Their point: Yahoo made about 1 million euros per worker from Yahoo France alone last year, and used to hype how "it's important to have [locally] concentrated engineering activities... to innovate" in France, where it would base "one of [its] most important centers in Europe." Yahoo France's engineers will now stop working until Yahoo agrees that they shouldn't have to stop working. At least they're fact checking the internet company's hype along the way.

Sent in by the friend of an ultimately unsuccessful Google applicant, the test was supposed to be completed by the applicant within three days. It asks for a response to an imaginary request from an imaginary Google manager, for an analysis of whether the company — "Poogle," not Google, mind you — can hire 750 engineers in six months to launch a new product within 12 months (click to enlarge):

This is a terrible question. The only issue is whether it is an intentional one, designed to test the applicant.

It's terrible because doubling the number of engineers on the sort of product Google makes — software — emphatically does not make it ship faster, certainly not within the first six months of their work, and certainly not at the scale of 750 engineers.

This has been widely understood among software managers since the publication of Frederick Brooks' Mythical Man Month in 1975. As blogger and former Microsoftie Joel Spolsky summarized the thesis 25 years later:

When you add more programmers to a late project, it gets even later. That's because when you have n programmers on a team, the number of communication paths is n(n-1)/2, which grows at O(n2).

From Mythical Man Month:

Men and months are interchangeable commodities only when a task can be partitioned among many workers with no communication among them. This is true for... picking cotton; it is not even approximately true of systems programming.

When a task cannot be partitioned because of sequential constraints, the application of more effort has no effect on the schedule. The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many woman are assigned...

Since software construction is inherently a systems effort — an exercise in complex interrelationships — communication effort is great, and it quickly dominates the decrease in individual task time brought about by partitioning. Adding more men then lengthens, not shortens, the schedule.

Even when a software team can benefit from some organic growth (as opposed to Poogle's doubling), it's going to take on the order of six months just to get the new people up to speed on the existing code base and trained in corporate peculiarities, which at Google are significant due to the scale at which it operates (Ken Thompson, legendary co-creator of the Unix operating system and inventor of Google's new Go programming language, still isn't allowed to check in code there, having failed to jump through the requisite hoops, he recently said in the book Coders at Work ).

So "Poogle" shouldn't be asking whether it needs to hire more recruiters to add 750 new programmers to "Product X" in six months; it should be asking whether the feature list for Product X should be trimmed, the deadline lengthened or a subset of it easily split off into Product Y.

But maybe Google is asking candidates to come up with that answer on their own. Whoops.

Supporting documents supplied as tabs to the test:

This one goes on; we've cut it off:

(Top pic: Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Getty.)

Google VP Bradley Horowitz (pictured) explained things at the annual Supernova conference in San Francisco the other day. He said the company intentionally (and selflessly!) leaves some brainpower outside its walls, according to the Register.

"I recently had a discussion with an engineer at Google and I pointed out a handful of people that I thought were fruitful in the industry and I proposed that we should hire these people...

But [the engineer] stopped me and said: 'These people are actually important to have outside of Google. They're very Google people that have the right philosophies around these things, and it's important that we not hire these guys. It's better for the ecosystem to have an honest industry, as opposed to aggregating all this talent at Google.'"

This is very generous of Google, given that it hires "the world's best engineers" via a grueling interview process, complete with quizzes. Some of its best employees had to short-circuit the system, but that only makes it more perfect, right?

Thankfully, Google is using this system for good, rather than evil, by turning down job prospects, for being too awesome. Now that's Christmas spirit: It's a sort of gift to the world. Not to the possible hires, of course, but in this economy they'll be working for an awesome company like Google in no time, right??

(Pic by Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten)

And that's among so-called "movers and shakers;" life might be even tougher on the rank and file. On the one hand, they get copious and diverse free snacks, food from the likes of David Chang and a very competitive salary. But on the other, there's the chaos that results from Google digesting acquisitions like DoubleClick and losing top executives like former ad chief Tim Armstrong. Some of the purported fallout, gleaned from the gossip in Business Insider's post:

• Advertising VP Penry Price is said to have lost power when Armstrong left and to be "looking for a way out."
• Mike Steib, director of emerging platforms, supposedly lost an internal power struggle. One source told BI: "It wouldn't suprise me to see him leave after a while."
  
• Director of media platforms Eileen Naughton won that aforementioned power strugle but supposedly wants to leave because she "thinks it's a crazy place and wants to get the hell out of there."
  
• Google's first Gotham engineer, Engineering Director Craig Nevill-Manning, is so rich, presumably on Google options, that people wonder if he'd rather be "traveling around in Africa having a fun time."
  
• M&A guy Jason Harinstein is said to be "poachable."

So there you have it: Google is a tough place to work in part because of the distracting wealth you earn there and because the awesome job offers you get as a result of working there. Sounds unbearable.

(Pic: Google New York, by Eddie Codel)

The UC Santa Cruz job is no accident; it was made possible by a donation from the Dead themselves. And it's not just drug bands spreading counterculture good fortune these days:

• Amid mass journalism layoffs, a new hippie-friendly type of gig has opened up: Pot reviewer. Denver's alt weekly went looking for just such a fellow, to serve the booming local market for "medical" marijuana.
  
• Grungy well-heeled young music fans made this year's Coachella music festival a "super happy" success. Far out for concert organizers who refused to grow up and get a "real job!"
• Vegan animal activist Jane Velez-Mitchell has a hit show over on CNN's Headline News and can now aspire to the even greater level of success attained by left-wing-radio-host-turned-MSNBC-anchor (and fellow lesbian) Rachel Maddow. (Maddow was a Rhodes scholar, putting her on the high achieving side of hippiedom.)
  
• The White House installed an organic garden under lobbying from Alice Waters, delivering a PR victory to the restaurateur derided as a hippie "dreamer" on national television just days earlier.
  
• In San Francisco, the sort of company that holds "naked" meetings and makes decisions through unanimous consensus is now showered with VC cash.
  
• A protest marcher from a hippie college changed his name to the militant "Barack" from the placid "Barry" and was soon elected president of these United States.
  
• If you advocate turning your cat vegan or making men pee while sitting down, for the environment, the New York Times will publish your op-ed, these days.

And all this time you thought "get a job" was the ultimate way to insult a hippie. Who's laughing now, straight edge??

(Pic via)

Here's a rundown of some of the more promising names in child-labor media. Some of the names will probably look familiar to you, since these kids are famous. Far more famous than most media hacks. In other words, they're coming for your job, loudly.

The Dating Advice Kid

Name: Alec Greven

Age: 10

Summary: His dating-advice book How To Talk To Girls is supposed to become a movie; he now reportedly plans How To Talk To Moms, How To Talk To Dads, How To Talk To Santa and How To Talk To Grandparents. Original publisher HarperCollins is presumably working with him on all of the followups.

More: Here's video of young Alec.

British Blog Boy Wonder

Name: Scott Campbell

Age: 14

Summary: Started British news website, contributes to BBC and various newspapers

More: Campbell is CEO of Net News Daily; with co-founder and editor-in-chief Nathan Adam, he claims 100,000 unique visitors per month, and has scored freelance gigs with the BBC (left) and writes a regular column for the newspaper First News. Asked earlier this year in a Guardian profile how the economic downturn was affecting his business, he said, "I'm 13, so therefore don't have a lot to lose in the financial crisis."

The Lil' Food Critic

Name: David Fishman

Age: 12

Summary: Aspiring food critic profiled in the New York Times; his Upper West Side New York tablehopping has been optioned by Lorne Michaels for a movie.

More: "As I left, I knew that soon enough this would be one of the most ‘hip' places in the city."

(Image via Rachel Ray)

The Pint-Sized Political Pundit

Name: Jonathan Krohn

Age: 13

Summary: Talk-radio regular and self-published author became a smash hit when he spoke at the CPAC right-wing convention.

More: The home-schooled youth practiced public speaking at Christian Youth Theater plays and calling in to Bill Bennett's radio show. Has appeared on CBS News and Today. His endorsement was sought by a Georgia gubernatorial candidate.

Barack Obama's Journalist 'Homeboy'

Name: Damon Weaver

Age: 11

Summary: A successful quest to interview President Barack Obama made him the talk of cable news.

More: After ending an earlier interview with vice presidential contender Joe Biden with, "Senator Biden is now my homeboy," got permission from Obama to also be the president's "homeboy." Has completed such other White House Press Corps rites of passage as attending the inauguration on a media pass and dissing an MSNBC talking head.

The Teenaged Tech Titan

Name: Daniel Brusilovsky

Age: 16

Summary: Founder and CEO, TeensInTech.com; product evangelist for video-casting service Qik; writer for TechCruch; has 120,000 followers on his "Verified" Twitter account.

More: He's an adviser to at least two companies; his parents used to shuttle him to and from tech conferences; says you should be persistent to reach your goals. More here.

(Pic by Randy Stewart)

That's according to Peter Norvig (pictured), Google's director of research, former Google director of search quality and former head of the Computational Sciences division at the NASA Ames research center. Here's what Norvig tells Peter Seibel in a Q&A in the new book Coders at Work (emphasis added):

One of the interesting things we've found, when trying to predict how well somebody we've hired is going to perform when we evaluate them a year or two later, is one of the best indicators of success within the company was getting the worst possible score on one of your interviews. We rank people from one to four, and if you got a one on one of your interviews, that was a really good indicator of success.

Small suggestion: Maybe Google can take these genius employees and have them, hmmm, we dunno, debug the frickin' broken interview process. Those who demanded they be hired should probably also be enlisted in the debugging effort. Writes Norvig:

Ninety-nine percent of the people who got a one in one of their interviews we didn't hire. But the rest of them, in order for us to hire them somebody else had to be so passionate that they pounded on the table and said, "I have to hire this person because I see something in him..."

Unfortunately, Google's had already done most of its hiring/rejecting and is now has been in layoff mode for much of this year. But, hey, there's always the next bubble.

UPDATE: A Goolge spokesperson disputed that the company was "in layoff mode," as we wrote, and stated: "To the contrary, we have been very explicit... that we are stepping our rate of hiring." Indeed, CEO Eric Schmidt stated in a discussion of Q3 results that "we're going to invest in people. We're already stepping up our hiring." That's in contrast to earlier this year, when Google had three rounds of layoffs from January through the end of March.

UPDATE 2: Norvig writes on his FriendFeed that we got "everything wrong" — this is just more evidence of how well the Google process works. Click through to read his full post (and our reply, underneath).

(Pic: Norvig, by Mathieu Thouvenin)

The rap band has been a pioneer in digital media, selling MP3 files and building a collection of websites, including a rap portal, well before other artists. Frontman Chuck D has also been a frequent critic, going back at least two decades, of the recording industry. So while investors in the new album will get a cut of revenue, according to TechCrunch, they shouldn't emulate industry high rollers, at least if they're fans of the talent, who famously sang in "Swindler's Lust:"

Hand in my pocket rob me for my chocolate (eheheheh)

Mo' dollars, mo' cents, for the Big Six [record companies]

Another million led to bled, claimin innocence



...No pressure, tell me why they don't care

Rap and R&B pavin the streets of Bel-Air

From the sales of singers, no longer here

The bigger killer, get the bigger share (eheheheh)

Hands off Chuck's chocolate, crowdsourced investors. It's right there in the Terms & Conditions... boyyyyy.

Ingles, reports the Los Angeles Times, was then fired. But Adams can't take all the blame: Ingels had to know it was coming. If you're going to tweet about which musician didn't wear a bra in your restaurant (Ali Harter), which Office star was hungover (BJ Novak) in your restaurant and which actress looked hot (Tori Spelling) in your restaurant, you probably aren't long for that restaurant. Especially if it's located in Beverly Hills.

Update: We had Adams' name wrong in the lead.

Though it's garnered $25 million in venture investment, HuffPo in January was making about one fourth the revenue of content competitor Salon.com, valued at just $700,000 by the public markets. This might explain why Eric Hippeau, the investor CEO recently installed to fix HuffPo's finances, has hired former Yahoo ad chief Greg Coleman as president and chief revenue officer, as reported by Kara Swisher of All Things . Coleman shoves aside, then, current Chief Revenue Office James Smith, who has been at HuffPo for nearly three years after stints at AOL and IAC.

We can't say that's a terrible move, given Smith's track record, but it's by no means a given that Coleman can go much further selling HuffPo's notoriously sketchy pageviews. But then he, too, has worked at AOL, known as much for its dodgy accounting and traffic-goosing as for its wholesome oxfords-and-khaki corporate uniform (Coleman remains a fan). So there's some hope.

Armstrong, the former golden boy of Google's advertising side, was hired just this past spring and has long been expected to initiate a massive restructuring. In his memo, he discusses a strategy session that nailed down where, exactly, the company is going. He also confirms his first two firings, reported previously by Business Insider: longtime company execs Kim Partoll, the COO, and Local, Mapping and Search boss John Kannapell. Both were hired shortly after AOL's disastrous merger with Time Warner.



He also mentions a "Project Everest:"

We have a strong strategy and we need to be laser focused on execution. We are planning another video update next week with a progress report on Project Everest, and I look forward to seeing you all then.

We look forward to that video, too! Full memo:

Arianna Huffington crowed after the 2008 presidential election that her website is "more participatory" than publications that practice journalism "the old way." But she's a favor-trading traditionalist when it comes to distributing money: Even the best contributing bloggers are unpaid, while paying gigs tend to go to VIPs.

Some have earned their status. Others were born into it.

Which isn't to say the well born are necessarily unqualified for their jobs: HuffPo is notoriously hard to work for, with famously high turnover; couple this with the site's national expansion and it's easy to see why HuffPo is hungry for young talent. But aren't there, like, some laid off journalists out there, with actual experience?

Here are some of the well-connected VIP spawn Arianna's taken on:

Ethan Axelrod

Ethan Axelrod is the son of Barack Obama's longtime adviser David Axelrod. The 22-year-old has written and edited for his student newspaper at Colorado College, according to the Washington Post, and apparently has no other professional journalism experience. He will edit HuffPo's Denver edition.

Mediaite quotes insiders saying he's modest about his killer genes:

"He's a very nice, unassuming guy," one staffer told Mediaite. "He's smart, obviously – he comes from good stock."

Funny that the Post's Howard Kurtz didn't mention his newspaper's own family connection to the HuffPo (see next).

(Photo via Axelrod's Facebook profile)

Nicholas Graham

Nicholas Graham is part of the same Graham family that owns the Washington Post. Formerly an Associate News Editor at HuffPo, Graham appears to have recently become Associate Video Editor. One insider tells us his predecessor, Patrick Waldo, was well liked inside of the company but was recently pushed out. (Pic via NCAA YouTube)

Elyssa Spitzer

It's hard to begrudge Elyssa Spitzer her HuffPo internship for at least two reasons. One, as the daughter of disgraced former Gov. Eliot Spitzer, she's been through a lot of family trauma in the past year and a half. Two, we're not even sure if her internship is paid. (Pic via Cityfile)

Liz Hanks

In 2007 and 2008, Liz Hanks worked as Associate Living Editor at HuffPo. We've heard actor Tom Hanks' daughter had two other jobs, as a news and blog editor, and that Arianna Huffington eagerly publicized her name and presence after she joined the staff (to a degree some on staff found unseemly).

We imagine working in the living section was scary: It was home to a wide array of true believers from Arianna Huffington's culty religious group, the Movement for Spiritual Inner Awareness. Hanks' supervisor, Anya Strzemien, was, according to insiders, forced by Huffington to attend a seminar run by a group closely tied to MSIA.Despite the hubub around her, Hanks seems to have been generally well regarded within HuffPo for keeping a level head.

Matthew Palevsky

Matthew Palevsky is Arianna Huffington's godson. His father Max was a billionaire computer entrepreneur. Palevsky was in January appointed to oversee HuffPo's OffTheBus citizen journalism initiative. He hardly seemed qualified:

The effort was a crown jewel, breaking two major scoops during the 2008 presidential campaign. It was previously headed by big guns: a Howard Dean and John Kerry organizer who formed a Web volunteering institute at Harvard Law, and a Nation editor and longtime magazine writer who teaches journalism at USC. They were of no relation to Huffington; one was later hired by Pro Publica.

Katherine Zaleski

Katherine Zaleski's father is said to be close friends with Ken Lerer, Huffington Post's co-founder. Further, we're told she has her own apartment in the El Dorado luxury co-op at 300 Central Park West; her dad is said to live in a separate penthouse of his own and Lerer a few floors down.

For four years, Zaleski controlled the coveted front page of the Huffington Post — as much as anyone besides Arianna does — but later moved into a special projects role. She took over the New York section after Dan Collins abruptly quit (Huffington later claimed he was always supposed to leave the job just after launch, but that's not what she told us just before launch).

The project was reset at least a half-dozen times... Each time, development was frozen and key aspects of the device rethought, retooled and repositioned...



... Jobs, who's been overseeing the project from his home, office and hospital beds, has finally achieved that much-sought aura of satisfaction.

That's the difficult, obsessive boss we all know and love! How about a few more redesigns, just for fun, Steve? It'll make you feel better!

Vargas covered "the marriage" of the Internet and politics at the Washington Post, but that doesn't mean he's a above some straying. He's going to oversee the Huffington Post's new tech section in the fall, reports the New York Times' Brian Stelter.

We can only imagine Arianna was breathy as she described for Stelter her "regular" emails with Vargas since the election. They apparently involved harnessing people for deep engagement, and were quite memorable:

I love his passion for communicating how technology impacts our lives, and exploring the many ways the Internet can be harnessed to reach new readers and engage existing ones more deeply - something we've been working on at HuffPost since the beginning.

Two weeks ago, Huffington hired newly-discharged Washington Post columnist Dan Froomkin; a month and a half before that HuffPo poached WaPo investigations editor Lawrence Roberts. HuffPo's editors also include longtime WaPo reporter Thomas Edsall and Nicholas Graham, of the family that owns the DC newspaper.

The big impact of the Vargas hire, of course, is that it means yet another awkward goodbye party appearance for WaPo columnist Dana Millbank, who thinks HuffPo's DC bureau is basically a bag of craven dicks. Or rather was a bag of craven dicks. Use that at the party, Dana. Was.

(Pic via Philippines Embassy)

The company is becoming infamous for its bingeing on and purging of personnel. Winter before last, Yahoo laid off around 1,000 employees, then immediately announced 459 new openings. In the spring came more layoffs, followed soon after by billboards like the above, snapped by Flickr user "nfarmer" next to U.S. Highway 101: "We're hiring!"

Now the back-and-forth has reportedly reached the level of self parody as Yahoo toys with its recruiters, the very people who are supposed to facilitate the Web portal's hiring cycles. We hear Yahoo has been trying to hire fresh blood into its recruiting office, including some from Fox Interactive, where recruiting honcho Elaine Fortier used to work.

Fair enough, right? Except that Yahoo has laid off dozens of recruiters over the past eight months, telling them (says a tipster) they are eligible for re-hire and promising they would be notified of new opportunities at the company. None, apparently, were contacted for the latest round of hiring.

This leaves a good number of people out in the cold, since Yahoo has, we hear, reduced the size of its recruiting organization to roughly 40 at the Sunnyvale headquarters from 220 spread throughout the U.S. (including Southern California and New York) in December. Apparently some of these people even left jobs as lawyers to become recruiters. D'oh.

As tough as it is on workers, maybe this will turn out to be a wise strategy for Yahoo; once everyone in Silicon Valley has put in a stint at the company, they're bound to end up using some Yahoo product or another, if only to figure out how much their shares are worth.

After calling outsourcing "unpatriotic, un-American" on her website, Huffington is... outsourcing. Here's an item from her Huffington Post's current job listings:

After raising $15 million in funding in the fall, one would think Huffington could afford to hire some American programmers, especially with unemployment nearing 10 percent. After all, paying the technical guys might help deflect the criticism that HuffPo exploits its largely unpaid writers. As for the hypocrisy, we assume Huffington, a notorious political flip-flopper, will simply say her views have evolved. Or maybe she'll blame a flunkie.

(Pic: Roo Reynolds)

At least Froomkin will be around other ex-Posties. He joins former WaPo investigations editor Lawrence Roberts, who joined HuffPo's new investigative fund in May, and Thomas Edsall, the longtime WaPo reporter who joined as titular political editor two years ago. Then there's Nicholas Graham, a Huffington Post associate editor and member of the family that owns the Washington Post.

Froomkin, who many supporters believe was ousted over the aggressive tenor of his reporting, will head HuffPo's Washington bureau, overseeing four reporters and an assistant editor. He'll thus learn first hand how deeply involved Arianna Huffington is the publication of her website, from arranging the front page to spiking articles for running afoul of her preferred political paradigm. Get ready for some fun, long phone calls, Dan. Try not to break any desks or strain your vocal chords.

(Pic by yksin)

Dauman, a friend acknowledges, is partying as hard as ever. Though he's grown sick of the scene in San Francisco, Dauman spends freely to find fun elsewhere, jetting to Vegas some weekends to party with his New Yorker girlfriend at events with a around four females for every male. (This is a new girlfriend; the dominatrix Dauman was said dating is history.)

Dauman's also returned to New York on a near-monthly basis, including for Fashion Week in February, and this summer to his parents' vacation home in East Hampton.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Or so we're told. But Dauman's hedonism doesn't seem to have affected his work. Though his side gig, a music startup, appears defunct, the Columbia JD and MBA got a promotion at Google last month, from "Strategic Partner Development Associate" to "Strategic Partner Development Manager." (See the excerpt from Dauman's LinkedIn profile at left.)

Presumably this means Dauman will have more responsibility around local content acquisition, as his father has described his job. This could help sell his bosses on a New York move; AOL, the New York Times and Huffington Post are all duking out in the city and surrounding markets for local news website dominance.

It certainly wouldn't be Dauman's first time finagling an advantageous transfer. Below, Dauman Sr., well-to-do CEO of Viacom, describes how no less a negotiator than Google chief Eric Schmidt was persuaded to hire Dauman Jr., despite the Viacom suit.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

[video via]

HuffPo co-founder Ken Lerer tells the New York Observer that the new CEO, Eric Hippeau of HuffPo investor Softbank, "thinks this isn't the time to be profitable-it's the time to invest." Investment is inevitable, since HuffPo has some $25 million in fresh venture capital reserved strictly for growth (as Huffington told us Monday, "The $25 million we raised from Oak has not been touched. It's available for our next round of expansion").

But why not finally turn profitable? In March 2008, more than a year ago, the New Yorker said the publication was "poised to break even." Since then, money has poured in; HuffPo brags it has doubled revenue over the past year and a half. Profitability, then, must have been restrained by expenditures, reportedly a longtime problem at HuffPo. There's been talking of trimming costs.

And yet Hippeau tells the Observer he's "not here to fix" the publication, "I'm here to grow it... we'll have deep partnerships with major players, which goes beyond content-sharing." Maybe one of these "deep partnerships" will take the problem of making money as an independent business off HuffPo's plate for good.

(Pic via Blip.tv's new interview with Hippeau)

Business Insider hears Coleman netted $3 million severance for his 10 weeks work for the company. That's about $60,000 per workday, assuming he didn't come in on weekends.

Maybe that sounds like yet another example of outrageous executive compensation. But we don't begrudge Coleman his money: He fell victim to a similar palace coup at Yahoo when yet another of his bosses was replaced. Kudos to Coleman for being smart enough to hedge his bets this time around with a severance deal, which he presumably insisted on up front.

As George W. Bush famously said, "Fool me once... shame on... shame on you... Fool me — You can't get fooled again."