[hueving]

>they can maintain the impression that Google engineers are the best of the best

This is not true for everyone. I see it as more of a failure on Google's behalf to create a good selection process. The flawed assumption you're making is that, since they have a noticeable false positive rate (i.e. good people getting rejected), they don't have false negatives (i.e. unqualified candidates getting offers). There is no guaranteed correlation between false negatives and false positives.

To carry this a little further, I would argue that it's very likely that some bad engineers get into Google because, by definition, their selection process is not correctly picking good engineers - just a rough approximation of what they think makes a good engineer.

[curun1r]

I don't doubt that some bad engineers get into Google...I've met quite a few. I met one engineer who believed that you should avoid interfaces in Java because it makes it difficult to click through source code in an IDE. I've interviewed ex-Googlers who were completely lost answering the interview question, "how do you write maintainable code?" From what I've seen, Google isn't testing for being able to write maintainable code and is, instead, testing almost exclusively for problem solving and being able to apply algorithms/data structures. That, alone, is going to lead to hiring some bad engineers.

But you have to look pretty hard to find those engineers...much harder than you do to find quality engineers that have been turned down by Google. And I believe it's intentional...that those false positives are about seeding the rest of the industry with people rejected by Google. I believe they interview more candidates than they need to bring in to fill their open positions in order to feed the perception (not the reality) that Google's engineers are the best of the best. That's the perception they care about, not the perception that their interview process is good at choosing employees.