Google's "interview process" is kind of a Valley joke. The only way you get hired at Google is if you're a "tech celebrity" (i.e. Guido van Rossum), you're a freshly minted grad from the likes of MIT and Stanford or you're an acqui-hire. Of course you have to pass the interviews. But there are almost no exceptions.
The initial phase of recruiting is also somewhat of a joke. I've heard the phrase "they interview anyone with a pulse" repeatedly. My own experience: I have a different recruiter contact me every 6 months, I tell them I'd be very interested in speaking with someone about specific teams / positions at my local office, and then 6 months later I get a call from another recruiter at a completely different office.
This matches my experiences perfectly. Heck, most recently, they contacted me, said they were interested in talking about my experiences, set up a time, and......never called. Nor did they ever email explaining why they didn't call. As if I wasn't already jaded by the experience of myself and several other friends in onsite interview loops, this has done nothing to improve my opinion of them as a company.
Come on, if that was true they would never be able to hire tens of thousands of engineers. They do have high false negative rate (by design) but it is far from impossible to pass. I personally know a ton of people who were hired by Google after standard interview process.
Google has upwards of 50k employees. Compare that to IBM: upwards of 500k employees. A friend (and maker and seller of tech companies, so he's quite well connected, much better than I) living in Palo Alto has told me he knows of no one who works at Google in engineering who isn't an acqui-hire.
