Ha! That's optimistic.
It might be somewhat feasible if they wanted him to be security engineer, not a devop. Still, he expected they have set up what essentially is an elaborate prank just to send a cold-call email to just one of probably numerous potential candidates.
How likely this is? What would be the risk-to-reward ratio for doing that, considering that many of unsolicited recruiting mails are not even read? Isn't it more feasible for it to be a genuine mistake on their part? Google's not infallible, omnipotent being after all.
I called it my "cleverness attribution error" and wrote about it this summer: http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/06/19/attrib/
I've run into it in a few other places, too.
I think you are being very diplomatic. :)
But seriously, this cleverness attribution error might be a big problem with large players like Google. Forum posters, blogs and the digital versions of mainstream media all seem convinced Google is somehow special. That they know what they are doing, at every turn. Assuming some silly mistakes is a "test". It's a potentially harmful meme: people assuming ideas like "genius" or "utmost comptetence" without requiring any proof.
Blind faith followers take note, because here we have _proof_ that Google makes mistakes too. Silly ones at that.
"I got my first glimpse of artificial intelligence on Feb. 10, 1996, at 4:45 p.m. EST, when in the first game of my match with Deep Blue, the computer nudged a pawn forward to a square where it could easily be captured. It was a wonderful and extremely human move. If I had been playing White, I might have offered this pawn sacrifice. It fractured Black's pawn structure and opened up the board. Although there did not appear to be a forced line of play that would allow recovery of the pawn, my instincts told me that with so many "loose" Black pawns and a somewhat exposed Black king, White could probably recover the material, with a better overall position to boot. "
about a move most computers of the time would find pretty quickly, and most decent human players would intuitively have thought OK at first glance.
http://www.azillionmonkeys.com/qed/chess.html
My theory is that a significant part of his game was based around human psychology, so he found it hard to grasp computers. He played computer-friendly risky openings as if to taunt the machine, and heavily talked up the influence of the programmers on Deep Blue to an almost paranoid extent.
The result was that he lost against Deep Blue when he should have won fairly easily if he'd been more disciplined.