I'm not defending the hiring practices at all; on some level, we lose out on a lot of qualified candidates who would do great work and would be great to work with. I'm not a recruiter, but I try to help out however I can; people on HN regularly email me asking for advice, or to ping their recruiter, and so on, and I'm happy to do this. I want to work with you, and I don't want the intrinsic flakiness of people to adversely affect your experience. But ultimately, I can't control other people, I can only control myself.

All my other comment is saying is how to think about the problem from another perspective. You have a lot to offer Google, but Google is not exactly coming up empty on its end. Therefore, I think it makes sense to cut Google some slack. But if you don't, that's your prerogative. I personally don't aim for 100% perfection 100% of the time, but some people do, and that is respectable.

(Oh, and I don't think complaining about the interview on your blog is bad at all. What's "bitter" is refusing to come back for a second try, even though you still are kind of interested in working at Google.)

You described it as a "free trip to MTV" as if it were some kind of a perk. It's wasting two days of somebody's time, and apparently showing no remorse. At that point the ball should have been clearly in Google's court, surely they could have figured out a less painful way of gathering any extra data they needed. I mean, the guy was in NYC! It should have been trivial.

It's well known both inside Google and outside it that many parts of the hiring process are badly broken. Suggesting that people should just grin and bear such abuse just means the process will never get fixed. While if people just stopped the process if it got silly enough, somebody's bonus would be in sufficient jeopardy to cause some action.

(When I worked at Google I never referred any friends unless they asked me to -- the chance of them having a bad experience was just too high. And recruiters were always pretending to be shocked that anyone could think the process wasn't working properly.)