Yeah, I struggle with that, too. I've never interviewed with them, much less worked there, so everything I know or think I know about their interviewing process and work culture is second- or third-hand, but it sounds pretty miserable from the outside looking in. Still, they seem to attract a lot of people who really love working there, and they're producing things like Google maps, GMail, self-driving cars, Android, Google Docs, and a search engine... I'd be irritated if I interviewed there and was rejected (although I'm sure I have much worse interview rejection stories from far less prestigious employers), but I'm not sure that would necessarily mean that they're doing it wrong.
i thought they said average score doesn’t correlate at all with how you do once you’re in? a lot of high performers only get in 2nd or 3rd time and barely.
I can't speak for whether that was true in the past.
(If you really care i can bug people for historical data)
However, as of 2014 average interview score was very well correlated with job performance (I can't give you further exact details because they are still marked confidential and i can't find a paper or anything that has disclosed it).
Note very clearly the word average above ;)
Individual interview scores are definitely not predictive of job performance.
Those interested in learning more would do well to read Kahneman's "thinking, fast and slow." Averaging across multiple axes and multiple interviewers gives good signal.
The average interview score from a panel of interviews correlates very highly with performance at Google, interviewees report high satisfaction, etc.
If those things changed, i'm sure Google would change it. But why would they change it otherwise?