Was it a proper double-blind study substituting interview result for rnd() to make a hiring decision? And established correlation a few years down the line?

Because what you've stated: 'data shows' ... "successfully pass go on to be successful" - sounds like cargo cult science or pseudoscience to me.

Do you really need to do the double-blind study, though? The median person cannot program at all, so using rnd() couldn't possibly have better than a 50% success rate (certainly lower; 50% is just a round number that I'm sure is larger than the number of programmers). Is Google doing worse than that? I kinda doubt it.

Yes. You can do it at each stage as well. And we are not talking about hiring a general employee but a CS or programmer. So employ rnd() after a resume screen. Google has already found that GPA and brain teasers had no positive effect. This is similar and it would be an interesting experiment.

Google generally isn't known for pseudoscience.

You've stated 'data shows'. So my question was - was it a proper double blind study?

Because it is definitely possible to do it properly. Substitute the results (or partial results) of the interview with rnd(), use it for hiring decision for a subset of candidates. Keep this information confidential. Establish if parts of your interview process don't perform better than randomness a few years down the line.

It's possible to do. Only I don't think this was done. And if it was not done, and the method was some 'data shows' with hand-waving - it would be under definition of pseudoscience.

You're calling most scientific journals psuedoscience -- even the hard sciences, like astrophysics. Nobody's doing controlled studies of supernovas, they're drawing inferences from observational data. I don't think your definition of science is sustainable.

Even Google has a PR department dumbing things down.