Yep, we took advantage of that at Netflix. Our average time from first contact to walking in the door was about two weeks if you wanted to move as quickly as we did.

We got a few folks who were in the final stage at Google, and we contacted them, interviewed them, made the offer, and got them in the door before Google ever got back to them.

They've been slow on "poaching" experienced folks as well. One person I know was offered a king's ransom to switch to Google, refused a "please stay" premium from the home company, and it still took half a year to walk through the door.

A friend interviewed with Google a few years ago and the process took well over six months before he actually got an official offer. It really is amazing how slow they are.

Counter point: The time between my on site interview and hire date was 1 month and 1 day. I skipped the phone interview so the time from initial referral to offer was under a month.

Having an internal reference may have helped, as did the fact that I told them I was actively interviewing and had offers.

Similar experience here. Having internal references seems to be very useful, not just for skipping the phone interview but for getting through the hiring committee. My start day is exactly one month after my interview, but even then that is because I put it back a week.

Does anybody get hired for SWE positions at Google _without_ an internal referral? When I was interviewing there 6 or so years ago I was under the impression that you, in practice, had to have an insider vouch for you.

The only internal reference I had was a distant acquaintance who - as they said themselves - just submitted one that basically read "don't know them much but they don't seem to be a jerk".

So you can absolutely get hired in engineering without internal references. (I'm also on a hiring committee myself.)

When I got hired back in 2004 that was pretty much the bar (helped that I knew how to fix servers I suspect too)!! :)

I was hired last year without a reference. I just submitted a resume to the careers page.

Sure, but my Fortune 500 employer takes 2-3 weeks to do that on average. Longer only if the new hire needs longer to unwind from prior commitments.

My story: first contact December 2005, started work October 2006.

My story: Interviewed October 2014, they wanted me to start December 2014, I pushed them to Jan 2015. My friend interviewed a week or two after me, started 1 week after me.

That seems longer than typical. From my first phone call with a recruiter to my first day of work was less than 4 months, and that includes me intentionally delaying my interview until after the holiday season, giving the job I left more than the standard 2 weeks notice, and my Google start date being pushed back due to the coronavirus situation

I purposely delayed my interview despite recruiter encouragement to get it over with, but I interviewed on March 20th, I was hired on the 30th (I think, it was in the week after the interview, I team matched by the end of the week), and I will onboard (unless something bad happens) next Monday. I’ve found Google to be much faster than I thought.

Congrats! Enjoy your time there. There's lots of good people, including some programming language luminaries.

One has to think why the concept of employment is still considered like marriage that require such an extensive ultra-deep multi-level deliberations. Let's say you were local, why it shouldn't be possible to give someone on-the spot offer after half-day of interviews as well as let them go with, say 2 weeks of standard severance if things don't work out?

At a large technology company with its own software stack it takes several months before a new hire isn’t a net-negative to the team they join. And it will be months after that before they reach full productivity. A bad hire is an extremely expensive mistake.

A bad hires are expensive mistake if you can't get rid of them until some artificial annual event. While I understand onboarding complexities, my experience is that the teams/companies which hasn't create good automated process so new hire can commit their first change within 2-days are big red flag (this was insisted upon by Zuck extensively at Facebook scale). I would also argue that culture of hire/replace team members in agile manner would help enforce this process more naturally and vice versa.

Being able to make a change, and being able to make a change without handholding are two different things.

> hire/replace team members in agile manner would help enforce this process more naturally and vice versa

Places where this happens are normally considered very high stress and competitive.

> I would also argue that culture of hire/replace team members in agile manner would help enforce this process more naturally and vice versa.

You're arguing in favour of high turnover - that can't be good neither for the company nor for the employees.

As much as our industry sucks at interviewing, it sucks at performance management even more.

A congenial but mediocre developer can stick around forever in most places once they're in.

This performance management weakness also makes me suspicious of various companies claiming to have nailed the interview process.

A congenial but mediocre developer may actually be more valuable than a rowdy and talented one because she pisses off less number of other brilliant developers.

Correct.

But that congenial/mediocre developer is still taking up a headcount that could hold a congenial/high-performing developer instead. There is also a separate issue where mediocrity discourages high-performers.

Because employment is indeed like marriage. Divorce and bad marriage is costly.

I mean, in some places, with some companies, they hire people as temps or contractors and later make them permanent. That effectively amounts to the arrangement you describe. This can't be obscure, so I don't understand your tone as if it was. It's just a matter of what kind of employment you consider worth applying for.

That would be a creative and different way to hire local unemployed people.

But it'll give you a reputation that makes it difficult to entice the sort of people whose current employers don't want them to leave.

It costs millions of dollars to hire someone at a place like Google. If you get it wrong you’re making an extremely expensive mistake.

Bringing someone up to speed in a large complicated ecosystem is extremely expensive. They will have to invest months into you before you will be capable of contributing in a way that isn't a net loss and a drag on existing team members.

At worst you pose a massive threat to the company/codebase. LOL i accidentally leaked all our secrets to china/apple/MS whoops.

But most of these companies/teams already employ massive numbers of contractors. They typically sign NDAs and often work on same code.

I've been on development teams which had contractors as 20% or more members. We had just couple of interviews and next-day offers for contractors while full timers went through multi-month process. Both worked on same code, often similarly complex tasks and used same on-boarding docs etc. One difference was that full timers were given more longer term tasks although, looking back, I feel many longer tasks simply became longer term because of tribal knowledge full timers developed and kept to themselves. The contractors were required to extensively document everything all the time :).

Pretty much all of my University friends got into team matching at Google for an internship position (myself included). All of them would have taken the job, and none of them were able to because the process was too long. It's pretty absurd, they even set up a call with myself and a dozen other people in team matching to basically tell us that we should take any other offers we have because Google is too slow. And then for full time it was the same thing - my time from application to on-site to offer was like 2 weeks for Jane Street, why is it 3 months for Google? The worst was that the deadline kept getting pushed back - for a month, I was told that I would be matched with a team that week, and I never actually got matched before my other offer deadlines.