Is this really like "most" engineers? My own experience is the opposite, I have been contacted multiple times by Google recruiters trawling LinkedIn or whatever, none of whom were aware of any of the others. I know a few Googlers and as far as I am aware none of them "applied", they were all contacted.
It was my understanding that one of the reasons for these style interviews was to get away from being language specific - in other words if someone has good CS fundamentals, and could reason about different problem spaces that they could probably pick up any language. Is this no longer true?
Google's questions tend to be about data structures and algorithms, and fairly language-agnostic (although you're expected to know the language that you choose well, and use it elegantly).
