[bzz01]

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.

[nickbauman]

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.

[plonh]

Your friend probably didn't go Stanford or Ivy League. :-/