What I'm wondering about is that they mention long hiring process as a reason for quitting the job. They finally made it to the end and they quit because of that?
Bad hiring practices represents a lot of organizational dysfunction, some of which impact your every day work, and since the hiring process is your first contact with the company it's often the first thing to come to mind.
Bad hiring practices also cause you to be interviewing candidates. A lot. "Google-style" tech hiring is characterized by generally meaningless interviews with very, very low acceptance rates. This is not just frustrating for candidates who fail, but also the people who get to interview them.
When I was at Amazon I was in this situation - a combination of poor hiring practices and organizational dysfunction meant that all of a sudden I was literally spending 5+ hours every single day interviewing people. It was brutal and demoralizing - doubly so when a candidate everyone liked is rejected for seemingly arbitrary/bureaucratic reasons. The sheer gauntlet of back-to-back interviews candidates are subject to also means that for every one candidate, many engineer-hours are spent interviewing them. The impact of diverting this much time towards interviewing candidates instead of actual work is easily felt.
To summarize the situation - we were a pretty scrappy team of 3 engineers that gradually took on more and more work as the scope of our work increased. There was an org-wide hiring freeze put in place because of the general doom-and-gloom right after 2008, so our demands to hire more people to cope with the increasing workload were repeatedly refused.
Come ~2011, the company starts breathing again and finally lifts the hiring freeze, at which point 7 engineering positions suddenly opened on my team, and the 3 of us became nearly full-time interviewers. I was gone within a few months, my other coworker soon after, and the most senior engineer on the team transferred within the company.
I'm not sure what the salient lesson is here - don't try to hire for 7 positions simultaneously with only 3 interviewers? Don't put a hiring freeze in place when there's obviously more work to be done? Something.
There were also lots of problems with the recruitment and hiring process itself:
- the quality of candidates we were getting from HR was very poor. Each of us wasted incredible amounts of time phone screening candidates who were wildly mismatched with the role, or straight up not qualified. Our phone screen fail rate was easily >90%, and this not only was disappointing for the candidates but also kills your interviewers' productivity and morale.
- Amazon has the "bar raiser" system. The standard on-site interview at Amazon was a full-day (6-8 hours) of back-to-back interviews, including lunch. One of these interviewers is a designated "bar raiser", who is usually a more senior, particularly trusted (or just political) person. This person can veto even an entire room full of "yes" decisions - and this happened with some regularity. It is absolutely devastating for team morale when an arbitrarily appointed person - who usually isn't even on your own team - vetoes a candidate that everyone on the team liked. This naturally resulted in us interviewing even more people, and more frustrated because we knew even if the candidate passed with flying colors there's still a chance they'll be caught by the bar-raiser's decimation and arbitrarily be rejected.
That last part is the situation I'm in at my current place - I'm at a smaller company where one of the original high-level engineers insists on interviewing everyone. He's also a fan of gotcha brain teaser problems - so even well-qualified candidates who interview well with the rest of the team will get into a room with him and he'll veto the candidate when they fail his teaser-of-the-day.
Translation: Amazon suffered almost 100% knowledge loss on the systems your team were the exclusive owners of. The cost of this kind of thing is staggering and yet I've seen companies discount it again and again, over decades. It's insane.
And as to your current gig: run. You'll never be able to grow a decent team with an idiot in charge, and you've got an idiot in charge. Get out, if you can. Nothing but good teams build good products, and if you can't hire a good team because you've got an idiot with a veto you'll be stuck building mediocre (at best) products.
It's a pity there is no actual demand for quality software developers. If there was, this kind of nonsense would be abraded away by market forces with incredible speed. The fact that it persists demonstrates that hardly anyone really cares whether they get good developers or not.
Perhaps the gentleman concerned is simply someone who helped start the company and hasn't quite understood the need for routine staff turnover in what is now a much larger organisation?
Adding my own personal anecdote to this: about 75% of the time, when I get contacted by recruiters for major West Coast companies[1] the positions they are scouting me for are inappropriate to my skill set, background, and interests. Sometimes wildly so.
[1] Which is probably once every two months or so.
I never forgot what they put me through though, and showed zero allegiance to the organization. I put on a smile, and kissed the right people, but in reality; I was a horrid employee.
I don't think companies realize how certain employees hold grudges? That HR idiot who calls every phone number on the resume, and talks for too long should be fired.(I know they're suspose to keep it brief in most states, but as a past employer, they have kept me on the phone for too long. I have had HR dudes call me when they were out at dinner--drinking--heavily.. I had one lady ask me, "Does the girl do drugs? She seems like the type?" I was floored. The women in question had a slight speech impediment, but overqualified for the position.
I would like to do away with resumes. I always felt a test would make the process fairer, and would do away with nepotism, padded resumes, and all the other BS we have had to put up with? (By the way--it is illegial for an employer to check your credit score in California.)
That might not cause you to quit immediately, but it might be an indicator for other problems and you might become more acutely aware of those when you start.
Also, now you have "I passed the Google hiring process" on your CV.
Who am I kidding, of course SOMEONE would, but more than one or two people?
Which to me means that the way you treat them during the interview and their first weeks at work end up being part of the calculus of Stay or Go. I've really taken this to heart, and I'm profusely embarrassed if for instance their equipment is not there day 1 and I'm working order.