I’ve been on GCP since Google App Engine was their first major product (2008ish I want to say? Maybe 2009) and that would only give me 14 years experience on GCP. Plus Go wasn’t originally supported on App Engine until much later.
Perhaps HR was complaining about not being able to hire those people for the $50k/yr + unlimited PTO budget that they have?
because I can bet that if HR was willing to pay $500k+/yr + sensible PTO, a few of those GCP engineers right out of Google who literally wrote the first few lines of code for GAE might consider joining.