>We've held that hiring bar constant through the years, even at times when it's been very hard to find people, and there's been a lot of pressure to relax that bar in order to increase hiring volume. We've never changed our standards in this respect. That has, I think, been incredibly important for the group. Because what you end up with is, a team of people who fundamentally will not accept doing things over and over by hand, but also a team that has a lot of the same academic and intellectual background as the rest of the development organization. This ensures that mutual respect and mutual vocabulary pertains between SRE and SWE.

It seems like changing their hiring process is a double edged sword. If they change it to allow more hiring volume, then other employees might become frustrated with how easy it becomes to work at Google. On the other hand, keeping an old hiring process where false negatives continue to occur seems very bad.