Blitzscaling 08: Eric Schmidt on Structuring Teams and Scaling Google
Why Hacker News recommends it
Cited as a first-hand source for how Google's leadership thought about hiring, organization and the Alphabet restructuring.
What it is
Stanford Blitzscaling class session where Reid Hoffman interviews Eric Schmidt about structuring teams and scaling Google. Topics include Alphabet, hiring, and how Chrome and Android operated inside the company.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2016 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Recommends simonpure · 2016-08 · on “Alphabet is still figuring out how to be a conglomerate”
Eric shared some of his thoughts shortly after announcing Alphabet at Stanford's Technology-enabled Blitzscaling class if you're interested in some of the motivation and types of problems they're trying to solve with it [0] [0] [this video]
Cites us0r · 2016-01 · on “Trying to interview Larry Page”
I was watching a video[0] the other day and Eric Schmidt said since the Playboy interview they have not given any more. [this video]
Cites elmar · 2017-07 · on “SoundCloud's Collapse”
I heard in a lecture of Blitzscaling with Eric Schmidt that google founders got the Google Chrome and Android projects running inside google without him knowing the real breath and intentions of the projects. [this video]
Cites mpweiher · 2021-05 · on “Objective-S: architecture-oriented language based on Smalltalk and Objective-C”
It is hard to encapsulate what is unique about a language in a pithy one-liner. This one is the best I could come up with so far. And yes, I am also annoyed by hyperbolic claims and titles, for example I remember a paper claiming a "Language for Cloud Services" (not sure whether they specifically mentioned AWS). Turned out to be a minimalistic FP language with rudimentary concurrency support. Applicability to cloud services was an obvious extension left to the reader. Grmph. > Is it really true? Yes, I believe it is true. It has taken me many years to figure this out, and I realise that it is highly non-obvious to the point of being startling and yes, seemingly over-the-top. The "About" expl
Cites mpweiher · 2021-05 · on “Why are there no return statements in Objective-S?”
This implies there's something else that's not "procedures/calls" out there, i.e. subroutines. What else is there, can we name one of them? Subdividing a big problem into a set of smaller problems is not just some specific way of programming, it's not even a specific way of factoring a system. It's universal, as in the entire Universe essentially is factored this way. We have areas of "widening" cohesion and coupling (implementation) and areas of "narrowing" cohesion and coupling (interfaces, incl. argument/return types). These occur both horizontally and vertically as we move towards smaller and smaller problems to solve. Your actual CPU works this way, itself. So I'm very curious what we'r
Cites rkk3 · 2021-06 · on “Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?”
Google famously only hired people with elite education credentials in the beginning. "We also didn't want to hire anyone from what were considered lesser universities" Eric Schmidt [this video]
Cites fnikacevic · 2024-01 · on “Mourning Google”
The perception of autonomy at Google was somewhat marketing. In reality the company was extremely rigorous and top down. They used the perception to hire the creative genius types they wanted. Eric Schmidt (Former CEO of Google) discusses it here: [this video]