From the average skill level of Google engineers I know, I would say yes, most would do a very solid job on the average interview question. However, you probab

From the average skill level of Google engineers I know, I would say yes, most would do a very solid job on the average interview question. However, you probably wanted to know if that means that they would all get back in if re-interviewed, and the answer is no. Google is famous for tolerating huge numbers of false negatives in exchange for a small reduction in false positives. So, by definition, many would fail, even if they are capable Google engineers. When I interviewed, I knew nothing of this process. Which was probably good, it would have made me a lot more nervous if I had know what lottery I was about to enter. In fact, I was pretty arrogant, seeing that typical questions were "just CS", and thinking my CS knowledge was pretty solid, I didn't even do any prep work. So I was probably pretty lucky to get in. My own assessment of the 5 interviews I had were that 3 of them went very well. 1 went so-so (the interviewer assumed I was a webdev and ask me all sorts of specific server balancing questions, whereas I have worked mostly on compilers and game engines.. I managed to do ok-ish since I do know distributed systems). The final one I felt went badly since there I actually didn't manage to solve the problem the interviewer asked (it was one of those more puzzle-y questions), but I guess I somehow did ok, since I did what you're supposed to do in such a situation: show that you're a good communicator and problem solver even when you don't know the answer. I was dissapointed in all these interviews since I was hoping for interesting questions specific to me (how did you implement this type inference algorithm?) which never came. Of all the interviews I've conducted for Google since, I've only had a 1:40 ratio of seeing people being accepted, even though plenty seemed highly capable to me. Usually some other interviewer didn't have quite as good a time with them as I did. You really need to make all of them happy to pass. To other answers that joke that these interviews are the hardest thing you'll do at Google, I'd like to disagree. At least in the teams I've worked, I've done things that thoroughly stretched my abilities, way beyond the level of interview questions. Of course they're of a very different nature, but that is the point: interview questions are very distilled, idealized, and problem solving in the real world is very messy, and to my mind at least, much more interesting.