It's odd how the various smaller companies I referred to, many of which are normal enough that you may never have heard of them, get summarised as "It was Google". I only mentioned it to also include the largest org I know where onboarding onto a Haskell project was not a problem.
I think he meant "bad sample" in the sense that those programmers aren't representative of abilities of average programmers. Ie, he thinks Google programmers are top programmers.
I got that, and it's an often-heard argument, which is why I stated that it worked as described for other companies as well.