It makes no sense to compare Givewell and Google. Alphabet has around 130,000 employees. Givewell has what, a few dozen? Obviously organizational dysfunction grows with size. Givewell should be compared to small firms and other small non-profits. Now everyone recognizes that even big companies probably could be much more efficient and Google in particular has got extremely fat and lazy off the back of the massive profitability of search—hence why it keeps buying interesting things only to fail to do anything with them and then kill them, so that should also be factored in.
Google, quite frankly, are also in a position to set terms in the hiring marketplace. They can fuck people around and frankly will always have an endless stream of quality talent wanting to go work there anyway. Givewell, by contrast, is going to be reliant on its own reputation and that of the wider of the EA movement to attract the people it wants. It is not in the same position and reputation matters.
I spent quite a bit of time last year looking into the hiring processes/recommendations of various big companies, and Google was generally the one I came away most impressed/convinced by, in terms of how much I expect their hiring decisions to correlate with employee quality. I’d actually claim it’s much better than most other companies (of any size), and probably has had a positive influence on hiring as a whole through people copying their processes.
I’m not convinced it needs to take as long as it does, and that might be evidence of bloat/ dysfunction. But other than that, I don’t think Google’s hiring process is dysfunctional.
It makes no sense to compare Givewell and Google. Alphabet has around 130,000 employees. Givewell has what, a few dozen? Obviously organizational dysfunction grows with size. Givewell should be compared to small firms and other small non-profits. Now everyone recognizes that even big companies probably could be much more efficient and Google in particular has got extremely fat and lazy off the back of the massive profitability of search—hence why it keeps buying interesting things only to fail to do anything with them and then kill them, so that should also be factored in.
Google, quite frankly, are also in a position to set terms in the hiring marketplace. They can fuck people around and frankly will always have an endless stream of quality talent wanting to go work there anyway. Givewell, by contrast, is going to be reliant on its own reputation and that of the wider of the EA movement to attract the people it wants. It is not in the same position and reputation matters.
I spent quite a bit of time last year looking into the hiring processes/recommendations of various big companies, and Google was generally the one I came away most impressed/convinced by, in terms of how much I expect their hiring decisions to correlate with employee quality. I’d actually claim it’s much better than most other companies (of any size), and probably has had a positive influence on hiring as a whole through people copying their processes.
I’m not convinced it needs to take as long as it does, and that might be evidence of bloat/ dysfunction. But other than that, I don’t think Google’s hiring process is dysfunctional.