Google will actually hire people right out of school if they are good enough. One Googler I talked to phrased it as, they have enough money to hire someone who

Google will actually hire people right out of school if they are good enough. One Googler I talked to phrased it as, they have enough money to hire someone who will only hit their stride several years later. Most companies don't have this ability, they need to hire someone with maximum experience for their dollar immediately. It probably helps Google in another way in that their culture is kind of cut off and different. Most of my experience is in enterprise Java and it's always weird talking to Googlers who were never really a part of the rise of Dependency Injection with Spring, unchecked exceptions with Hibernate, etc., etc.. Sort of like how they don't use C++ exceptions if you are a C++ guy. So growing their own talent has advantages in that the talent won't expect the more common public practices that Google missed out on.