Isn't this level of interviewing kind of excessive and time-expensive? If I were Google, I would do the following:
1) Have the first interviewer be the best/most-appropriate interviewer for the position (manager, lead dev, whatever). Have them write down in a sealed envelope a "hire" or "no hire" statement after the interview.
2) At the end of the assorted interviews, measure how often the first interviewer is correct in his hire/no hire assessment.
My theory is that interviewing is a great opportunity for "thin-slicing" (a la Blink) and that you'd get 98% of the value with 10% of the time invested.
Related anecdote (from gladwell dot com):
One of the stories I tell in "Blink" is about the Emergency Room doctors at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. That's the big public hospital in Chicago, and a few years ago they changed the way they diagnosed heart attacks. They instructed their doctors to gather less information on their patients: they encouraged them to zero in on just a few critical pieces of information about patients suffering from chest pain--like blood pressure and the ECG--while ignoring everything else, like the patient's age and weight and medical history. And what happened? Cook County is now one of the best places in the United States at diagnosing chest pain.
Not surprisingly, it was really hard to convince the physicians at Cook County to go along with the plan, because, like all of us, they were committed to the idea that more information is always better. But I describe lots of cases in "Blink" where that simply isn't true. There's a wonderful phrase in psychology--"the power of thin slicing"--which says that as human beings we are capable of making sense of situations based on the thinnest slice of experience. I have an entire chapter in "Blink" on how unbelievably powerful our thin-slicing skills are. I have to say that I still find some of the examples in that chapter hard to believe.
Maybe there is a secondary objective for excessive interviewing:
"Hazing is often used as a method to promote group loyalty and camaraderie through shared suffering (male bonding in fraternities), either with fellow participants, past participants or both."
you'd get 98% of the value with 10% of the time invested.
Hard to say. The economics of hiring aren't intuitive - a bad hire can do a lot of damage, esp. if it's a management position (which this wasn't, I know). It's probably better to nicely turn down 10 people (and nicely ask them to re-apply in 6 months) than to let in 1 charming, but conniving and free-riding bullshitter into your team.
I dunno-- I'm a big fan of "fire fast". If you can't detect a charming, conniving, free-riding bullshitter in 1-2 weeks of working with them, how are you going to detect 'em with 10 man-hours worth of interviews?
that's not very easy to do in a big corp environment. in a startup- it's a lot easier for both one being fired and the one doing the firing: being fired from a start-up can happen for many reason others than pure performance, where-as if one is fired from a bigger corporation that carries a bit more of a negative stigma with it.
in addition firing in a company like google is expensive: there's three months of training for a position like SRE (given they're scale at which google operates), during which they're paid a competitive salary (as usual), provided free food, flown out to mountain view (if from remote office).
i can understand why google would have the requirements they would: they want to maintain the start-up culture (everyone is working there by choice, there is a perfect culture fit) at a much bigger place and for a longer duration.
for what it's worth they're also open to letting people interview multiple times as well, for the same or different position. to this experience definitely help the original poster. he could come back within a year to interview (say) for a munich office position, where the competition wouldn't be as intense.
Those are actually really good points... Hiring people is more expensive than saying, "Sure-- come on aboard. We'll see how you do!".
That being said, I'm still not convinced that 10 hours of interviewing is any better than 2 hours of interviewing in terms of predicting success/fit in an organization.
I think 2 hours would be sufficient for 90% of the candidates. That's acceptable when you're in a start-up environment (where you generally have to fight for candidates and the pool is self-selecting to start with), but the 10% at Google could really make a big difference: google's pool of applications is bigger and the "laws of large numbers" come into play.
Also there's something else I haven't thought which is also a matter of "laws of large numbers": you simply can't hire every qualified one (and there would be opportunity costs in hiring the first person to pass the minimal qualifications).
I think people can be convinced of this by explaining this is a signal to noise ratio problem. If we have a lot of sources of information but if a lot of them have a lot of noise, it's useless.
1) Have the first interviewer be the best/most-appropriate interviewer for the position (manager, lead dev, whatever). Have them write down in a sealed envelope a "hire" or "no hire" statement after the interview.
2) At the end of the assorted interviews, measure how often the first interviewer is correct in his hire/no hire assessment.
My theory is that interviewing is a great opportunity for "thin-slicing" (a la Blink) and that you'd get 98% of the value with 10% of the time invested.
Related anecdote (from gladwell dot com):
One of the stories I tell in "Blink" is about the Emergency Room doctors at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. That's the big public hospital in Chicago, and a few years ago they changed the way they diagnosed heart attacks. They instructed their doctors to gather less information on their patients: they encouraged them to zero in on just a few critical pieces of information about patients suffering from chest pain--like blood pressure and the ECG--while ignoring everything else, like the patient's age and weight and medical history. And what happened? Cook County is now one of the best places in the United States at diagnosing chest pain.
Not surprisingly, it was really hard to convince the physicians at Cook County to go along with the plan, because, like all of us, they were committed to the idea that more information is always better. But I describe lots of cases in "Blink" where that simply isn't true. There's a wonderful phrase in psychology--"the power of thin slicing"--which says that as human beings we are capable of making sense of situations based on the thinnest slice of experience. I have an entire chapter in "Blink" on how unbelievably powerful our thin-slicing skills are. I have to say that I still find some of the examples in that chapter hard to believe.