Really? You know company-wide practices at all offices, for the last decade or so? I have this first-hand from a colleague who worked there, and he is definite

Really? You know company-wide practices at all offices, for the last decade or so? I have this first-hand from a colleague who worked there, and he is definitely not one to make things up. Plus... this would be an oddly specific lie, don't you think? To be fair, I should have used past tense in my comment, since this was a few years ago. But, given interview experiences at Google reported by other immediate colleagues, I would find the story believable even without knowing the credibility of the source. Here's another one: My friend (not the one who saw the "ranking" system) had an interview at Google, where he was given a programming exercise and told he could solve the problem in any language he wanted. The interviewer left the room, and my friend correctly solved the problem in Objective-C. The interviewer came back, looked at it, and said, "Oh, not THAT language." A few years later, Google publicly admitted that its interview process sucked and said it was making it better. I have declined to interview with them, however, not only because of friends' experiences but also the company's behavior on the whole.