[asuffield]

Part of the company culture is that we value always being able to expect that everybody you encounter is a strong engineer who will do sensible things when presented with data.

You never go into an encounter with a new person or team being unsure of whether they're going to be difficult. You never have to avoid dealing with "that guy". You get to trust everybody that you meet.

It doesn't just improve overall quality, it makes it a better place to work. Good engineers are happier in this environment, and there is pretty near universal agreement from people who have experienced the results that this is a thing worth preserving.

There are plenty of things about the hiring process which get enthusiastic internal debate, criticism, and data-driven analysis. This is not one of them. This is a thing which we really like.

(Full disclosure: I have gone through the interview process twice, failed the first time, passed the second.)

[eridius]

You can get all the same benefits by firing people who don't work out. Optimizing for zero false positives mean you miss a lot of people who would have been great but were rejected in the name of zero false-positives. Startups can't handle having someone bad be hired early on, because even if they're fired later they've still done a lot of damage. Big companies don't have to worry about that.