All this posturing about interviews is ridiculous. They are a very flawed tool at best. Whatever happened to actually learning what people were capable of?

The best hires are always the people that you've worked with in the past, or who come personally recommended.

Google's dick-swinging about its interviews is IMO not really one of their strong points. The interview process can eliminate some complete losers, but it probably also eliminates lots of people who would have been great on the job.

I have some empirical backing for this. During my brief tenure at Google our team worked with a lot of interns, and we made our recommendations for extending offers. Then, suddenly someone made a new rule that outgoing interns should be re-interviewed by members of a completely different team, I guess, for objectivity. And a lot of them were rejected through that process.

So we had people who had proved themselves in an initial interview, and during many months of on-the-job contributions, getting rejected because some wanker asked them some question about missionaries and cannibals or some other useless puzzle question.

And yeah, it was that sort of thing -- I remember one intern trooping dejectedly back into our offices and I and the tech lead tried to figure out what the hell the answers were to the question(s) they got asked. We couldn't figure out those puzzles either.