When a company has a lot of money coming in, they can be successful despite decision X, rather than because of decision X.
Microsoft can interview people asking about filling airliners with golf balls. Valve can just not bother with Half-Life 3. Google can have zero support and a self-driving car division that keeps avoiding chances to release anything.
That the companies are successful doesn't mean all their actions are smart - sometimes it's that their successes are big enough the occasional bad decision doesn't hurt them.
They have almost complete monopoly on online search, web ads, online video, on phone OS, on browsers. And they are not afraid to abuse those to get more, and are getting away with this.
You don't need to do anything right when you rent-seek most of the online world.
'Rent seeking' doesn't refer to the same kind of 'rent', of course, but I think the analogy holds up pretty well. All Google has to do is turn a few screws, and the rest of us will have no choice but to sing whatever tune they call.
The usual recipe for success in tech: competitors who are even less competent.
See also: how Microsoft dominated personal computing back in the day.
Again I think this whole line of thinking is nonsense, but even if you take it at face value, it still doesn't make sense.
There's no question that Google is happy to have false-negatives in interviews.
> I believe they purposefully taret the type of people who think working at Google makes you a fundamentally better person than anyone else
why would they do this? And, if they do this, how are they generally speaking so successful? (this is also an amusing comment because the only group I find more critical of Google than HN is Googlers)