Well said. The problem is, many recruiters actually wouldn't understand that sarcasm. And that's the problem the OP is talking about. For a lot of recruiters, they are so excited to be working at a big tech firm that they don't understand why anyone else would be any less excited.

  It's also not realistic, given the wheat-to-chaff ratio
  out there, for a manager to interview all the candidates
  directly without an elaborate screening process

Sure, but that screening process should be completed before you invite a candidate for an on-site interview.

I'm a hiring manager. If I say someone should spend 8 hours attending an in-person interview before I'll spend 5 minutes reviewing their resume/github, I'm saying my time is a hundred times as valuable as theirs. I can understand someone taking umbrage at that - especially someone who had better skills than me. And I want to hire people with better skills than me.

I broadly agree with you, but let me nitpick a bit, because nothing suits HN like a pedantic quest for truth.

8 hours vs 5 minutes is a bit extreme, for a start.

Secondly, the time a hiring manager needs to spend reviewing resumes includes unsuccessful candidates as well - so it's not 5 minutes, its 5 minutes * |all_the_vaguely_plausible_candidates|. There might be 20 or 30 resumes in the pile for some of these jobs. SO the manager might be 100-150 minutes in, in order to get to that 1 person who needs a "8 hour interview" (or whatever that is; I suppose places that fly you somewhere might be burning 48 hours or more - I know people in Australia who have been flown to the US for job interviews!). If you live in town it might be more like 2-4 hours. So the ratio isn't quite as extreme as you make it out to be for the manager, even if it seems unfair to count time spent reviewing all the other candidates' resumes/githubs.

There's also the issue of developer titles not being standard.

As you say at Intel: SE -> Senior SE -> Staff SE -> Senior Staff SE -> Principal Engineer

IBM has: Engineer -> Staff -> Advisory -> Senior -> Senior Member of Technical Staff -> Distinguished Engineer.

I'm sure other companies have different ranks too.

Unless you dig into the technical ladder of each company, its hard to say that Staff SE is the same everywhere.

Fair enough, and there's a legit argument that even identical titles from two given companies doesn't necessarily mean a automatic equivalence. That being said, when the scales are roughly equivalent, someone approaching you with a job offer 2-3 grades below where you are now is just embarrassing - you know, it's typical to offer a promotion to jump ship.

This sort of invites the question of what you WOULD be interested in working on (and what size team you've been leading) if you were to consider leaving.

Asking as a Googler who occasionally gets to dream up a neat trick here or there (and leads a team of pretty clever people, too!).

I'm happy where I am, honestly, and am not fishing for someone to flatter me, and am certainly not going to go into the answers to that question on a public forum. They approached me, I was minding my own business.

The main thing I guess is that a recruiter would have to be asking a question more like yours and less like "hey, how do you feel about an exciting job in the new field of SRE where only have to carry a pager 1 week in 4" to make me feel like it was even a respectful approach. They had even grasped that I was at Intel as a result of a fairly successful exit, but... hey... maybe some people want that pager.

As it stands, it was pretty much a "Hey $NAME, we like think it's good that you did a graduate degree at $SCHOOL. Congratulations on your $RECENT_CAREER_MILESTONE. If you ever tire of your $MEANINGLESSLY_SENIOR_SOUNDING_JOB at $MASSIVELY_INFERIOR_COMPANY_TO_GOOGLE you should join our generic hiring process".

(not hating on SRE, mind you - but no-one sane looking at my LinkedIn profile or anything else would think I have that skill set or would be willing to retrain from the bottom to develop it)