I was actually going to bring this up. I have a lot of friends who are interview pros. They say if an interviewer decides earlier on you're not going to get hired, they basically fold up their sheets and ask non-related general questions to pass the rest of the time.
As an interviewee, I have, more than once, thanked my hosts for their tea and cake and left early when I detected that the interview was turning into a chat.
Would a collegiate interviewing model not work better for an intellectually driven organisation like Google? Each team interviewing for their own positions, but with some form of 'tenure track' process for the longer term?
The 'tenure track' is a great idea. How would you implement it though? Just curious.
As I said a few levels above, I am not a programmer. I'd imagine it might work like academic departments, a series of short contracts (well paid!) leading if successful to a more permanent place with some ability to direct own work.
I get the impression people are dealing with firehoses rather than trickles (talk of 'recruitment pipelines' like in a tyre factory) so perhaps the collegiate model just won't work.
At a broader level, the problem with this is that the delays inherent in doing a lot of hiring and relocating people means that you can't have teams doing their own hiring and then waiting for people to arrive and come on-line - there need to be candidates in the pipeline before the exact seats open up. Otherwise you're talking about a 3-6 month delay from when a seat opens to when there's an engineer sitting in it, which sucks.
With that said, it doesn't change my opinion of it being a time waste for me. I have a career, I know, more or less, what I want to work on next, and I have no interest in devoting a month (seriously, Google recommended taking that long to come up to speed on interview questions) of study to interview for who knows what position, especially when the whole system is gamed towards rejecting false negatives.
Welcome to reality in most of large corporate america. I've seen insane 6-9 month interview processes at places like Cisco and that's not even a successful hire. Likewise at other large SV companies.
If you can get it down to 3 months, it's below par and better than the competition.
You are also going nowhere for a long, long time.
Also, with decent performance you can transfer after a year, occasionally even earlier if another team really wants you.