Interview loading at Google is very strange. I've been interview-trained for 2 years now, I'm in the interviewer database, my skills are updated, and I set my constraints to 2/week. I've been assigned a total of 3 interviews in those 2 years. Meanwhile I have friends that're in the 2/week club.
I suspect that recruiters are going off name-recognition: there're some interviewers that they know & like, and so they assign candidates preferentially to those interviewers with digging into the database to see if there'd be another equally-qualified engineer.
Many other things work like that too. If you do code reviews quickly, you'll get a reputation as a good reviewer, which means...more code reviews. If you always know the answers to people's questions, it means you'll get more people asking you questions. If you're a UI wizard, it means you'll always be assigned UI work, even if you want to do something else.
The usual way out of this is to learn to say "No". That's how I escaped the UI trap, and I've done it to get out of code review & question overload as well. I suspect Rachel's problem could've been solved by setting her interview constraints to 0/week, which (if done by enough people) would've also forced the recruiters to look further down the interviewer database and find untapped engineers for interviews.
I suspect that recruiters are going off name-recognition: there're some interviewers that they know & like, and so they assign candidates preferentially to those interviewers with digging into the database to see if there'd be another equally-qualified engineer.
Many other things work like that too. If you do code reviews quickly, you'll get a reputation as a good reviewer, which means...more code reviews. If you always know the answers to people's questions, it means you'll get more people asking you questions. If you're a UI wizard, it means you'll always be assigned UI work, even if you want to do something else.
The usual way out of this is to learn to say "No". That's how I escaped the UI trap, and I've done it to get out of code review & question overload as well. I suspect Rachel's problem could've been solved by setting her interview constraints to 0/week, which (if done by enough people) would've also forced the recruiters to look further down the interviewer database and find untapped engineers for interviews.