I think an underlying reason for so many anecdotes of the sort in the comment threads here is the sheer number of hires the Goog is trying to make right now --

I think an underlying reason for so many anecdotes of the sort in the comment threads here is the sheer number of hires the Goog is trying to make right now -- according to http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html, they've grown headcount by close to 10% in Q1 alone so far. Life for their recruitment folks is probably fairly interesting these days.