Here's the thing that I think some of the engineers in this discussion might be missing: A company shouldn't consist of only engineers. Don't get me wrong: I'm

Here's the thing that I think some of the engineers in this discussion might be missing: A company shouldn't consist of only engineers. Don't get me wrong: I'm a software developer, and I'm a bit of a software snob. I have trouble (though I've mostly overcome it) seeing Managers, CEOs, marketing people, sales people, "designers", etc. as doing "real work" because they're not engineers. Maybe designers feel the same way about me. They should. But the reality is, good companies need good designers, and with experience I've discovered that designers can really blow your mind sometimes. But the hiring process for a designer is not the same as the hiring process for an engineer. One area where I've personally been very dissatisfied with google is the lack of customer support. I can't imagine asking programming questions to a customer support person who was expected to help people with their adwords account. The person being interviewed here, and who wrote this blog post is one of those "customer support" type people. Not pretending to be an engineer. If you only hire engineers and your hiring process is engineer focused, you're going to miss out on a lot of really good people, and you're going to have non-engineering roles staffed by engineers who just want google on their resume so they can go get an engineering job later. And these are not the people you want helping others with their adwords account. (Of course I'm not familiar with the internal structure of google, so I'm giving examples meant to be representative of the problem, but that might not actually be true.)