> deciding whether someone will fit in the Google clique That can be shockingly important. You can be a great developer, but still not a good fit for a company

> deciding whether someone will fit in the Google clique That can be shockingly important. You can be a great developer, but still not a good fit for a company. As an example, I saw several employees top-out at relatively low points at MSFT but then go to Google and have heard back that they have done shockingly well. I would bet that the reverse is also true. Some of the best interviewers I've had on my loops were people who had a great grasp of whether a person was not only smart, but whether they would be successful long-term (e.g. if this entire division got killed, would they still do great work elsewhere in the company?). While I can't characterize hire/no-hire decisions for old legal reasons, I can certainly say that many of the people who struggled at MSFT but excelled at Google favored closed-door remote-work style hacking over personal interaction code-design. One style is not necessarily better than the other, but for people who can only work in one mode or the other, they will find themselves career-limited in the long term if they go someplace that does not fit with their work style.