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).
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.