[rightbyte]

It most certainly is.

Cheaper, not cheap, is the keyword.

Google programmer staff is way too big to be any sort of elite. They are not a 1 in 100 programmer.

Maybe the 60 percentile or whatever at their scale.

Since the stereotypical silly good programmer skill is negatively correlated with social skills it would not surprise me at all if the median Google employee is even below median due to their recruiting process.

I.e. their recruiting is worse than dice rolls.