[pavlov]

> “they all, as far as I can tell, struggle with hiring senior talent, yet are unable to let go of these hazing processes”

The weird thing is that it’s been this way for decades, but the enormous product-market fit of the FAANGs’ core products have masked this.

I read a new book about Android development, mostly built around interviews of the original team. Several times it was mentioned that after the Google acquisition, Android was unable to hire the people they needed — experienced Be/Palm/Danger devs from their network — because they were unable or unwilling to pass the Google interview bar. High-level exceptions had to be made to bring in these people Google absolutely needed to build the new OS.

That suggests that other teams inside Google (and other companies imitating their interview process) have been in a similar quandary, but without the C-level exception to hire the experienced people they wanted. And I think that explains some of the product struggles these companies have had. Android is clearly the exception as a long-term success.

[mrmekon]

Huh, that's interesting. The Android team was absolutely hounding me for an interview back in ~2009, to the degree of finding my parents' home phone number and asking them to convince me to take an interview.

I reluctantly obliged, and had a couple of phone screenings where they said they were looking for experienced embedded systems developers for low-level hardware development. I was specializing in 8-bit microcontroller firmware and Linux kernel drivers, and the recruiter said it was exactly what they wanted.

When I took the first technical interview, they grilled me on MapReduce and cluster storage, and then asked me to design a collaborative text editor for the web. The interviewer didn't have a copy of my resume, hadn't seen it, didn't know what position he was interviewing for, and didn't know anything about hardware. We had a really awkward moment when I explicitly said, "there must be some mistake, I'm supposed to be interviewing for an embedded role." I bombed the hell out of that interview, and never heard back from them again.

If my experience was typical, then no wonder the Android team had trouble with staffing.

[warrenm]

Your interview experience is typical - I've interviewed 4 or 5 times at Google (never once after applying), and each time I've "failed" some portion of the prescreen script interview that's done by incompetent "recruiters"

[UncleMeat]

I have experienced this. My team works in a niche domain and finding people who both have the relevant domain expertise and pass the interviews is hard. I think this is less because of people being unwilling to do interviews and more just inherent noise in the process. It makes hiring especially brutal when 95% of candidates the system throws my way are completely unqualified because they don't have the domain background.

This is a clear and unambiguous downside.

But the presence of downsides is not always a reason to reject a process. A huge upside of the process is that Google enables fluid transition of people within teams around the company. This among my favorite things here and it makes it so that good people with shit managers are not just automatically flung out of the company because their particular team is a toxic mess.

[romanhn]

It really is odd, and I think it shows how processes have inertia of their own, the bigger the company, the bigger is inertia. Too big to stop at this point. After our struggles to hire senior folks as a Bay Area startup I was expecting something different at a big tech company.... and it just wasn't.

[yieldcrv]

Yes this has happened to other people, I believe it was the homebrew developer that couldnt pass the hazing and found it ironic