[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.