Makes sense for google. And it's not that I didn't appreciate doing all that (and I did do well), it just struck me how they knew nothing else about me afterward except that I could answer academic questions, and how different that was from the startup world- where, at the very least, you want to know what they're passionate about and that they are productive.

Asking an engineer what their strengths are and then to demonstrate or explain in concrete terms is how you find out their unique value proposition. I'm not talking about "I'm a hard worker" type garbage, I mean "my strongest experience is in systems programming on Linux." "How so?" "For example, I wrote a specialized TCP kernel module that works like this..."

Again, not saying that should be the whole interview- but there are some non-academic skills and experience (like managing and leading a critical system used by thousands of people) that are worth more than a few weaknesses in problems that were already solved years ago and that are easily looked up. It's how you should judge people looking to get into a graduate program, but falls short if you're trying to build teams of awesome fury that need more broad experience and even (gasp) unique experience that you don't have a ready-made question for ;-)

For broad-spectrum roles like software engineers, Google hires people first and then figures out what team they should join later. If you want a specialist role, then you'll need to find one on their jobs page.

To illustrate, here's the kind of thing Mr. TCP kernel module should be applying for: https://www.google.com/about/careers/search#!t=jo&jid=107205...

And here's the kind of generic role they probably shouldn't be: https://www.google.com/about/careers/search#!t=jo&jid=34154&