So they should continue to hire by a metric that doesn’t work? Not try anything different at all?
I just mean to say that all hiring criterion have tradeoffs, and none is strictly better than the others.
And I don’t know what a new process should be. Google has the data from literally millions of applications and has decided to just ignore them or not to try different ways of hiring? Give me a break.
We assume somebody competent is looking at this, but for all we know they are using the same dumb myopic evaluation as they use for promotions. I mean the same people came up with both.
If they're making money, then it works, and they should stick to it.
That's their actual metric, not developer competence in itself.
What if Apple had stuck to just selling iPods in 2007? Just like Blackberry, more iPods were sold in 2007 than ever before - the same year the iPhone was introduced.
What if Netflix had kept shipping DVDs or more recently didn’t invest in its own content years before other providers started pulling theirs?
Sure, but how are those things relevant? Those are strategic decisions, not decisions made by developers -- and don't concern what we're discussing, if the devs they hire are good for the company.
If somebody at Google C-level decided "let's close down Search and Ads, and just make kitchen juicers" their profits would also tank.
But that's not related to if the devs they hire are good for them. Unless their profit is hampered by dev output (and not one of the other reasons it can go down), their devs are fine for them.