No, I still don't want to work for Google

There are specific areas where I want to focus -- search, data analysis, infrastructure -- and my next job I'll probably be looking for a focus in one or more of those areas (each of which Google would be a good option but without a degree and at my age I doubt I'd get hired). Be that as it may, I really, really don't want to work in a huge organization. I hate bureaucracy, central authority, people I never see in the organization making policy for me, etc. I spent my entire adult life in the military up til a couple years ago. I think that has something to do with it.

edit: This comment really crystallizes the type of thing I want to avoid, which means eschewing employment at Google, IBM, Microsoft,etc: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4713802

>Those were (are?) the designations for certain types of jobs over there. You might think that if you're hired into the company, your possibilities are wide open, but they aren't. System administrator flavored SREs (site reliability engineers) could only get other SA-flavored jobs, of which there are relatively few. Meanwhile, software engineer (SWE) type SREs could go into any other SWE job, of which there are many. If you were hired on as a SA-SRE as I was, then you have to do an internal interview to get to be a SWE-SRE. If you can't make it through that, you're stuck. I made it, and a friend did too, but I know people who didn't. I'm sure that makes them feel great, especially if they're already doing SWE type work in their daily jobs. I was told repeatedly there was no difference between the types, but found out the hard way when it was time to transfer from a toxic situation and there were few alternatives. It took over a year to finally get it all sorted out.

This explains the blind allocation policy. If knowledge that is not At Google doesn't count, then there's no point in matching people with their expertise or interests, because a Noogler by definition doesn't know anything.

In July 2011, I did some research on the strategy of the Google+ Games team and saw that the going plan was doomed to failure and seriously risked such embarrassment as to kill the entire product. (Lots of Zyngarbage, preferential treatment to mainstream publishers.) I had some domain expertise from designing a game and spending a lot of time hanging around game designers. So it was pretty easy for me to come up with a strategy that had a damn good chance of actually succeeding. I posted it internally and got a huge amount of engineer support. The strategy was to establish a quality-centered community first by providing a platform for independent developers, integrate it with Hangouts, and become a center for the "German-style" board game sphere. The high quality starting community would establish G+ Games as cognitively upscale, creating a comparative brand advantage that would persist in perpetuity.

By the way, the Google+ Games engineers also got wind of what I'd been proposing and they supported me. It was as obvious as it can be to humans (obviously, no one can predict the future) that this strategy would work. I got a ridiculous number of emails from engineers telling me that I was right on and that they wished they were implementing "Real Games" instead of giving ridiculous preferential treatment to mainstream publishers (who were throwing us mediocre product because they didn't expect us to succeed). What got me in trouble was that a lot of high-level people didn't like that an FNG had so much engineer support.

I was a recognized domain expert, but not an At Google domain expert. There were no At Google games experts, because Google had never gone into the Games space before (and that's smart, because Google did extremely well on web search by being ideologically non-editorial, but for the games space quality is so damn important that you must be editorial.) So it came down to politics, because Google's At-Google bias rendered it incapable of recognizing domain expertise and discovering a correct decision.

Finally I got an email to the effect of, "domain expertise isn't relevant here, deal with it. Besides, you're only a SWE 3." Well, fuck you very much. I don't see why job titles matter when you're about to lose millions of dollars and would have been making as much had you listened to me.

A year later, I was proven right, but it doesn't matter in the least. Google+ Games is a non-concern, and I'm not a part of Google.

The lesson I learned from that ordeal is not to try to "save" a company from itself because you can't. You'll be seen as right, and possibly even lionized, long after you leave... but it won't matter in the least. Keep your head down, stay employed, and enjoy the middle-row seat to the show-- that "show" being the people in charge making fools of themselves.

Instead of having a 'simple test', just find some random, buggy sub-optimal code sample online (shouldn't be hard) and ask them to identify the problems with it and refactor.

I can almost guarantee you that bozos won't see half the problems, and they definitely won't know how to fix them.

Asking someone to code up simple examples on a board ends up just testing a dude's ability to code up simple coding questions. Bug finding/fixing, creating readable and elegant code and the ability to refactor are all much more relevant and important than asking if someone can implement a sorting algorithm or parse a custom data structure.

In the end, I think that by testing candidates this way it'll make it more likely that the people you hire actually have skills that are important to their daily work.