I interviewed w/ Google a couple of years back, didn't get hired. Interviewing is a two way street, and I won't BS if I don't know something. That said, had one interviewer who had 0 personality, 0 people skills, and didn't introduce himself. He asked one of the typical open ended questions, which was fine, we went through it a bit. At the end, he claimed there was actually a closed answer to the problem, wouldn't actual say what it was and just walked out. The two of the other few people I talked with were interesting and engaging. But it was seriously a mixed bag and didn't present a good face for Google.

Recruiter calls again a year or so after the fact. "You did well in your prior interview, but things didn't line up. Interested in coming back in?" Me - "The last impression left a pretty bad taste in my mouth. Not at this time."

Note - I was on internal referral as well as had apparently incredibly impressed the "phone screen" person (whatever that means). Of anywhere I have talked with, GOOG has been at the bottom of list in overall experience.

Given that google has recently publicly denounced their own hiring methodology (that they've been using for years), I wouldn't use them as a shining example.

Also consider the fact that most companies are not google and don't have the same unlimited streams of top candidates coming in the door (is that even true for google any longer ?). A smaller operation (ie. the typical hn population) needs to work much harder to avoid false negatives. One way of doing that is to optimize the hiring process to allow a good candidate to shine vs the Google way of putting the candidate through endless abuse (I know what I speak of).

I think Google's hiring is less about finding a few good engineers and more about collecting impressive specimens of humanity for a dream team. They're playing a different game than most, and that's their prerogative.

In reality nobody gives a shit about the false negatives. If you want to make a statistical argument you have to base it on the false positives. It looks like there is no such thing as a "false positive" in Google. They've been hiring puzzle-solvers and phone-dictation-coders for 10 years, only to suddenly turn around and say "puzzles are not a good predictor for success, nevermind we used it for 10 years, still no false positives".

I doubt Google's false positives are better than anybody else's.

Good companies should care about their false negative rate, as if they're smart they will realise that unlike Harvard their pool of potential candidates does not completely refresh each year. As you yourself exemplify, Google are now seeing many candidates who have applied before. While there are more than enough fresh bright young people growing up each year to fill Harvard's interviewing pipeline with first-time-candidates, there clearly aren't enough new top-rate computer scientists (who are interested in working for Google) coming into the field each year to fill Google's interviewing pipeline with only first time applicants.

And if you are reliant on the false negatives coming back, and not being put off by the process, to keep your pipeline full of high-quality candidates, surely that has to be a risky approach longer-term. As Google loses its fast-growing-exciting-upstart reputation, and competition for engineers gets tougher, -- it's gradually going to get harder and harder to convince the best of the false negatives to come back into the process again.

They're not trying to find the best out of all possibles candidates, or the least likely to fail. They're selecting the candidate that it's easiest to make a decision on.