I do work at Google, and I'm saying that Norvig's description is still accurate. It was true when I was hired in 2010, and it's true now for the candidates I interview now.
I'm not sure why it's relevant that Google has sometimes hired sub-standard people. Of course it has. Interviewing isn't perfect, and sometimes we make mistakes.
No, sorry, I didn't meant it in a provokative way. I was just saying it in relation to Norvig's statement.
Although I really like Google and most things about how you guys work, I can't hide that I think it's becoming a common joke how broke the interview process is at Google.
One of my friends told me that they needed, really needed a person, but it still took four months to fill up the position. Another friend was contacted for a PhD software engineer position, and even though he had told the HR person that he was also interviewing for another company, he had time to go through the whole interview process with the other company (consisting on several meetings), and by the time he had an offer, Google still hadn't had the phone interview with him.
I'm just saying that I had the impression that the hiring system isn't not amongst the best ones out there, but I have big respect for how the company works.
Specifically, I think it's great, for example, that they aren't afraid of trying a million things and shut them down when they're not happy. Most companies are afraid of switching and are extremely slow at making any decent change.
But so, just to understand if you want to say something about it, do you really interview a person without a position? Just for the whole company? Or do you mean that if the candidate is good you say 'hire, but for a different position'? Or do you mean something else?
I wouldn't call the interview process at Google broken. While some of my coworkers are better than others, I've yet to encounter any that truly aren't at the top of our field. Whatever we're doing, however we may fail in other areas, the primary goal of interviewing--to find and hire highly qualified people--is something we're achieving.
Yes, we may be rejecting highly qualified people who would do well at Google, but interview poorly. As has been noted in the comments here and elsewhere[0] it's far better to reject a qualified candidate than accept an unqualified candidate. Though we'd all be happier with a higher true positive rate, we're not willing to accept a higher false positive rate to achieve that.
What we're not good at, and what we get lampooned for so frequently (e.g., this story) is that in our pursuit of minimizing our false positive rate, we come off as arrogant, sometimes condescending, and a number of procedural and legal problems exacerbate that appearance. I've interviewed people that were right on the threshold between "hire" and "no hire", and like Joel advises, I wrote down "no hire". I'd love to tell these people what would have swung my opinion and ask them apply again in a year, but I just can't: it's too dangerous.
As far as interactions with recruiters goes, I can't really speak to those issues, since my experience in the hiring process was atypical (though not at all distinct in the ways we've discussed here so far, e.g. being hired for a company and finding a position after an offer has been extended).
Now, to answer your question, I have never interviewed anyone for a specific position. Every single person I've interviewed has been for engineering as a whole. People get interviewed for specific job ladders (e.g. SWE, SRE, SET, etc.) but the specific teams/projects a person will work on is decided after they've accepted an offer, as I understand it (and experience it myself).
By the way, just to clarify because maybe it wasn't really clear, when I said broken I didn't mean at all that the interview process at Google fails at hiring good candidates, I just meant that sometimes it takes literally months and that's too long, and that often people in the meanwhile receive other offers. For many of them it's not possible to say no to another offer just because maybe they will get an offer from Google in two months (and career wise it's not serious to jump around and leave a place after two months unless the position is a lot better).
That's all, and I think it's cool that you interview that way. Maybe I've had a biased opinion given what happened to the people that I directly talked to. Thanks again for clarifying these points.
Note that we do expedite the process for people who receive competing offers; I had an offer from another company the day after my Google interview; I told my recruiter about it and she had me an offer from Google within a week.
I explained in another thread here[0] one of the biggest sources of discontent from people who interview here, in case you're curious.
I'm not sure why it's relevant that Google has sometimes hired sub-standard people. Of course it has. Interviewing isn't perfect, and sometimes we make mistakes.