Vacuum - Edward Vielmetti in Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104

on interviewing at Google

Some comments from a private list I'm on full of smart people re interviewing at Google, paraphrased:

1. Don't even apply if you want to have a private office with a door; even the VPs have double offices.
2. If you want to build the next great new Web 2.0 thing, go build it, you don't need Google for that.
3. If you want to telecommute then Google is not your place.

All seem like sound advice, and in some sense very similar to the sorts of interview advice I'd give to anyone working at any rocket-ship Internet company (these would have all worked for Cisco back in the day).

Technorati Tags: GOOG, google, teh-googe

Event promotion with Twitter and Google Calendar "Quick Add"

Here's a recipe for promoting your event using a combination of Twitter and Google Calendar.

1. Make some friends on twitter. BE MY TWITTERFREND PLEEZ
2. The recipe for events is to enter "what", "who", "where" and "when".
3. You are writing for both a Twitter audience and for data entry.
4. Please test by cut and paste into Google Calendar "quick add".

What:
5. Put the URL if any in the what part of the event; that becomes event title.

6. Include a #hashtag or @reference in the text to refer to something.

Who:
7. Use both a Twitter @name and a real name in the who part for maximum visibility.

Where:
8. The where clause is preceded by the word "at".
9. If Google Calendar can't geolocate the phrase, it turns this clause into a search. Be creative.
10. You are indexing into Google Map's Community Maps and you can put more information there.

When:
10. Be careful with relative days (today, next week) to avoid confusion when these are seen later.

To be done:
11: build a bot that reads a twitter stream and autopopulates a Google Calendar with events.

UPDATE: a2events calendar via a search at Terraminds. @bkerr is threatening a public google calendar (the #11 TBD).

Technorati Tags: annarbor, arbcamp, calendar, googlecalendar, library, parser, quick-add, twitter

Seth Godin presentation at Google - he's coming to Ann Arbor May 22 2007

Seth Godin is coming to Ann Arbor on May 22 - see the Connect Ann Arbor blog for details. Here's a video of a presentation he gave to Google last year which has almost a quarter of a million page views.

Worth noting is that the talk is closed captioned - so you can look at it and listen to it even with the sound turned down low and still make out what he's saying.

Technorati Tags: seth-godin, 48104, annarbor, may-22, michigan-theater, downtown, the-dip, books

Grady Burnett to speak at Good Morning Livingston, Feb 13 2007

Quoted in its entirety; links are my own.

Google speaker set for Tuesday
By Jim Totten
DAILY PRESS & ARGUS

Those who want to get the latest update on one of the hottest companies in the nation shouldn't miss the Good Morning Livingston breakfast on Tuesday.

Reservations are still being accepted for the event, which will feature Grady Burnett, head of online sales and operations for Google's Ann Arbor branch, as the keynote speaker. The popular breakfast event is sponsored by the Howell Area Chamber of Commerce.

Pat Convery, chamber president, said Google's presence in Washtenaw County will affect Livingston County. She said existing residents might be interested in working at Google's Ann Arbor location, and those who move to Michigan for jobs at the Google offices might purchase a home in Livingston County.

Convery said residents are "interested in the success of this company and the innovation it's brought."

She figured those who attend the breakfast want to learn how Michigan can be more of a part of the company's success.

Burnett's talk will focus on Google's plans for its new location — hiring and recruitment, a description of what the Ann Arbor division will do and a segment on what Google does beyond its role as a search engine.

The monthly breakfast event typically attracts 100-180 people, and has featured politicians, economists and business leaders in the past. Convery said the program — organized in the late 1990s — is a popular networking opportunity.

Contact Daily Press & Argus reporter Jim Totten at (517) 548-7088 or at jtotten@gannett.com.

Grady Burnett, head of online sales and operations for Google's Ann Arbor branch, is the keynote speaker at the Howell Area Chamber of Commerce's Good Morning Livingston breakfast at 7:30 a.m. Tuesday at Crystal Gardens banquet center, 5768 E. Grand River Ave. in Genoa Township. Tickets are $15 in advance or $20 at the door for chamber members, or $25 for nonmembers. Call (517) 546-3920 for more information on the program.

a2b3 for Jan 25, 2007: Pfizer, Google's new tubes, interview season

A reminder that this morning is the a2b3 meeting for the week at Eastern Accents. I'll put notes here after the meeting. Possible topics include the Pfizer Ann Arbor closing and the installation of a series of tubes at the new Google Ann Arbor office. (As viscous platypus notes, "All that traffic requires large tubes"). It's also starting to be Google interview season as spring graduation gets closer. See you there!

a2b3 1/11/07 non-summary

I'm blogging this in part because of the Yahoo Groups / U of Michigan email snafu mentioned earlier.

The weekly a2b3 meeting happened today as it does every Thursday at Eastern Accents. You're invited.

In attendance: Lance Carlson, Mohan Kartha, Jose Nazario, Ron Suarez, Jim Schuler, Laura Fisher, Derek Mehraban, Dan Cooney, Jeff Stanislow, Hali Sund, Brian Kerr, and Don Blumenthal. (all links to LinkedIn profiles) and your host Edward Vielmetti.

Topics covered in no particular order of importance: Page Packer pocketmod layout program for Mac, automated social calendar aggregation, Calendar Swamp blog by Scott Mace, the Arbor Update calendar via upcoming.org , iPhone vs. Nintendo DS, the state of Wireless Washtenaw, how much an iPhone would fetch on eBay, iPhone as the second coming of the Newton. There was more, but I was taking notes on one page of a pocketmod so there wasn't that much room, and the table was long enough that there were two or three simultaneous digressions.

We concluded collectively that we wouldn't give up our Moleskines, Nintendo DS's, pedometers, Hipster PDAs, Blackberries, or simple but rugged candybar phones for an iPhone, but Mohan was certain that the Treo he loathes was going to give way to an iPhone. Ooh, shiny!

I talked about plans for a weekly Thursday call through my new employer, Ann Arbor internet search engine marketing firm Pure Visibility to talk about weblogs, tools to manage them and productive approaches for using them commercially - look for more details of that for a 1/18 launch. 2p Eastern, 11a Pacific. Email me if you're interested. Space is limited, order yours today, operators are standing by, but wait there's more etc.

Google interview process is changing

From tonight's New York Times feed on the Google hiring process:

As a result, [Laszlo] Bock, who joined Google from General Electric last spring, has been trying to make the company’s rigorous screening process more efficient. Until now, head hunters said, Google largely turned up its nose at engineers who had less than a 3.7 grade-point average. (Those who wanted to sell ads could get by with a 3.0 average, head hunters said.) And it often would take two months to consider candidates, submitting them to more than half a dozen interviews.

Unfortunately, most of the academic research suggests that the factors Google has put the most weight on — grades and interviews — are not an especially reliable way of hiring good people.

“Interviews are a terrible predictor of performance,” Mr. Bock said.

Replacing GPAs and interviews is a new survey instrument designed by Todd Carlisle. The initial prototypes of the survey checked to see if you owned a dog (not a good indicator of performance) or if you started a club in high school.

But Dr. Carlisle was able to create several surveys that he believed would help find candidates in several areas — engineering, sales, finance, and human resources. Currently about 15 percent of applicants take the survey; it will be used for all applicants starting this month.

This post from Todd Raphael on "Horsing Around at Google" refers to Google's "staffing analytics" department:

He'll be looking at what traits successful current employees have, and what lessons can be learned from those people (Did they attend Purdue and work at Microsoft for at least five years? Did they major in music?) that will help Google select new ones.

"We have more jobs, more locations," Carlisle says. "How do you know if they fit?"

Pinpointing local search results

Here's some tips for improving your search results when you're looking for businesses or resources in a particular location. So many times you want to find something nearby to where you actually are or are going to be, and the Page One hit from Google for the term you're looking for isn't precise enough.

1. Include the zip code in your search term. Not all zips are the same size, and you might have to hunt around for a few of them when you are trying to cover odd geographies, but when this works it works really well. Google search for e.g. "car wash 48104" returns at the top a link to a map of car washes near 48104 from Google Maps. The ads that are running there look like they are aimed at owners of car wash businesses. These white page listings have categories, and so you can construct searches that result in page like this map of public libraries near 49855 (Marquette, MI).

2. Search on Mapquest by category rather than by business name. Here's a similar search for libraries near 49855 on Mapquest, and it unearths a few places that the public libraries search doesn't touch (e.g. the library at the National Ski Hall of Fame in Ishpeming, MI). Note that category names are coming from a fixed list (a controlled vocabulary) so some experimentation to see what terms your index uses might be in order.

3. Search on Yahoo Local. It shows maps of search results, and includes user reviews in the listings. (Of course, these reviews can be gamed, but there aren't 100s of them like Amazon and so at the moment I tend to mostly believe them.) A search for libraries near Grayling, MI (a typical stopping point on our car trips, and I'd like to have a place to go better than McDonalds) unearthed a recommendation for the Frederic Community Library -

I love to read and I find it very nice that we have a library so close. My Grandchildren always look forward to going there too. If there is ever a book Sandy doesn't have in the library she will call all around and find it for you. I go to the library usually weekly and it is always a nice atmosphere there. Sandy is always friendly and ready to help in any way. Thanks again for the great library in our little town.

4. Business Week has a story - Fine-Tuning Local Search - about Skyhook Wireless's location-pinpointing service and their Loki search engine that looks for things based on where you are now. A May 2006 review of Loki by jeepx wasn't thrilled about the search engine itself, and since it's Windows only I've never tried it myself. It claims to search for things based on where you are now, but really as these examples show you it's almost always at least as useful to search for things based on where you aspire to be (or where you're going to be in the next couple of days when you're traveling).

I still haven't figured out how to do proximity searches over a long stretch of highway, short of finding someone who has already done the work for that route. You'd think there would be travel planner / route planner / map directions tools that offered the easy way to do searches along the route, e.g. "find me a good vegetarian restaurant somewhere between Ann Arbor and Chicago within 15 miles of the Interstate", but it turns out that you have to stumble through three pages of listings with that kind of imprecise search to find a blog entry like Vegan Diva's Food on Our Trip where she recommends the Kalamazoo People's Food Coop as a place to go (grocery store, not restaurant, but closer than the typical roadside Big Boy).

Search log analysis for 9 November 2006

A sample of some recent searches on this blog, with my best take at answers.

cornell style notes - my entry on doing cornell notes in my Moleskine, the 43 Folders wiki page, and the recently updated Notalon editor specifically designed for taking Cornell Notes.

average drive time pittsburgh to ann arbor - about 5 hours (one hour to Ohio, three hours to Toledo, one hour to Ann Arbor. More if you stop along the way to let your kids run around in the spiffy Ohio Turnpike rest stops. Stop in Toledo at Friendly's or Beaners, and check Brewed Fresh Daily for local news and coffee around Cleveland.

pedometer of choice - Omron HJ-112 ($20 from Amazon), using Walker Tracker to keep tabs. I hit one million steps counted at the end of August and am closing in on the second million.

michigan house election totals 2006 - the 2006 Unofficial Michigan General Election Results - State Representative has district by district, county by county details. I don't have a concise, condensed single page with all winners and totals handy, but you could make up one from these results.

grady burnett - 107.1's Martin Bandyke interviews Grady Burnett of Google, Ann Arbor and John Hogan, the Ann Arbor Ad Club President. It was heard Thursday, Oct-12 on Martin's AM show. The entire interview can be heard here without radio edits.

train or bus ann arbor to marquette mi - by Greyhound, $109 one way leaving at 9:00am and arriving 3:45am the next day via Chicago. Alternatively, take Amtrak to Chicago, stay the night, and take the 7:20am Chicago to Marquette bus which arrives at 6:50pm. Better yet, check out one of the Facebook groups for Yoopers like Yoopers are people too, and post a ride wanted item there.

Laszlo Bock: Google hiring process is changing

From the Wall Street Journal online:

This past March, the Mountain View, Calif., company brought in a new head of human resources, former General Electric Co. executive Laszlo Bock, who also worked at the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. Under Mr. Bock, Google launched a large-scale survey of current employees, seeking to identify the factors that correlate with success at the company. "Everything works if you're trying to hire 500 people a year or 1,000," says Mr. Bock, 33 years old. But "we're hiring much larger numbers than that, and so it forces us to go back and say...what do we need to change in the way we interface with our candidates?"

One initiative Google has already undertaken is reducing the number of interviews. Mr. Bock says each candidate offered a job by Google went through 5.1 in-person interviews on average in June, down from 6.2 at the beginning of the year. (A veteran tech recruiter says five to eight interviews is probably about average for Silicon Valley.) Google is also considering requiring staff members who interview candidates to submit their assessments within a week of the interview; right now, there's no strict deadline.

You missed your $90 chance to spend time with Laszlo Bock at a charity auction:

Item Number: 21

Estimated Value: $90.00

Description: I will provide 90 minutes of case interview practice. At the winner's preference, we can also spend the time discussing behavioral interviews, what consulting firms look for, resume preparation, how to get noticed at receptions, etc. I was an Engagement Manager at McKinsey's Stamford, CT, office (1999-2003), and led McKinsey's recruiting efforts at SOM for much of that time. While at SOM, I interviewed with about 15 consulting firms and had a 100% offer rate.

Special Instructions: Practice session can be by phone or in person (strongly recommend in person). If in person, we can meet at my office in Danbury, CT. At your preference, we can do two 45-minute sessions. Can also have more than one person at the session ... whatever's best for you. Located at Table 9.

Live Event: After the online close, this item will be going to a Live Event for further bidding.

Donated By:
Laszlo Bock (Yale SOM '99)