Comment by supergirl

Why do you think white boarding over the course of an several hours would be a better predictor of these traits than years of making very meaningful contributions to software?

It seems to me like creating and managing a repository of more than 4800 contributors is a much better signal of a candidates software engineering, communication, and human skills than a couple of people's opinion of a couple of hours of white boarding.

because I'm not good at other things they need.

It's not that you're not _good_ at it, but you're not able to demonstrate under time constraints, lack of references, lack of iterative code/compiler/REPL feedback, and while being stared down by someone whose default mindset is "why am I wasting my time on this person?"

It's never 1 reason why you get rejected, it's the total score.

That depends on how far down the interview process you are. Often they'll cut you off at a phone interview if you stumble. Sometimes they'll cut in-person interviews short if they think you're not worth it. So, they don't always get a "total score" to judge against. It's often just summary judgement off subjective feelings.

Disagree, this is not some PR campaign of a corporate drone, a real person felt frustrated with the process of hiring in Google. Is it to instigate debate on HN, I doubt it. He is just venting out, that his body of work which is public is effectively ignored in favor of a pedantic exercise.

I am speaking from personal experience here, they don't count a lot of factors while rejecting a candidate, you make one mistake on their particular set of questions, you are out. They don't even look at your resumes until all your 4 interviews are completed. However, selecting a candidate is a different matter, in that decision they might consider everything.

And so Google can continue to lose talent to competitors, or have potential hires go off to start their own startups they can then pay a premium for, while keeping "good enough" talent for existing initiatives.

I'm starting to realize why Google is absolutely terrible at any sort of customer-facing product.

If Google keeps telling itself it only hires the very best guitarists, and it turns down someone like Hendrix - because he's "not a team player", or he doesn't know how to tap out 13/18 while improvising an Indian Harikhamboji raga, or for some other inane reason - then it isn't really interested in the best guitarists at all.

It's the difference between an holistic view of talent, and an academic and rather narcissistic insistence on specific limited social signals that are believed to correlate with intelligence.

And this really matters in practical ways. A lot of talented devs will be reading this story and wondering if they really want to work for Google. Negative PR like this is incredibly damaging. Consider the opposite - if Google could say "Yes, the Homebrew guy works for us." How much value do you think that would have had?

Long term, the really smart and inventive people start to stay away. And then you get something that seems to be happening to Google already - declining product quality, a poorer user experience, and diminished reputation. You know - Google's record of hits recently hasn't been that great?

So anyone who thinks Google is fine because it still has thousands of applicants is missing the point. Instead of being the kind of place where Hendrix plays, it's in danger of becoming the kind of place where there are a lot of people with a lot of solid but uncreative technical chops, and no one is making cool and interesting music any more.

I think this is spot on. I have seen 30 person teams composed of 30 one dimensional people, and 3 person teams composed of 10 dimensional people. With few communication barriers and everyone thinking about everything all the time, I take the small tight team. It does depend on the project, though, because a) sometimes the problems can be parallelized and many people working is good and b) 10 dimensional people don't typically like boring problems.