I reluctantly obliged, and had a couple of phone screenings where they said they were looking for experienced embedded systems developers for low-level hardware development. I was specializing in 8-bit microcontroller firmware and Linux kernel drivers, and the recruiter said it was exactly what they wanted.
When I took the first technical interview, they grilled me on MapReduce and cluster storage, and then asked me to design a collaborative text editor for the web. The interviewer didn't have a copy of my resume, hadn't seen it, didn't know what position he was interviewing for, and didn't know anything about hardware. We had a really awkward moment when I explicitly said, "there must be some mistake, I'm supposed to be interviewing for an embedded role." I bombed the hell out of that interview, and never heard back from them again.
If my experience was typical, then no wonder the Android team had trouble with staffing.
This is a clear and unambiguous downside.
But the presence of downsides is not always a reason to reject a process. A huge upside of the process is that Google enables fluid transition of people within teams around the company. This among my favorite things here and it makes it so that good people with shit managers are not just automatically flung out of the company because their particular team is a toxic mess.
The weird thing is that it’s been this way for decades, but the enormous product-market fit of the FAANGs’ core products have masked this.
I read a new book about Android development, mostly built around interviews of the original team. Several times it was mentioned that after the Google acquisition, Android was unable to hire the people they needed — experienced Be/Palm/Danger devs from their network — because they were unable or unwilling to pass the Google interview bar. High-level exceptions had to be made to bring in these people Google absolutely needed to build the new OS.
That suggests that other teams inside Google (and other companies imitating their interview process) have been in a similar quandary, but without the C-level exception to hire the experienced people they wanted. And I think that explains some of the product struggles these companies have had. Android is clearly the exception as a long-term success.