This I'll actively disagree with. Google is in a strong negotiating position. They would be amiss to their shareholders to not negotiate well.
For someone with a short tenure at Google, I'm worried that you haven't seen the larger picture yet.
The corporate policy is to hire the best and treat them well. But we are not hiring the best with consistency, instead often weighing cost and patience higher than talent and experience.
Ask around about your colleague's referrals. For the very few that get through HC, many of those engineers pass up the opportunity to work at Google precisely because our offers were to drop them a level or two and 10-15% salary. Make no mistake, that this hurts Google. We would be much stronger to have the talent from Cisco, Amazon, and Microsoft that I've seen turn away Google.
I'll disagree on the notion that Google's hiring practices don't allow a small error to derail the entire process. Basically, within Google we haven't noticed any of the problems around our hiring practices enough to solve them.
The problems are clear; unfocused interview loops leading to poor feedback, much too long process between phone screen and receiving approval from MTV, a focus on hiring those good at interviewing and not those good at engineering (hiring scores do not correlate with performance scores), and ignoring experience by offering salaries or positions significantly below candidate's current levels in the industry.
We end up being a place which is great for college hires and those getting their first chance, e.g. moving from test to dev, but not for experienced hires. And the effect is larger in some groups than others, but the senior engineers on my floor are mainly those without motivation to advance their careers and move on, even to internal projects.
For someone with a short tenure at Google, I'm worried that you haven't seen the larger picture yet.
The corporate policy is to hire the best and treat them well. But we are not hiring the best with consistency, instead often weighing cost and patience higher than talent and experience.
Ask around about your colleague's referrals. For the very few that get through HC, many of those engineers pass up the opportunity to work at Google precisely because our offers were to drop them a level or two and 10-15% salary. Make no mistake, that this hurts Google. We would be much stronger to have the talent from Cisco, Amazon, and Microsoft that I've seen turn away Google.