[jboggan]

I've only been there 13 months but I've found the quality of previous and new hires are ridiculously high. Given the number of talented people applying every day I think Google could increase hiring by 100% with no appreciable drop in quality.

Google has a lot of imperfections addressed elsewhere in the comments here but the engineering culture is extremely strong and one of the best parts about being there. I think the overall "Googley culture" is suffering but it isn't for technical reasons.

Then again maybe I'm one of those C players who snuck in the past year.

[hueving]

>I've only been there 13 months but I've found the quality of previous and new hires are ridiculously high.

Seek out the people that were there 6+ years ago and compare their quality with the average Googler. You'll likely notice a difference.

Google now has over 50,000 employees. It's not possible to get that big that quickly without a reduction in hiring rigor. There wasn't a sudden influx of geniuses to fill that demand.

[jboggan]

They're pretty much the same raw talent, just with 6+ extra years of navigating the Goog and collecting all the arcana that makes you an effective engineer there. Of all of the complaints I have heard from older and newer Googlers, not a single one (in person or on Memegen) has ever complained about a drop in engineer quality. If anything it is a continuing frustration over how high the hiring bar continues to be and how we can't get referral bonuses for any of our friends.

[stuckagain]

Doesn't that suffer from survivor bias?