[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"