Steve Yegge famously talked about Google's "interview anti-loop", where you get two interviewers in your process who wouldn't have hired each other, so the things one of them values are actually negatives for the other, and viceversa.
I don't know if that's still a problem at Google, but it could explain why some people don't pass the interview process even though they are reasonably clever.
From my more than 5 years at google I saw a lot of random stupid interview questions. I was astounding. 10 years ago they didn't seem to do any interview question checking, you could ask anything.
I don't know if that's still a problem at Google, but it could explain why some people don't pass the interview process even though they are reasonably clever.