, computer programming requires a very high level of conscientiousness. The six main facets of conscientiousness are ‘Competence, Order, Dutifulness, Achievement Striving, Self-Discipline, and Deliberation’. Serious coding requires basically all of these—whereas incompetent, disorganized, slapdash, unmotivated, undisciplined, and unthoughtful programmers simply won’t write good code. This also fits with Simon Baron-Cohen’s observation that coders tend to be much stronger on ‘Systemizing’ than on ‘Empathizing’—and systemizing seems closely related to detail-oriented conscientiousness.
Linch—these are mostly fair points.
Insofar as both Google and EA are quite range-restricted in terms of people having very high intelligence, conscientiousness, & openness, organizational behavior lessons from the former might transfer to the latter, if they’re empirically solid.
I would quibble with your claim that Google doesn’t select much on ‘conscientiousness in the Big Five sense of hardworkingness or orderliness’. I think there’s a tendency of people who are moderately high on conscientiousness to compare themselves to the most driven, workaholic, ambitious people they know, and to feel like they fall short of what they could be doing.
However, everyone who’s taught students at a large state university (like me), or managed a business, or hired contractors to renovate a house, will be better-calibrated to the full range of conscientiousness out there in the population. Compared to that distribution, I would bet that almost everybody selected to work at Google will be in the top 10% of conscientiousness—if only because they’re often selected partly for achieving high GPAs at elite universities where you have to work pretty hard to get good grades.
Also, computer programming requires a very high level of conscientiousness. The six main facets of conscientiousness are ‘Competence, Order, Dutifulness, Achievement Striving, Self-Discipline, and Deliberation’. Serious coding requires basically all of these—whereas incompetent, disorganized, slapdash, unmotivated, undisciplined, and unthoughtful programmers simply won’t write good code. This also fits with Simon Baron-Cohen’s observation that coders tend to be much stronger on ‘Systemizing’ than on ‘Empathizing’—and systemizing seems closely related to detail-oriented conscientiousness.