Google tries to "remove bias" by not having you interview with anyone you might work with or even people in your area. During my onsites for a VR role none of my interviewers were VR people. It's "in case you want to switch teams". Right, because I'll suddenly decide my passion isn't the interactive stuff that I have the terminal degree in my field in, I'm going to want to do backend Go stuff all of a sudden /s

Spoke with a recruiter a month or two ago about a Developer Relations role and when I asked about the total length of process (because previous Google interviews were 6 months), I was told that they actually don't even have any of the Developer Relations roles that I was interviewing for available. If you do get through the interviews, you just sit in stasis until they get a 'quota' of more jobs to fill. There's no such thing as "figure out what team you're going to work on". Talk about making you feel like a cog.

FB recruiter on the other hand recently said they interview and hire you, then you'd have a rotational program for a while and you pick which team. Seems more reasonable. But who knows what the truth of it is.

Recruiters will say anything.