Google employee here.
I was asked a very fun question about some memory management.
Another one was a simple DP.
There was a math question from the IMO I think, which I happened to know beforehand and told the interviewer.
The design question was around a load balancer.
To answer your question, I think some of the skills are useful like memory management when designing protocol buffers for your system.
Or thinking about how my gslb config could possibly be messing up the load balancing, causing pages for our service etc.
Overall I think, and this is my personal theory that as long as the question gives the candidate an opportunity to think on their feet given the know Computer Science, I would support the process.