I've been through the entire Google interview, yes. And I'm going to go (slightly) out on a limb and say that if Google could reduce their false negative rate, they would. IOW, yes, that's a factor of having a high bar, but what that statement is capturing in aggregate is the fact that their interviewers are not all equally calibrated and the interview process can be very uneven, although always looking for very strong people. They then turn around and give those really strong engineers a very high salary and (in many cases) relatively uninteresting work. It would be surprising to me if that changes as a result of this $1B grant, but I would be equally surprised if they don't try to skim the cream off that particular crop.