The first Google phone screening for SRE candidates is usually done by a technical recruiter who doesn't have extensive technical knowledge but at least knows the basics and is able to talk with you about the answers you give (albeit not in as much detail). It's supposed to be easy and it's to filter out people who lie on their CV or really don't have broad superficial knowledge.

The follow up phone interviews are what really matters (before the onsite of course) with actual engineers and go more in-depth with coding questions (among other things) at least.

I remember my recruiter was a really knowledgeable guy and he knew his stuff even though he wasn't an engineer. We had a nice chat and he was able to keep up with my (basic, obviously) responses of how TCP works, how to implement inode-based filesystems or whatever information you can read out of a stat call... Nothing too fancy but still it didn't sound like rehearsed script to me.

In my opinion Google absolutely does care about their employees. However, if you are turned off at the first contact, this company might just not be for you.

At the end of the day, it is not about what the company can do for you, it is about what you can do for the company.

But maybe they encounter so much noise in their hiring process that this actually is the correct process at scale.

It may minimize "humanity" for potential interviewees, but it optimizes for lack of heart ache on their end.

Is my guess.