Actually (with that) he wasn't being an asshole; he was doing you a favor.
In revealing to you, quite candidly, just how disappointing the Google experience evidently is for a considerable portion of engineers.
> evidently is for a considerable portion of engineers.
I only see evidence that the experience was disappointing for a single Googler, the lunch interviewer, not "a considerable portion" of them. The interviewer's data point is certainly valid, but it's not clear to me how much you can generalize it.
Obviously it is to be taken into account together with a whole slew of data points -- not just in the form of online postings, but from close acquaintances who have worked there over there years.
Humans don't work like that. That single data point and the experience he had allows quite some generalization.
Maybe this isn't how you build a ML model, but that ML model won't work very well when interacting with other people.
The fact that someone in the interview chain is willing to tell you significant negative information dramatically raises the Bayesian prior.
An interview chain is normally extremely well vetted for people who are positive-only. The fact that this failed is a dramatic cause for concern.
Having worked at four companies I have yet to see there being any serious discussions on merits of which questions to ask, the style of interview to be conducted, how to grade candidates reliably, or the amount of help and guidance to give candidates. In short as far as I can tell the whole tech interview process is generally a mess.
I have tried to push for discussions on all of the topics above and most engineers simply do not find the topic interesting enough to engage at length. There's a lot to discuss and everyone complains about the current state of the interview process across the whole field yet few do more than complain. Alas that is life.
As for vetting for "positive-only", I am not sure that's something that can even be done. Usually conducting interviews is part of your performance and you are expected to do them or it will reflect poorly on you as an employee. So every senior engineer or above typically will aim to do some amount of interviews and, let's say you are one of them and you are not very happy, when you get asked by your manager whether you are a positive employee, you are very unlikely to say no.
Also unhappiness is a pervasive quality regardless of title and you can very easily find high level managers and one year out of college engineers that are equally unhappy if you were to ask them candidly. This is a separate topic, but we as an industry have potential to make our workplaces incredibly engaging and rewarding but that potential somehow seems so very hard to achieve.
Whoa! Really?!?!?!
That's a huge difference from any of the places I have worked. If you didn't want to be on the interview loop, nobody in their right mind thought it would be a good idea to command you to do so.
Normally people wanted to be on the interview loop simply so they had input on the people who might become their colleagues. But there were people who wanted nothing to do with the loop and that was okay, too. Maybe you simply had too many deadlines or just were an introverted personality.
But forcing people to do the interview loop? That's seems like a recipe for disaster.
Interviewing is apparently the most popular choice to fulfill this requirement, so get ready for a glut of disinterested people interviewing you at google.
As an interviewer myself and having interviewed for startups (which is a different beast due to the additional selling involved in converting candidates) I've learnt to break the ice, encourage the candidates, treat them as human and guide them towards the solution if they're off by a little. I do also cut short some interviews when I realise the candidate is an obvious mismatch. I do so politely and in the interest of saving both of us some time.
So, when the Airbnbs, Dropboxes and Googles don't extend the same courtesy - even though I know they have the upper hand - I lose any interest I have in joining them by the end of the interview. I have had really good experience with BrainTree & Pinterest & a few others. So I do know not all companies are bad and even within the company there are good and bad interviewers and it's just a matter of luck. Still, the doubts about self-worth are hard to squash.
Edit: I call out Braintree in particular because they conduct interviews in pairs. At least one person's job to listen at all times. IMHO, this makes all the difference. Any signs of bias, narrow perspectives and hostile behaviour should - at least to some degree - be reduced with this model.
I'm pretty sure that there is another "school of thought" that is exactly the opposite: start nonimpressed to make the candidate "fight for it". In some companies it's very plain how interviewers agreed a bad cop / good cop routine in advance.
"I think you will like it here, me I'm bailing because I can't stand it"
My understanding is that this isn't a criterion for choosing interviewers, even lunch interviewers. The recruiters who line up interviewers with candidates aren't in a position know the views of the interviewers; I don't know any of them barely at all.
(Disclosure: I work at Google and have conducted many interviews, but I'm speaking only for myself.)