CS183C Session 8: Eric Schmidt

&quot;I went to Novell under the mistaken goal of being a CEO. I didn’t do the due diligence, and if I had, I wouldn’t have gone. Our basic goal was to get out with our professional reputations intact and not end up in jail. The books were cooked, and people were frauds. But it turns out you can overcome that, and the skills I developed helped at Google.&quot;<p>I&#x27;m quite surprised that he would say something like that in public. I understand that this is a transcript made in a class in which Eric Schmidt was being interviewed. I know the chances are slim, but can anyone confirm that he really said this?

&gt; At Novell, we had what I called “glue” people. They sit at the boundaries, and help everyone work together.<p>What does he mean by this? Social people that make a good environment? Or generalist that know a bit of everything?<p>&gt; You don’t hire generic people — you hire people who have had stress and achievement.<p>Isn&#x27;t this bias inducing towards good storytellers?<p>&gt; Once we decided to review all the tactics, we put in a scoring system. Sergey said, the problem is, these scores are biased.<p>How does google evaluate performance?

&gt; 6 months after we went to auctions, we had to merge three different databases. I asked if I should be in the datacenter, and the engineers said, what are you talking about, we never go to the datacenter.<p>Hah! Good one. The best datacenter is one you never see, and never have to see.<p>However it does make me wonder if Schmidt knows less about software than I thought he might. The random scattered mentions of machine learning present the same image. Then again, I assume this is a person taking notes which are snippets of conversation potentially out of context.

&gt; Q: Hiring? &gt; A: One of our rules was, we don’t want to hire your friends. Another rule was not to hire people from “lesser” universities. Another rule was to only hire people with good GPAs. It was frustrating, but it meant that we ended up with a lot of really smart people from great universities, and that served us well.<p>I wonder what led to Google changing their minds and not considering the GPA as a part of hiring decisions.

&quot;Gnome&quot; is actually Noam Shazeer

&gt; The teams are far larger than they should be. It’s a failure of architecture — the programmers don’t have the right libraries. I hope that machine learning will fix that problem.<p>This may have been a transcription error, but as written I can&#x27;t make sense of it. Can anyone else?

That last part about antitrust is weird. European (antitrust) law is biased against large companies? Huh.

Does anybody know why the playboy interview put the IPO in jeopardy?

Definitely looking forward to watching the video.

This is filled with punctuation errors. When I saw the first one, I just regarded it as a typo and kept reading. But it wasn&#x27;t a typo, which is annoying—it&#x27;s as if this interview was done by someone allergic to question marks.