No hard feelings. Honestly, I'd have a much harder time hiring if half the rest of the industry wasn't irrationally cargo culting Google's hiring practices.

Ah, I see, then I don't think you read the GP post, or I wasn't clear enough, since that is exactly a point I made.

Also, if you're only giving real-world work tasks, do you screen at all for basic competence first? I ask because I suspect we're talking about different things.

Also 2 (edit), does your work only involve one kind of task? How do you assess the breadth of their basic understanding without using simple problems? Are your programmers doing very repetitive stuff?

>Also, if you're only giving real-world work tasks, do you screen at all for basic competence first?

I've done both with and without. I honestly found it hard to make judgments about what effect what I was doing was having on the hiring funnel though.

If you're talking about that rather than later stage hiring then yes, I agree it's a different kettle of fish.