My impression is that Google standardizes interviews with a sort of grading rubric. Similar to standardized testing in education, this methods evaluation is biased towards a specific type of personality/skill set. I went through a phone interview with someone on the Software Test Engineering team setup by a recruiter. Right off the bat, I felt this person was not enthusiastic about the interview. I'm sure due to the shear number of applicants that are interviewed at Google, it gets mundane to have to conduct so many. At the start of the interview, there wasn't really much of an introduction, it was as if he has a list of questions prepared to ask and he got started right away. I didn't feel like there was any organic conversation that allowed the opportunity to communicate any of my experience or skill set. First question was simple but not well defined, "For the mathematical equation for search bar (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division), how would a test plan be organized and implemented?". I asked a couple questions for clarification and apparently took too long to formulate my answer because his reply was "ok, well that took a while". I correctly answered the brain teaser coding question, but pretty sure I had already failed the "answer a vague question with not enough information to allow a detailed response" portion of the rubric. At the end of the interview, the interviewer thoroughly answered all of my questions about the team and the position which was nice. But overall throughout the interview I felt that with any questions I asked, the purpose of the reply was more to keep things moving rather than to add clarification. Which was unnecessary considering we finished 5 minutes early.