Yeah, you can chat with whoever you like if you're reasonably senior, but then you do the same exact interview as everybody else. That "chat" was just a "chat". It wasn't a part of the hiring process. There are likely exceptions at the truly stratospheric levels, for people whose credentials aren't debatable, but for 99.99% of people it's all the same 5-person loop with a whiteboard or a Chromebook.
Honestly, this I'm perfectly fine with -- if you need a calibrated panel to assess your eng bar. What is annoying (the case for Google MTV for me at least) is if gatekeepers block you from identifying if there is potential fit in the first place.
Their interview process itself makes very little sense though. There's literally nothing in it that resembles the job you'll be doing on a day to day basis (copying from one protocol buffer to another, while sipping a free latte), so they're hiring for some proxy traits the correlation of which with job performance is low to non-existent. They know this, too. They've done a study where they just hired some number of people at random, without looking at their interview results, and then tracked their performance over the next few years. Those folks performed about as well as people who received high interview scores.
