Ask HN: Why does Google get away with such bad recruiting practices?

It's possible that your recruiter quit and hopped to a different company. That is one common source for recruiter going dark. It's also possible you got a really bad recruiter... there's an enormous variance of recruiter quality.

Just guessing here, but auto generated emails are tricky because you don't want to send people incorrect messaging by accident (for example if your recruiter wants to swap you between application roles, it may involve a cancel and add, which could send an auto rejected notice - (hypothetical example, I have no idea)).

I'm not sure if this is insightful, sarcastic, crazy, or most likely a mixture, but I have occasionally thought that the mighty GOOG is trolling us with their traditional hiring process and if you actually want to work there its infinitely easier to found or join a startup they'd find tasty and get yourself bought. Which is an interesting way to finance and report hiring bonuses, and the ultimate form of portfolio building as an interview technique.

Personally I am not willing to jump the hoops to get in conventionally and I don't actually want to work there, I know I can't tolerate what I'd have to do to get hired there, but I am pretty sure I could stomach what I'd have to do to get acquired, if I made it my full time goal.

This also fits into the financial offer. I don't live in SV and some years ago a Google recruiter tracked me down and unfortunately the general terms of the job position meant a staggering hit to the standard of living of my entire family.... I just can't abuse my wife and kids like they wanted me to. What they proposed was pretty brutal compared to our current standard of living and budget. However... if they bought my startup, and I dumped the money into Mountain View real estate, essentially giving me a free house, well, that's different... with no multimillion dollar mortgage I could afford to work there for the original offer...

Its an interesting solution to hiring when you're located in housing bubble central.

Seems like they could spring a couple of bills for a technical writer to polish the requirements when the end result is likely to be a six digit salaried employee.

There's also pigeonholing. I've seen it happen plenty of times. If you helpdesk even momentarily, to pay the loans and get some food, you'll never touch an IDE again professionally until you scrub that from the resume. Replace some dude's mouse and you'll never compile source code for pay again. Ever. You're done with paid software development forever never to be permitted to return. I've seen it happen to decent enough programmers...

Looking at ops post history he's a C++ robotics guy and HR will never let that resume past unless its a specifically C++ Robotics position. In IT you gotta treat your successful past jobs or degrees like other professions would treat a minor cocaine habit, well, uh, sure I accept that a long time ago I wrote Perl, way too much Perl, did lines and lines of it, but that was a bad time in my life, which is over, and my true calling, as my heavily doctored resume indicates, is I've always been a Scala guy. Even when I started computer work in 1981, my first 23 years in computing, I was really was a deeply stealth Scala guy, I always knew back when I was writing Z80 assembly code decades before Scala was invented that I really wanted to program in Scala, I just had to kind of do it in Z80 assembly the first few years. Did I tell you how when I was writing MVS CICS mainframe code I was totally writing it just like I was using Clojurescript Hoplon last week? Yeah totally man, really. Well anyway its all good now and my parole officer, er, I mean life coach, says I've turned my life around. Sure I do a line or two of Perl on the weekends or when I get really drunk, just like everyone else, amiright? but it never negatively affects my work life. Thank God that Larry Wall tattoo I got in prison err, I mean when I was doing lines of Perl, is on my butt and not my face, that would be totally awkward to explain at interviews. Sniff. Oh geeze I hope you guys aren't gonna be like IBM where they tested me at the clinic to see if I still had a problem with recreational Perl use, sure I came up positive and I still say that test was rigged. I mean you run SLOCCOUNT on anyone's entire github repo its gonna come up positive for a couple lines of Perl, everyone does it and I'm actually a lower risk because I did lines and lines of Perl until I couldn't handle it, and after treatment I'm totally better and less likely than some rando off the street to get addicted to Perl, I gained a lot of wisdom and experience the hard way, and I can grind awesome prison shanks out of a plastic spoon and oh sorry got a little off topic there we were talking about how I was a Scala programmer for 23 years before it was invented. And a damn good one too aside from doing a couple lines of Perl on the side, but I'm all good now. Yeah its crazy and the last paragraph was a little over the top but it really is the only profession I know of where you have to downplay past success like other professions would try to hand wave away a minor drug problem.

I just tripped down the rabbit hole of skimming said comments back a few years, you're not kidding.