someone from youtube recently reached out to me about some stuff and as an aside commented that i'd also probably make a good google employee. but my college GPA (2.8 or so) pretty much rules out that possibility. too bad.
If you have actual experience, nobody should care about your GPA. Or even whether you have a college degree. Lots of people at Google don't. If you're still in college it might be an issue, but if you have something to point to you still have a shot at getting into the interview process.
The interview process is hard. I won't lie to you about it. Even if you belong at Google, there is a good chance of not making it through on the first try. But your odds are infinitely worse if you don't even try.
Speaking personally, I didn't apply to Google for years because the core Google languages are Python, Java and C++, while my professional experience was all in Perl. Eventually I did apply, and discovered that it never would have been a problem. And in fact I'm doing most of my work in internal languages that nobody comes here knowing.
If the language is well-suited to the task, this is in fact an efficient approach.
The stuff about the GPA seems like a giant myth. I don't even remember my college GPA and I had a few rounds of interviews at GOOG.
That said, you won't get through the Google interview without filling in some of your CS holes. You don't need to know what anything is called, but if you don't understand why quick sort and merge sort are efficient, you'll have trouble with the interviews.
That said, if you made it through real analysis and algebra, then the CS stuff you need shouldn't be too hard for you to learn. Really. If your interests include math and CS, one fun place to start is trying to tackle Project Euler problems. While doing that, read a few books, and you should be good to go.
It's the lack of formal CS that'll do you in...you have to know some of the theory to get past the interviews. They don't care how you learned it, but they care that you know it.