Yes, I've said it before, Google is what you get if you hire essentially at random and then tell all those people that the process that hired them is infallible.
I work for Google, and no, we do not think our process is infallible since we understand there is a large chance for false negatives and even a small chance for false positives.
We do not hire at random, each hiring goes through multiple interviews and the results of each of those interviews are also reviewed by multiple people (interviewers are required to record all notes/code produced during the interview). Then a decision is made. If we feel not super certain we err on the cautious side and turn down the candidate, even though we know there is a good chance for false negatives.
As far as I can tell, our false positives rates are very low, and everyone I've worked with here at Google are incredibly qualified at their job. Are there people who don't perform? For a company this size that's an obvious yes, but I think if you judge interview's goal of eliminating false positives at the expense of producing false negatives, then we've been pretty successful.
