> you will never work with anybody like that at Google. Really never ever.

Well... at a previous company I worked at, we hired an ex-google software engineer. He had a good resume, and was one of the best interviewees I've ever had. He totally nailed algo questions and even some arcane functional stuff I threw at him he hadn't seen before (yes, those kinds of questions are pretty dumb, but I was a bit more naive back then).

But, this guy ended up being a terrible programmer. I mean, he seemed pretty darned bright from that interview session. Amazing even. But he was unable to ship code, let alone write good, elegant code. He just wasn't wired for it.

Ironically, he ended up getting booted from his team and moving into the biz side where he made a lot more money than the rest of us (trading).

Yeah, I'm not saying there aren't terrible programmers. I'm just saying that everybody can write a 1 to 3 line "for" loop and navigate a directory structure :) That's the level of incompetence the parent was describing.

Definitely not true. I'm a current Google employee, and one of my teammates (a senior staff engineer, no less) does NOT know what a unit test is, what an API is, what Borg is, or how MapReduce works. After suspecting this for a while, I asked him to try to explain some of these concepts, and he either had no answer or his answers were hilariously wrong.

(He did come from an acquisition, though, and doesn't write any code. He's more of a manager, despite not being on the manager track.)

"Borg?" I had to look that up. It's Google's in-house cluster manager.

I thought he meant the 'Borg' design pattern ;-)

I don't know what Borg is either, but then I realized it is likely an internal Google thing; unit test, API, MapReduce -- these are all ubiquitous concepts to programmers outside of Mountain View, so the inclusion of Borg seemed a little out of place.

I am currently working with Google. We had people who couldn't code on our team. I don't know if they were officially contractors like me or Google proper.

I knew a guy who could go to the board and draw a FSM, construct a context-free grammar, or construct a proof for anything the professor asked for.

And in Algorithms, he could go to the board and walk through any algorithm we happened to be talking about.

In essence he was perfectly suited to white board interviews.

But when I worked with him in Software Engineering his code was unmaintainable, poorly commented, and he was very abrasive and unpleasant to work with.

Yup. The difference between a computer scientist and a software engineer.

It's a sad state of affairs that our industry is currently conflating the two. Or maybe the industry has only now reached a stage where the two need to become separate?

I mean, you wouldn't expect a theoretical physicist to design an experiment or, worse, a bridge.

I absolutely would expect a theoretical physicist to at least be able to competently contribute to the design of an experiment, especially as it pertains to his specialty.

The bridge analogy is spot on, in my opinion. It mirrors my above comment, and I couldn't agree more.

The theoreticians usually figure out what exactly to look at. The experimentalists figure out how to do it, and then carry it out.

A common joke is that you don't let the theorists anywhere near the apparatus, because they'll break things.

That person knows how to code, he just writes bad code. As most people do at the start of their career. It is learnable though.

The bigger problem apparently is that he's an asshole. Interviews can screen for assholes, but not with programming exersizes.

This perfectly puts an handle on what is happening: http://sijinjoseph.com/programmer-competency-matrix/

That may have been the case for 2006 Google, not 2015 Google; there's ~18000 engineers now.

I helped a classmate who didn't understand basic programming concepts batting 1/20 in full time interviews before getting and accepting a Google offer.

That was when I realized how far Google's hiring standards have fallen.

Do you work at Google? I agree with the grandparent - I haven't met a single person lke that here. I'm sure false positives exist but they are rare - you need to do well on a bunch of interviews that involve both coding and algo questions. Either your friend learned how to code or won't last long.

I knew somebody like that who got hired at Google. Bad coder, got fired from two companies in a row, and would have gotten fired from where we worked too, except I went out of my way to stop it from happening.

That turned out to be a mistake, but that's another story. Point is, he went on to work at Google.