[vonmoltke]

> 1. Google views software engineering skills as fungible. If you can learn domain X, you can equally well learn domain Y. Hire smart people, and put them on something they find interesting, and you'll get high quality work out of them. Computer science / problem solving then becomes a sort of proxy for whatever skills are ultimately necessary. If you can learn that, you can learn anything.

I get the impression from your post that you view this as a positive attribute. I actually think it is a negative. I feel that, like other engineering disciplines, software engineering is so broad (and getting broader every year) that skills are not truly fungible and that a certain level engineers must specialize. The result is that companies like Google either test for a breadth that fewer and fewer engineers can actually achieve, or they trick themselves into thinking their evaluation covers everything when it does not. It might (a big might) work when you are only a couple years removed from your undergraduate degree, but its a lousy way to hire experienced people.