[choppaface]

What's ludicrous is the assertion of fantasy here. Some context:

* Google's current hiring process lag from first contact to start date is 4-6 months. That's based on reports in Blind and a couple of recent hires I know. That lag is double that of large competitors. Google wants to make candidates wait in order to appear more exclusive. "Projects need staffing"-- clearly not as much as Google needs to maintain its brand.

* "You're going straight to the bench." This is based on a variety of comments, some posted here, some from former Google PMs and SWEs I know. It takes more than a year to get a project that most people consider meaningful. Some have different expectations upon joining, though.

* "you are almost certainly being used to aid in the retention of somebody else." I used to work with an ex-Googler who had a large role in Google's Ads team. He couldn't code very well, and routinely struggled to have accurate assessment of senior engineers. It's questionable how he passed the SWE interview bar at Google. But he was "good looking" and "affable" (he once appeared in a vanity magazine in a shirtless photo shoot). He routinely claimed that his female Google superiors hit on him. Other ex-Googlers told me there where many people in the office who seemed to be "fluff" for everybody else.

The bottom line: Google prides itself (excessively) on having a uniform brand, yet is large enough today that the long tail of "out-of-brand people" is quite large. When you submit your resume to Google, you're feeding their index and ranking of all-of-SWE humanity (literally-- they heavily apply ML to their resume pool). Don't get brainwashed with the brand, and think critically before letting a _company_ have this sort of power over people.