This is exactly what I thought when I heard about this guy. He's undervaluing himself bigly. If you obsess over one company, or girl, or whatever else, you take all of your own power away and hand it over to chance. An interview or conversation could fall through for any reason at all. Meanwhile if you're intense enough to study algorithms for 8 months you can probably get a pretty good job at any number of places without wrecking your self-worth if you get rid of the tunnel vision.
Google is HUGE company, to the point, I won't assume people from Google actually sharing anything except the fact they are from Google. There are awesome people doing world changing stuff, also common programmers doing routine work. I think a lot of people just assume they join Google they will automatically be promoted to the first league, which is not true according to my observations.