Wednesday, December 06, 2006

It's all about scarcity of resources

There has been rumours going on for quite sometime that Google has started to lower their requirements to new hires(unfortunately I cannot remember where;)), but as it is apparant from this article it seems that Google still have some of the "smartest guys in the room". Nevertheless, as it is apparent from the citation below to many smart people may cause problems...

Every company wants to hire the smartest people possible, and Google has clearly succeeded. But you know what you get when you get too many smart people in one room? You get the corporate equivalent of the U.S. Olympic basketball team.

Think about it: there can only be one smartest person in every room. There are dozens of trophy hires and incredibly smart, entrepreneurial minds buried inside Google who are fast-becoming frustrated with their inability to accomplish anything. And while Google motors along, minting money with its AdSense and AdWords programs, these brilliant minds are getting antsy.

Armed with seven-figure bank accounts and professional networks of dozens of other equally brilliant and rich new friends, those frustrated Googlers are bound to
set out on their own and ignite a son-of-Google wave of innovation.

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Sunday, November 05, 2006

Supply and Demand: Lebanese version

From NYT:

BEIRUT, Lebanon, Nov. 1 — This is a city of nightclubs, but the nightlife is something else these days, and not just because of the feverish edge sharpened by the war last summer.
By 8 p.m., women in their 20s and early 30s are prowling in packs of five and six, casting meaningful glances at any and all passing men. In the bars the women dance for hours — often on top of the bar — and legs, midriffs, bare shoulders and barely covered bosoms are offered for public admiration.

Samir Khalaf, a professor of sociology at the American University of Beirut, said the
scene astonished his American colleagues. “They are just shocked,” he said. “ ‘This is Lebanon, the Middle East?’ they say. They can’t stop talking about all the belly buttons, about all these highly eroticized bodies. You see it everywhere here, this combination of consumerism and postmodernism and female competition.”
For a few weeks twice a year, after Ramadan and before Christmas, thousands of Lebanon’s young men return from jobs abroad — and run smack into one of the world’s most aggressive cultures of female display. Young women of means have spent weeks primping and planning how to sift through as many men as possible in the short time available. The austere month of Ramadan ended a week ago.
The country’s high rate of unemployment pushes the young men to seek work elsewhere, sometimes in Western countries like France and Canada, but mainly in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and the other oil states on the Persian Gulf. The women, inhibited by family pressures, are generally left behind. “The demographic reality is truly alarming,” Professor Khalaf said. “There are no jobs for university graduates, and with the boys leaving, the sex ratios are simply out of control. It is now almost five to one: five young girls for every young man. When men my sons’ age come back to Lebanon, they can’t keep the girls from leaping at
them.”

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