[vic_nyc]

I agree with you. And the effectiveness of the criteria Google uses to screen & interview candidates is highly debatable, at best.

One of their recruiters once contacted me (because I went to a 'top university') but decided it would be a 'waste of time' because I hadn't done any Java or C++ recently. It used to be that Google was interviewing for knowledge of the fundamentals unlike most other 'business-oriented' companies that want specific recent skills.

Nowadays it seems that they've got the 'worst' of both worlds - I heard they interview for very hard-core graph programming algorithms, and at the same time they want recent experience with Java or C++. So basically if you've recently only done Lisp/Smalltalk/etc or even Python, you don't qualify. Where is the logic in that?

On top of that, my impression was that the salary levels of their employees were fairly astronomical, on par with the ones paid by banks/hedge funds, but that definitely doesn't seem to be the case.

[robrenaud]

I've done more than 100 interviews at Google.

The first candidate who I interviewed and was hired coded in Lisp during the interview.

I recently interviewed a candidate who did a lot of iphone development and was obviously very bright, but didn't code very well in straight C get hired.

Candidates coding in Python during the interview is pretty common and I certainly don't count it against them.

I am not sure what recruiters are looking for and filtering upon, but if you are good with C++ or Java, even if you haven't used in the last few years, that is more than certainly enough. If you aren't good with C++ or Java, but you are really good anyway, you can still make it through the interviews, but it will be harder.