In fact entire teams of HR thrive on being able to say "We havent found anyone yet." Despite HR, I 've managed to look outside the box and instantly gotten the kind of people I wanted to work with. They havent been blue-chip grads or people with 10 years of PPT pushing experience in a large firm. They have been people who have been enthused by a good problem. There is a ton of talent out there on the streets of Bangalore, they dont all have certificates, but many seem to have demos of products they have built. In my rule book, thats good enough. If you look for designers ask for an online portfolio, if you are looking for devs, ask for side projects, if you are looking for sales guys figure out if they understand tech well enough to sell. In short I need to see demonstrated value.
If you are big company, hire all the certificate holders and thank you for cleaning up the streets.
Recently we hired a girl, who has all brands next to her name. Hopped like 6 companies in 5 years. Endless projects to her resume and everything looks fine and dandy. After hiring her we figured she was fit for nothing. Every day she reads interview questions for about 1-2 hours. Makes calls to her friends. When asked to work, she just slacks around, force her too much and she throws in the 'harassing the girl' card. Now she wants all foreign travel opportunities to herself.
We know for sure she will quit in another 4 months, and she will get a good job too. Remember she is an expert reading those interview questions for an hour daily.
This is the regular crowd here in India that hops jobs too often. So its perfectly acceptable for the HR to ask for solid experience on a persons resume.
Your job hopper story is sad, but company "loyalty" is a nonsensical concept to me. You should only ever be as loyal to the company as the company would be to you. For me that means I don't consider company loyalty for one second. That being said, leaving a place too quick (or staying too long) makes you look bad so you have to way that in. Never some stupid one-way loyalty.
Of course, the other extreme are interviews where they feel it's okay to ask you questions that make it look like they only hire "geniuses" who can tell you why the mirror reflects left to right etc ...
Unfortunately salary hoppers are so common among the job hopping crowd, that its sufficient enough to say the most and nearly all job hoppers are salary hoppers.
I just told you about what works for some of us. Sure it might cost us a couple of good people who don't have a side project, but all of the people we end up getting are the problem solving type.
Iow, I am not sure school has anything to do with programming ability (it might be interesting to draw up a matrix of dev superstars and schools. hmm). Unlike Stanford or MIT, IITs don't do world class research. They have a good bachelors degree program. And Google Bangalore doesn't do "cars that drive themselves" style work anyway. From what friends who work at Google tell me, Google Bangalore doesn't have a(n internal) reputation (to put it mildly) of pulling off feats of superior engineering skill.
That said, I have zero issues with Google using any criteria they want to hire devs (just in case it wasn't clear earlier). I don't consider them "elitist" just because they do what works for them. In fact I don't even believe in the "elitism" concept. I think it is a largely empty word used to mean "they do things in a way that I find unsatisfactory".
Even if Google has a hiring bias towards IIT grads, the best way for a non-iit grad to get a job offer from Google (if that is what he wants) is to be a better engineer than the favored folks.
"Be so good they can't ignore you" as a wise man said. Good Advice.
The same with IIT, IIT itself will do little to make the person better. Even my experiences with IIT'ians has not been uniform, a lot of them are good ... but not everybody.
Now the main stuff,
Academics is one thing, industry totally another thing. Academics assumes that you can memorize, recollect from the memory and invent. The industry assumes your can discover and deliver. In our times to be able to discover is far more important thing than ability to invent. Coupled with productivity is what makes this software so interesting.
If you are productive, hardworking, and discover and experiment quickly you can achiever far more than any guy from IIT or whatever.
In short, Education only takes you so far. After that its all upto your work.
I believe it's more like given a choice between someone `who is most probably a good athlete and may or may not be a good footballer`, and another `who may or may not be a good athlete and may or may not be a good footballer`, you would go with someone who is most probably a good athlete.
The ideal way would be to test them on the soccer abilities, but the volume of applications a company like Google does, and the percentage of people who claim to be programmers, but aren't really good, forces the use of heuristics. It will be simply impractical to test candidates for the actual programming the job entails.
Also, IIT grads do well in traditional interviews. You are more likely to get a dynamic programming solution from an IIT grad for a subset sum problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subset_sum_problem than from a normal college grad - not that it has a high correlation with programming abilities, but traditional interviews focus on these kind of questions.
I did my bachelors from a simpleton college, and I was considered a good programmer, because hell, I could code up a vanilla binary tree in C++(no string attached - a binary tree with inorder traversal - that's it) from scratch in a lab test in under 45 minutes - that was as hard a problem you could get to solve in a lab test.
I would have to be admit I will be negatively biased towards people graduating from that cadre of colleges. Not that they aren't good programmers there - it's just that you will have to dig through a lot of not-so-good to find someone good, and it's not a worthy investment of time.
The kind of questions that are asked on tests will make you puke. We had a AI course, and we were following AIMA(I believe you were maintaining the Java code at that time) - the questions that were asked on the first test were essay questions viz. "How do you design a better computer"(from introduction chapter which wasn't much about designing about a better computer), implementing A* search was considered outside the scope of the course(implementing anything from the book was considered out of scope)...I could go on an on, but you get the idea.
You're probably right (and I say that as an IIT grad). Most of the people I knew there were significantly smarter than me but couldn't program their way out of a paper bag.
With the changing times, many startups are getting into the recruiting space and helping such companies as google choose credible candidates without the elite institution tag.
Would changing the OP's sentence to "Google is mostly elitist" help? (Genuine Question). You might (please note the emphasis on 'might') be the exception that proves the rule. Here in Bangalore, for example, it is known that Google has a strong bias towards IIT grads and academic performance.
Whether such a strong preference for such schools/academic scores etc should be labelled "elitist" is a different debate. Fwiw, my gut feel is that if you are a strong enough engineer, you can get Google to override this bias.