And yet they're still terrible at interviewing.
Why?
(and if you think I'm exaggerating-- thats how Steve Yegge described it when he was interviewing at Google, though it migth have changed since then)
My radical proposal is to record interviews, for later playback and study.
Ages ago, I ran for office. Very similar hazing ritual.
The recorded endorsement interviews were generally terrific. Only one of the unrecorded interviews was constructive; I wish it had been recorded.
The majority of unrecorded interviews were shit shows. Which then seeded more drama. I quickly learned to make my own recordings. Kinda like having dash cams.
And the spiral continues.
'Not the most efficient solution' was the feedback, even though all that was happening was that their method required 1 loop and mine had split those operations into 2 loops, with exactly the same time and space complexity.
Oh, and I had immediately taken their hint to modify my code anyway and the solution was working in both cases.
My Google interviews were similar. A guy had me write an algorithm for scoring bowling, then after everything asked me to "turn it into an API" without specifying anything beyond that.
I asked a few questions about the use cases and he refused to expand.
At that point I had no choice but to just start adding weird methods and turning the one-shot algorithm into an iterative scoring class (where you could calculate score as you added frames) and the guy started to nitpick literally everything I did.
"Why did you indent here?" Because a new block of code is there. "Why did you put the brace on the same line?" Because I like to follow 1tb style personally, but I can change it if you'd like. "Yes please do."
Then was rejected, without any feedback other than "perhaps consider brushing up on your coding abilities, or take a code camp and try again in 6 months". I've been writing code for 20 years, 11 professionally. It is, quite literally, almost all I ever do.
Ultimately realized how terrible of a company Google was, anyway, so I dodged a bullet in the end. But you just kind of have to learn to roll with these punches.