It is unfortunate, but as mentioned above, you need to just play the game until you get to the real part. It's like when I call customer support, I gotta play along with the non-technical people and get them to bump me up the chain to someone technical when I need advanced help.
The unfortunate truth is that it's unreasonable to dedicate precious engineer time to screen millions and millions of people, they'd get no actual work done. So the first layers has to be like this. You just play along for the first step, and after that it'll get much much more interesting, trust me.
This guy seemed like the kind of person who loves showing off his knowledge and having the last word on everything. Honestly this kind of people, as knowledgeable as they are, usually do poorly in a work environment.
Just to clarify, at least for the SRE hiring process, you first have a single technical phone screening with a technical recruiter (not an engineer) which is literally on the phone. At least it was for me, no webcam or anything. It's a pretty short and back-to-back question/answer type of conversation similar to what is told by the article (although the article strikes me as odd and does not match my experience). After that you have a couple (or more if need) of "phone" (read: hangouts with webcam and shared doc) interviews with actual engineers and those are more technical and require you to write code as well. Then you'll be moved to on-site interviews.
(This is for Europe at least, I imagine it'd be similar in other areas but can't know 100%).
You say "Everyone is making the assumption that the author of the post transcribed this interview instead of paraphrasing it". As a member of "everyone", I disagree.
I do suspect it's not as black and white as the article makes it out to be but the general attitude is not uncommon in tech companies. It's in fact so common it has become a bit of a meme. So I'm personally taking the article with that in mind.
> This was a culture interview, not a technical interview
Oh spare me. If a "Director of Engineering at Google", above in the thread, calls the interview "super strange" and "making [the recruiter] look like a blithering idiot", you can't start making random excuses up for Google. "It's about the culture!"
Also, as a member of "everyone", how can you disagree with that statement when no one has even bothered to call out the fact that we only have one side of the story and it's the side of the story that wants our sympathies?
EDIT: I found the post you were referring to (it wasn't at the top when I first posted my responses)... The "Director of Engineering" was even saying that he doesn't buy the transcript because it's only one side of the story. That pretty much seals my point.
Also, you're moving the goalposts here. At the time this was posted, the author of the post claimed it was an interview for Director, people were claiming that the interviewer acted exactly as written, and I, along with others, were claiming that either the author left out information, misunderstood it, or edited it.