If Googles interviews had seemed to be remotely reasonable, I'm sure the people complaining would have been fewer. As it is, they seems very much to have the attitude that it doesn't matter if they weed out tons of great candidates as long as they weed out the bozos too.
I once went through technical phone screening with them for a management position, and was bizarrely asked lots of probing questions about unix filesystem internals. Which I answered with descriptions of how it varied by implementation for 3-4 different filesystems I've worked with over the years. But I hadn't worked with his pet filesystem and so couldn't answer everything the way he liked.
In the end the recruiter came back to me totally exasperated after he'd failed me. She'd looked at my feedback and taken it to some committee, and had the tech interview thrown out after they realised the type of questions I'd been given.
But by then I'd have time to reflect about the fact that the guy who interviewed me was on the team I'd been expected to manage, and I did not like the thought of a team like that. Couple that with a process that seems almost designed to push away people who aren't desperate to work there, and particularly people who have plenty of other alternatives, and I lost interest.
(Blind allocation for example, is not something I'd subject myself to - the only reason I said yes to that interview round was because it was for a specific position)
I realize the problem. But their current approach has the outcome of alienating a lot of their target audience from even wanting to work there, or at the very least wanting to subject themselves to the hiring process.
The result is that a lot of people who are good enough to find it easy to find competitive jobs elsewhere self-selects out of the process, leaving the people who either really badly want to work specifically at Google, or who don't have other alternatives, in their hiring process.
The former group likely will contain lots of great people still, given that there's still a lot of people who see Google as a great place to work. The latter group likely isn't who they want.
Clearly the former group is not enough, given that Google has an army of recruiters who keep hassling a lot of us who have never applied to Google and/or who have turned them down for interviews or jobs before, or who have even worked for them and left.
They recognise they are losing out on a lot of good candidates, or they wouldn't have these people calling the same potential candidates over and over and over.
And from personal experience I know a lot of their recruiters are frustrated at how hard it is for them to fill many positions, and how often they approach candidates and are explicitly turned down because people don't consider it worthwhile subjecting themselves to their interview process when they can easily get jobs with competitive packages and terms elsewhere.
The last Google recruiter who contacted me called me to plead for me to do a second round management interview after I was lukewarm after the totally botched tech interview I've mentioned in this thread - she'd gotten approval to simply skip doing another tech interview completely after the tech interviewer did his ridiculous nonsense.
But who would I keep putting myself through that shit? No other potential employer, many of whom offer better terms than Google are likely to do, have ever tried to subject me to that type of employment process. I know I'm good at what I do. I'm used to being rapidly pursued with face to face interviews, being taken out for lunches and dinners, having the recruiter and potential employer actively sell me on the prospects and the benefits of working there, being told upfront exactly what I will work on and having them make it very clear that they can meet my salary and stock expectations. It's not that I need to be treated like some special snowflake, but I'd put a premium on working somewhere where I know I am appreciated.
Googles recruitment process scream "we don't care".
I once went through technical phone screening with them for a management position, and was bizarrely asked lots of probing questions about unix filesystem internals. Which I answered with descriptions of how it varied by implementation for 3-4 different filesystems I've worked with over the years. But I hadn't worked with his pet filesystem and so couldn't answer everything the way he liked.
In the end the recruiter came back to me totally exasperated after he'd failed me. She'd looked at my feedback and taken it to some committee, and had the tech interview thrown out after they realised the type of questions I'd been given.
But by then I'd have time to reflect about the fact that the guy who interviewed me was on the team I'd been expected to manage, and I did not like the thought of a team like that. Couple that with a process that seems almost designed to push away people who aren't desperate to work there, and particularly people who have plenty of other alternatives, and I lost interest.
(Blind allocation for example, is not something I'd subject myself to - the only reason I said yes to that interview round was because it was for a specific position)