Exactly. The process is designed to reduce false positives. The downside is there will be some false negatives.
It is not 100% accurate and it can take months to get through the process, but if we do it right we will be spending years together. So, it is worth the investment in time.
However, the real problem is the amount of bias they introduce into the process. Few Google products have a lot of polish and they really don't get the social networking side of the web. Conceder how much effort it would take for a standalone version of gmail that could easily replace outlook everywhere and make Google a ridicules amount of money.
False negatives means you are wasting a talented person's time (on both sides) because your interview process sucks. From the stories I've heard, Google needs to work on reducing that.
How do you reduce false negatives without increasing the rate of false positives? Do you have any suggestions on how they can do this? The balance of standards of an interviewing process is a really tough problem. Surely the solution you'd suggest for them is more than just "be perfect"?
Don, IMHO, you're using the wrong techniques. Tests of random knowledge and focussing strictly on quick answers to logic problems will get you lucky left-brainers -- they're the ones who happened to know what command options are available for sed and awk, and are good linear thinkers.
Google should be doing better than that -- much better.
I just got done interviewing for an SRE position, and while there were a few small "trivia" questions, most of it was about general Linux userland tools, and were mostly used as a lead-in to having me solve some sort of practical, real world problem. For the few cases where I didn't know the answer, the interviewer just moved on to the next portion. It seemed rather balanced IMO.
I've had two rounds of interviews at Google and I would not characterize a single one of the individual interviews I experienced as requiring "random knowledge" or "quick answers to logic problems".
I think there is a real danger here of extrapolating the experiences of one or a few people to a statement on hundreds or thousands of interviews/interviewers. At the rate Google is interviewing candidates it should be expected that some interviewers are not good interviewers.
After doing a lot of research on the subject (to prepare for my own experience) I can say with some certainty that based on reports from people that actually went through the experience, interviewers asking for brainteasers or "random knowledge" are in the clear minority.
(At least for software engineering interviewing. The questions for product managers seem to be a whole other beast.)
From what I've understood from countless stories on the web and from real-life friends and associates, your story is the anecdotal one. Brainteasers, logic problems you're expected to solve in seconds, and random quizzes on arcane facts is the norm at Google. It's how Google makes its hiring decisions: can you remember arcane facts quickly? Are you good at solving logic problems on the spot?
Are you objecting on the grounds that you think you know how they should interview better than they do, or that you think they actually are hiring the wrong people? I've always heard that Google is chalk full of amazing programmers doing really good work, so I'd say evidence is on the side that whatever they're doing is working.
