[d3gamer]

> My friend who had next to no experience got a job at Google as a contractor through a 3rd party company. He gets very solid pay and access to all of Google's lux facilities/food and he didn't even have to do a technical interview. I think they do this because if you suck they can basically fire you anytime.

Yup. Not a lot of people know this, but a significant percentage of people at Google are contractors (red badges). One of my friends is currently working there as a contracted web developer. He said that while working there is awesome, the turnover in the contractor ranks is very high and there is not a lot of support for newbies. It is pretty much a sink-or-swim environment. Outside of "codelabs", there isn't much documentation of their internal tools so my friend has to constantly read the source code to figure out how to use something.