I did 250 interviews at Google and I’m a member of a hiring committee.

I interviewed once a professor, who taught a course on algorithms and data structures. He was great at basic questions (check height 0f a binary tree) but the moment we went into something that wasn’t a trivial direct application of his knowledge, he failed. He couldn’t come up with a rather straightforward algorithm (a fairly trivial modification of DFS), let alone write code for it on the whiteboard.

I won’t name him or the university. You’d recognize the university instantly, and his name possibly if you attended certain conferences.

It’s possible that he just had a bad day or was really stressed, but he ended up not getting hired. I’m not sure if he tried again later or gave up.

Bottom line: no, not every professor can pass an interview at Google. At least not on every try =)

Updates in response to some comments:

• There’s nothing fun about “failing” someone on an interview. It’s sad (if I felt they were smart, but still didn’t convince me they can be a good engineer) or annoying (if someone is completely unprepared). But definitely not fun.
• I understand that research and engineering have different requirements. But just like if I wanted to do research, I’d be interviewed accordingly - professors who want to do engineering are tested for their coding skills.