With a process like this (based on this story as well as others), does Google actually consistently employee competent talent? Obviously Google has landed some serious rock-star talent, but of the scores of college graduates they hire for internships or entry-level positions, does anyone know if their hiring process is working for them?
They employ a lot of people that can write code on boards, and can certainly churn it out at high velocity. But when you start looking at the actual code... it's bad. When I first looked at the chrome code, the layer they dumped on top of webkit to make it out-of-process, the only thing I could think of was "this looks like something a kid fresh out of college would cobble up together". Same thing with most of their projects - lack of clear design, hacks, hard to maintain, lack of standards, no portability. The projects that get visibility end up getting better (more competent programmers assigned to them), the rest lingers in crappiness mode.
They're not all like that, obviously. They have very smart and very competent people there. But the general low quality of their code, the lack of polish in their products, it clearly shows the consequences of hiring people based on how fast they can dump code on a whiteboard.
Hmm. I had a very different experience. Most of the Google code I've seen them release is very, very high quality, like the Guava libraries: http://code.google.com/p/guava-libraries/
