Even Steve Yegge got selected (or maybe nearly selected) out by his own process (unwittingly, mind you)

> One day, the recruiters gave us a special round of packets to review. In these special packets, we were able to read the interviewer notes and candidate responses. All personal details were stripped out, and we were told it was a “calibration exercise.” We had to do our regular voting job with these special packets, and see how it went. I think we may have assumed they were from another site, since cross-site calibration was common.

> Our group did our job, and voted not to hire about 2/3 of the packets. This was about par for the course.

> But surprise surprise, this time, those were our own packets from when we had all interviewed at Google. The recruiters had tricked us into reviewing our own interview packets, and we had voted not to hire most of our own group.

From https://yegge.ai/essays/the-last-technical-interview/ (May 2026)