I think Google&#x27;s competition for employees is now largely other big tech companies, and they pay competitively relative to other big companies.<p>When I was applying, the software labor market was a bit more fluid, Google&#x27;s target demographic was more startup-like, and it was right as the financial crisis was gathering steam and a number of people who had previously been in finance (including myself) were looking elsewhere.  So their competition for employees was much more broadly defined.  Google doesn&#x27;t pay anything near what a creative algorithm-designer can make at a hedge fund, nor will they net you a few million dollars from a startup exit, but at the time those were the other opportunities that people might&#x27;ve considered.  A number of folks I met at Google in 2009 were former startup founders; very few that I met in my last couple years there (2013&#x2F;2014) were.