[discmonkey]

Agreed that the hour invested may not be worth it for a large percentage of people (again I got lucky, I would feel so differently if I was rejected after 7 interviews).

Google's point is just that they prefer to avoid false positives at the cost of (potentially) a lot of false negatives. The current interview process is probably some local optimum;

I haven't worked at a company yet that is actually good at interviewing. Where good is optimized over high recall and accuracy and a small time investment.

I know that Google does have one big advantage, in that a good percentage of people that get the offer end up accepting. That (unfortunately) gives Google a lot more leeway and possibly less incentive to further optimize the interview process. Software engineers are in high demand, but also Google is in high demand among software engineers.

At my previous job, trying to find a candidate for a role essentially involved lowering the bar until somebody was no longer in demand, since we weren't "in demand".