I had the opportunity to speak with someone who was on the hiring committee at google when the company scaled from ~5k employees to ~20k employees. This was the

I had the opportunity to speak with someone who was on the hiring committee at google when the company scaled from ~5k employees to ~20k employees. This was the committee of people in charge of designing the interview funnel though I'm not sure if it was for engineering, specifically, or the whole company. He said that there were two very large compromises that had to be made in order to hit those growth numbers: 1. Near-total reliance on gpa and school prestige for entry-level position initial resume screening 2. Relaxation of membership controls on the internal pool of people at Google qualified to administer the "is googley?" culture fit interview I would not be surprised if "allowing non-technical people to pre-screen technical people" is a similar growth-forward HR compromise made, resulting in the OP's suboptimal experience.