Their attention span for products and tendency to half-ass things that aren't highly visible (Android SDK and documentation comes to mind) supports this notion. It's exactly what I'd expect from a company hiring 100% A players but needing 95% B-C work—avoid and shirk until you can land on a greenfield project, work on that until it's boring, then jump ship to another company or a more interesting project, because god knows you didn't go to MIT and then cram algos/structures for 6 months to update developer docs 8 hours a day.

Being/becoming good at CS-riddles (i.e. passing Google-like interviews) doesn't necessary correlate to being A player on the real job. So one might say Google employs a lot of B/C players (who just passed their interviews) where being A is a requirement for the job.

Yes, this. Also, if you look at the source of the output that is publicly available, you find that the overall quality is actually much lower than one might expect if they were hiring people that were truly great at making software more of an "art" rather than a blob shoved out the door that passed QA testing.

"CS riddles" test exactly what they're meant to.

This describes the target of hiring at all levels in the Bay Area. Everyone wants A class talent for their B or C class CRUD. A major contributor to this is that the industry is relatively immature with respect to engineering practices.

Does the class A talent describe their education or their work ethic?

I've been on projects with incredibly knowledgeable and talented people that just couldn't stay on track, and I've been on projects with people that weren't the best and brightest but they were focused and put in a lot of work. You need both kinds.

I knew several people in roles like this when I was there. They had somebody who had done a PhD in OS research working on startup scripts.

I have a former colleague from academia with a PhD in math (his focus was algebraic number theory) who works at Google...writing a lot of JavaScript - the kicker is he enjoys it a lot more than his time in academia (I feel the same way as a PhD dropout myself - I primarily write JS/manage engineers now).

I definitely believe that there must be people who enjoy this, in fact they are probably in the majority. It's just that some of us don't, and these are who startups should be pursuing.

Indeed, until today I had not understood the great attraction to working at a megolith such as google: big money.