Peteris Krumin has another My Job Interview at Google post which is always a sure fire way to drive traffic to your site. People seem to really want to hear about Google interviews for some reason!

Google is a great, big company (the comma is important) and had an amazingly short list of foibles that really irked me during my tenure, and a huge laundry list of items that made me excited to get to work. That being said, I once changed my internal IM status to “Recruiting needs a Code Yellow” instead of latency.

The hiring process drove me batty, and to some extent so did the performance review process too.

So, As I read Peteris’ diary of his interview process I wondered if it would be time for large companies to have an Internal Affairs group to test their assumptions.

They could have current employees be interviewed again by groups that don’t know each other (this is when it matters if you are big). You could have Bob “I’ve been at the company for five years” Hunter come in to interview for a “new job” and see how it pans out. I am guessing that it would be quite enlightening from both sides. I wonder how many people wouldn’t quite make it in, so to say. I am pretty sure that although my one path to Google worked out, there were many folks in the road where I could have had a slightly different interview panel or hiring committee and I wouldn’t have made it (I won’t argue who would have been right ;).

InternalAffairsRecruiting.com could send trained people into interviews to do reports on the companies too. A lot of fun would be had by all. And, maybe some hazing would end?

On another Google recruiting note, the process worked well and Alex Russell is joining the Chrome team. Congrats to both Google and Alex on the move. I can’t wait to see what he comes up with there. Having an Ajax fellow working inside a browser team can only be a good thing for us developers. And, with Aaron, Arv, Dan, and many others… Google has top notch talent. It also means a Dojo fellow joins the existing crew of Brad, Gavin, Abe, and I am sure others.

And then I see Google Layoffs – 10,000 Workers Affected which has already been read into far more than it should be. I actually think it can be good for Google to focus a little and rein in. Instead of layoffs I am sure we will see a bit of a thinning due to attrition and not hiring quite as fast. Laying off the bottom performers isn’t a bad thing though!

This is a fantastic time to hire top talent. Just look. Google got Alex, and probably let go of a few fringe folks (no offense to them) that aren’t engineers. I am excited to start a new group at Mozilla with a great pool of people talking to us. Remember Apple was built in the 70s ;)