The way you should think about it is they didn’t want to spend the money on a full employee for that position. If they were forced to do that they just wouldn’t

The way you should think about it is they didn’t want to spend the money on a full employee for that position. If they were forced to do that they just wouldn’t hire for that position. Or that position would be as competitive as any other job at Google and probably would not be the same people that are currently red badges. There absolutely is a caste system in Silicon Valley based on how you can jump through credential and interview hoops. Which doesn’t necessarily correspond to job performance, which is frustrating for everyone. But nobody can figure out a better way to predict on the job performance. There are some emerging signals like open source contributions but not everyone uses that either because it can also be gamed.