I don't want to name him as he's decently well known, but I'm pretty sure my mentor monitored Vint's interview to make sure no one accidentally rejected him for a coding error or something.

They were really going after all the legends.

Google hired Guido van Rossum around the same time. I worked down the hall from Rob Pike, they had already hired Peter Weinberger (the w from `awk`), and I shared a 4-person office with Gren Stein, who was then director of the Apache Software Foundation.