> The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers.

I know things have changed, but in the early '00s good luck getting hired to Google without a PhD, masters minimum.

4.0 dual major in CS and psychology from Georgia Tech, graduated in 4 years with both of those degrees. Yeah, no thanks. [Not me, a friend of mine who wanted to work for them]

They always insisted, at every hiring event I attended through around 2008, that they only hired the "best of the best" and things like that. If that's true, then this:

> They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language

Isn't true.

So Rob has it right and Google is hiring really mediocre people. Or Rob has it wrong but only saw the mediocre hires.

EDIT: Cleaned up the grammar a bit.

Or, I suspect the quote is mistranscribed or was spoken with a mental "shortcut" and should be:

They’re not [in]capable of understanding a brilliant language, but we want to use them to build good software.

i.e. they're smart people, but we don't want them to focus those smarts on the language itself, but on writing software with the language...

Well they can't possibly have the same hiring bar they used to, due to the amount of hires they need. When you're a smaller company, or a rapidly growing one, you can't really afford a bad egg. At google's current size, they can. To be clear, I think their hiring standard has dropped. But that doesn't mean they don't still have very talented people. Or that their average competence level isn't high compared to other companies

It seems they want cheap code monkeys. At least from Pike's quote.

I don't know if it means code monkeys, although I agree you could interpret Pike that way. When you look at root cause analysis you're going to see everybody's bad days, and your bad days can be pretty mediocre.

I've lost count of the number of engineers I've pissed off by implying that they or their coworkers might in fact be human beings and thus prone to errors.

White knuckling (as the term is applied - as a pejorative - in Alcoholics Anonymous) is rampant in software. If you make a mistake it's because you're bad and you should TRY HARDER LOSER. Not because our architecture or tools are error prone/obtuse.

You could say the pressure cooker interviewer process is looking for people who don't cave under pressure, but I don't think that just because you don't crumble doesn't mean you aren't incapacitated. I suspect it ends up selecting for people who think working under intense pressure is normal and there's no point in trying to relieve that pressure, ie working smarter.

I think they eventually realized that it was all bullshit and came up with the algorithm wankery instead.

That’s bullshit too, and they know it, but it’s the best they have and works well enough when they have a limitless pipeline of people willing to try.

I’d like to see google recycle their current employees through their interview pipeline and see what happened.

>So Rob has it right and Google is hiring really mediocre people.

All big corporations start hiring mediocre people sooner or later. Nothing wrong with that. It's just the way it is.