(Tedious disclaimer: not speaking for anybody else, my opinion only, etc. I'm an SRE at Google.) I'm only going to respond to a couple of parts of this. I more

(Tedious disclaimer: not speaking for anybody else, my opinion only, etc. I'm an SRE at Google.) I'm only going to respond to a couple of parts of this. I more or less disagree with everything you said and even some of the whitespace, but there are only some parts that I can discuss publicly so I'll limit myself to those. > to figure out what any competent human being would think of as blindingly obvious. No: to take the things which you thought were obvious, and collect data proving which ones were true and which ones were false. This is no longer "obvious", it is now a proven fact. Yes, science is a lot more expensive than guessing. > HR people can and do make those kinds of assumptions all the time. They do it when they are looking at resumes; they do it when they are setting up phone screens > There's a deeply seated problem happening when you allow people with no subject matter experience be the gatekeepers of who does and doesn't get into a company. I can state unequivocally that peopleops at Google is not involved in these functions, except to monitor their performance. > Perhaps every pod at Google doesn't need its own HR rep, but there is a level of management that would make sense to have one HR person to handle hiring/recruiting/necessary paperwork. We do assign people in something roughly like this fashion, although they aren't really involved in hiring, recruiting, or paperwork.