I've also seen this happen a few times, and it's happened to a few of my friends as well. Google does it a bit differently and makes you pass their gauntlet of

I've also seen this happen a few times, and it's happened to a few of my friends as well. Google does it a bit differently and makes you pass their gauntlet of interviews to ensure that you're totally overqualified for any position you end up in. Once you get hired there, they find a spot for you, but many many engineers there are super overqualified for what they end up doing. They end up turning away many qualified engineers because they're Google and have enough applicants anyway. If you're not Google or Apple or Facebook, you probably can't afford to do the same thing.