Poll: Have you ever applied to work at Google?

Its a pretty interesting story so I thought I'd share:

I applied through the traditional on-campus recruiting at UC Berkeley. Got past the first round of interviews on Berkeley's campus and then was taken to the Mountain View campus for 4 interviews and a bunch of events. That night, I got a call saying that the interviewers really liked me and recommended that I be hired. At most companies, that would mean that I was made an offer. Instead, they have these "hiring panels" where executives from various departments take a look at your resume, the notes from interviewers, and your transcript / other related documents. 3 weeks later I got an e-mail saying I was rejected during one of these panels. These people never met me; in fact, the 6 people who had met me all recommended that Google hire me. It was kind of weird, since no other company I had applied for had a process where people who hadn't interviewed you made the final decision on whether you should be hired.

Obviously, I am a little frustrated by it - so take this with a grain of salt. However, I think that my experience was emblematic of a few specific issues with the hiring processes there (though they have some amazing processes as well):

1) People who've never met you should not be pontificating in large panels about whether you would be a good fit. That just doesn't make sense.

2) Google has a very strong academic focus on hiring. It is clear when you interview with them that they care a lot about top-brand schools and top GPA's. They seem to believe that the best students will make the best employees. I am not sure, but I think the reason I got rejected may have to do with two C's on my college transcript (which is not indicative of my inability to Ace calculus but rather my lack of interest in attending class). Personally, I think the academic focus is much to their detriment - and a major part of the reason they've struggled at social. That said, Google has some brilliant people who I'm sure I would've loved to work with :). Take this answer for what it is but hopefully you'll find it valuable.

Google hired me with 10 years professional software development experience and no CS degree. Google hired my friend with similar years of experience and no high school diploma.

I'm with you there...I don't think I'd fit in at a hardcore engineering shop like ITA where you'd have to live and breathe algorithms. But at places where you're just building and maintaining straightforward web apps, you don't need to be able to give a lecture on computer theory, you just need to know how to code, and how certain practices affect security, scalability, performance, or maintainability. These are the places where you'll find CS guys who like to talk a big game, but the codebase is messy and full of hacks. In my experience, the CS guys at these places spent all of their time learning theory and how to architect on whiteboards at school, but they never learned how to write good code. This is where I shine, because when the lights go down and the crowd goes silent, no one cares about how many chords you know, or whether you can play a harmonic minor scale...they just want to know if you can hit notes.