> You would be thrilled, but would that get the candidate the job? At previous companies I've worked at (small statups) where I had a high influence on hiring:

> You would be thrilled, but would that get the candidate the job? At previous companies I've worked at (small statups) where I had a high influence on hiring: yes absolutely unless someone more qualified with the same excitement came around (aka Rob Pike walks in). At Google interviewing is complicated. There is a lot on the Google careers site about this if you're interested. If you brought this up while doing team matching it will make people's eyes light up. My TL liked that I was doing game dev, R&D, and OS dev for fun and I think it's a large part of why I was chosen for my team.