I do/did too. It is not fool-proof, but their ratio seems to be lower than other places I have seen.

Is it that, or is it that they're big enough not to notice as much?

Yes, it's impossible to get rid of "false positives"

But my perception of Google interviews is that it's very picky about some areas but leaves huge gaps.

Let me guess, the false positives are the ones that know big-o for all sorting algos but can't implement them.

Or create a "Car" class inheriting from Wheel, Engine and Door

I'm not sure that's a really good perception. I've been on 3 of our hiring committees for about 5 years now.

The vast majority of candidate packets I see are well rounded in the interview space (IE don't just test theoretical aspects, but practical stuff as well).

There are occasional ones where one or more interviews is unhelpful or useless.

It would be very odd to see an interview where someone started out by asking about algorithm complexity, rather than "how do i sort this", "code it", "great, how fast does that run", "can it be made faster" or something similar.

I have never seen anything close to the last one.

Most false positives i've seen are culture fit or motivation issues, not technical capability ones.

Thanks for your answer. The last example was really an exaggeration.

"Most false positives i've seen are culture fit or motivation issues, not technical capability ones."

Interesting. Well, "everybody wants" to work at Google, but usually the way companies work is opaque to the outside (but then again, it's supposed to be like that usually)

Even though the interview is certainly intended to remove people that may not be a great fit (because of the time it takes, for a start) maybe something could be done in that respect

I've seen it all and some technical people really aren't a fit to certain cultures. Not to mention some work environments are the opposite of Google and bringing people from those environments may be a challenge.

Can you give examples?

While I'm lucky to be way from the corporate world for the last few years, I'm still very interested in practises such as hiring and interviewing.