Talent is not a single measure at Google. There are multiple facets to whether Google believes a candidate is solid. Strong technical talent is not an indicator of success, rather just one aspect of it that's taken into consideration by the hiring committees. So yeah, Google will say no to incredibly talented people because they fall short in other areas.
Crapshoot is table stakes practically everywhere you go. At least Google makes an attempt at making things objective and holistic.
There's a lot of myopia in this thread.
I have 16 years of total experience. Their initial offer to me indicated they thought I would take $231k/year for the privilege of working there. I got them up to $253k/year. Both numbers are less than I make now (though the latter is close).
As far as I am concerned, and based on my direct experience, Google pay is not the hit shit everyone claims it is. Maybe it would be if I played the competing offer game, but I shouldn't have to do that.
Check out levels.fyi.
Nope, every shop has convinced themselves they are changing the world, and do ask these questions, often on codepad.io. Even greeting card companies, hah.
I do contract work and interview often. Not one single place in the last two years hasn't tried these highly inefficient tactics on me.
They do it this way because they can, they have to weed out 99% of candidates, they are hiring for software engineers, it makes sens to weed out those who do not know perfectly core/advanced CS problems/solutions.
If you have such a high hiring bar — and you still get a sexist memo, or vocalised hate-crimes on your platform, or salary suppression, or workers being disallowed from using the bathrooms, or 20,000 employees staging a walk-out because of bonuses awarded to perpetrators of sexual assault... Maybe your a hiring bar is lower than it should be.
No. Google, FB, interview this way because you don't have the skills on their stack, and this is the common denominator. (Source: I'm an engineer/manager at multiple FAANGs for the last decade.)
But the only reason people apply to Google and Facebook and Netflix in the first place is because they pay a lot of money. There are plenty of crappy CRUD shops that won't ask you to enumerate palindromic primes. As long as you can do Fizzbuzz they'll hire you and pay you 80k/year to glue libraries together. But people still try to interview at Google instead because they want to make 300k/year and not 80k/year. You can't have your cake and eat it.