Unfortunately, this is not unique to Google. Believing that all the world's problems and challenges can be solved by an algorithm is part of the culture. And it's what alienates SV from the rest of the world.
It's why Facebook doesn't understand that people want to see what they choose to follow on their newsfeed, and not what FB's latest algo thinks they want to see.
It's why Google thinks it's OK to collect every scrap of data it can about a person and try to follow them around. If a person did that, it would be called "stalking" and is a crime.
It's why Uber believes that it's OK to treat its passengers poorly and its drivers even worse - because they're all just values in a seemingly unlimited array that can just be popped off if they don't meet the metric.
It's why Amazon thinks it's OK to mix fake items in with real items when shipping purchases. Because data can always be trusted and 1 always equals 1.
Worth noting that for specialist roles and middle/senior management, there are special pipelines. The problems seems to be a mismatch in what the average person thinks is "specialist" and what Google thinks is specialist. Lots of people think they're specialists, maybe they are, maybe they aren't, but more often than not it doesn't matter anyway. "I built an app" or "I built a tool used by many of your engineers" or whatever doesn't make you a specialist. It might be a reason to stick you into the generalist SWE pipeline, and it might be a 20% project for you
There's a surprisingly high hit rate for "checking random notable person in the OSS community in the company directory". They almost never work on things related to their public notoriety.
The one exception to this is research staff. Someone notable for their research is probably hired for their research. But this doesn't mean that any PhD will be hired for their research, much as you won't be extending your thesis if you get hired by a quant trading firm.
>If it makes you feel better, it's equally frustrating for hiring managers, who just get input from recruiters that so-and-so failed the phone screen.
This is perhaps the single most important aspect of the hiring process at the bigCos. The hiring process is built from the ground up to prevent you from doing this. The companies have a level of technical competency they expect from employees. Your first priority as a manager isn't to maintain that level of technical competency, its to have someone fill your headcount.
If they let you screen people, then either they let you waste other people's time on candidates who should have been screened out, or they let you make the final hiring decision, and you potentially hire someone who doesn't meet the global competency level. This ends up getting silos and requiring interviews to switch teams and having "weak" and "strong" teams and such, which is still sometimes a problem at Google, and Amazon, but no where near like it was apparently an issue in the Microsoft of old.
which begs the question, what are all those software engineers actually doing?
This is the problem. Google hires as such ridiculous volume (onboarding >5000 people last quarter, and on average growing at ~10000 employees (FTEs) per year) that the process gets abstracted into whatever Google thinks can be done algorithmically. This makes almost no sense for most roles, including any type of specialist as well as middle/senior management, and you end up with situations like you faced.
If it makes you feel better, it's equally frustrating for hiring managers, who just get input from recruiters that so-and-so failed the phone screen. I'm at the point where I tell my recruiters to let me do the phone screens myself whenever they come across what -- on paper -- looks like a strong, viable candidate. <banghead>