> Mostly I just want you to come around on the diagnosis, and agree that we need to fix it properly for the first time in 50 years. [...] At Google, rather than putting a little black desk on every interview loop, they just assumed all the interviewers had their heads up their arses (an evidence-based assumption), [...] People are not allowed to question whether the interview process is valid. Challenging it is akin to casting aspersions on the entire engineering staff. First of all, how dare you?

A scoping/guidance suggestion to start: Is the problem of improving hiring more tractable if you don't try to solve it for Google?

What if Google is hopelessly tainted with biases, from having run almost every single person there through a process that you acknowledge is a horrific load of poo. Which not only means the process has become a religion/frathouse that people are proud to have been accepted into, and will defend fiercely, but also greatly determines the strengths and weaknesses you have to work with, if you want to get them to do anything else.

What if you instead start with smaller companies that don't have the baggage of FAANG, and look at their requirements, which may include some mix of (off the top of my head): prior experience, learns whatever is needed, creative/innovative, works as a team member, aligned with company success, professionalism, good for morale, good for catalyst, will have some loyalty during the harder stretches or when tempted by a little more money.

It would be nice if, instead of many 2-person startups making their first hire with the assumption that they should mimic the known-bad processes of megacorps (often based on their own FAANG-oriented interview prep in college), the megacorps were desperately trying to figure out how to hire as smartly and genuinely as SMBs, but at FAANG scale and with all the FAANG legacy workforce biases clawing them down.