(I'm yet another Google engineer.) Personally, in my interviewing I don't care at all about schools or GPAs. (I think the only time I've even considered the s

(I'm yet another Google engineer.) Personally, in my interviewing I don't care at all about schools or GPAs. (I think the only time I've even considered the school is when candidates are from a big name school like MIT, where I will modify my interview to ask more culture questions to try to see whether they are too full of themselves.) Instead, consider this: hiring someone who isn't good is much more costly than not hiring someone who is good. It's not only that you need to pay a person who doesn't do good work, but they're also a drag on everyone else who is already really busy. That is to say, it's much better to err on the side of "no hire" when you have any doubt; Google has plenty of employees already, and while they surely want more (and the bar is continually lowering), there's also no shortage of people who are willing to go through the legendarily Kafkaesque interview process repeatedly. So it is possible that your one bad interview sunk you, even when it wasn't indicative of your skill. Everyone has bad days or bad luck sometimes, so don't feel too bad about it. You're in a good position in the world where there are many other tech companies eager to hire you as well and even compete on what they offer you.