[YesThatTom2]

Former Google SRE here.

From the outside it looks like Google's strategy is to hire people that have the skills that people can only get from already working at Google. i.e. They have forgotten that they themselves did not have those skills when they were hired.

Sadly blog posts like this make me think they are suffering an unintended side effect from doing this: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/03/hiring-lake-wobeg...