Oh, please. Perhaps they care about pedigree and GPA for new grads, but what else do they have to go on? I'm 40, and they didn't seem to care at all where I went to school nor what my grades were. The interview was challenging, but a lot of fun (the good kind of challenging), and certainly not a "nightmare."
I agree. Whenever I read one of these articles, I feel like I should post my own story of how I interviewed at Google and it was completely reasonable, if expectedly rigorous. I really only had two complaints: 1) they sent me to lunch with a guy who works on AdSense, and at the time I was working at Yahoo on their Content Match system, so we had a pretty awkward time trying to figure out what we could talk about without disclosing anything confidential, and 2) it took a really long time after my interviews for them to actually produce an offer (maybe 4 weeks or so), although their recruiter did give me regular updates of what was going on in the process.
FWIW, they did ask me for a lot of awfully detailed information about my current and past compensation packages and what other companies I was interviewing with. I mostly declined to provide that information, and they didn't push it.
