So the one thing that you might be missing is that in the engineering org, we don't hire into a job or team, we hire into a ladder. While individual job opening

So the one thing that you might be missing is that in the engineering org, we don't hire into a job or team, we hire into a ladder. While individual job openings exist and drive the number of people that we're looking to hire at a site, during the recruiting process you aren't really being matched to those. If the job opening is for a SWE, then you get a generic SWE recruiting process and interview panel. If you pass that, then the site managers will figure out which SWE roles at that site you would best fit into - but because everything we do is secret, as an outsider you are basically unable to have any useful input into that process, you just cannot know enough about it before you're hired. The public versions of job postings are missing most of the important details, and the way we do things is too different. We're also far more interested in skills than experience. Moving between teams is easy once you've been hired (because you've already passed the generic interview for your ladder), and at that point you'll have enough information to make an informed choice. People are expected to move around, and do. This has got a lot to do with why the hiring process works the way it does: you're being hired for all the future jobs you'll do, not the one you get assigned to on day one. (If this was about roles outside the engineering org, I have no knowledge of how hiring works for those) > On the positive side, all the Googlers who I've spoken with through the various interviews have been smart and pleasant. This is in some sense both the goal of our hiring process and the evidence that it's working well.