It seemed like Google's hiring filters were about what a Stanford student might think is important (that socioeconomic class, had learned what Stanford students do, thinks whatever they don't know is less important or follows naturally from what they know, preferably recent grad (again, student thinking), with affluent lifestyle expectations, etc.).

Wall Street, OTOH, is about making money. They might also not fully know how to hire the people they want, but it seemed they valued scrappy more, especially when it leads to real results (which are maybe easier for them to see, when it can be pretty directly quantified in dollars).

(Though the Wall Street recruiter I talked with, back 2 decades ago, when I first wanted to work for Google, did ask about my GPA. So I told them I had a perfect GPA, like most of the other students in that grad program, and that that wouldn't tell them much about someone's potential. Then I told them I didn't really want to work on Wall Street, which had a bad reputation from the preceding decade, though the $400K to start was maybe 10x what I was making at the time. Then Google gave me some asinine brogrammer student nonsense in the interview, before that was a thing, and before wannabe companies mimicked it. So I ended up going to neither company.)

And yet there are fairly high-level Google employees who came in with acquisitions and don't even have college degrees.