True. But I am a college dropout with no experience in formal Computer Science and my professional developer skills are quite lacking. I am good at hacking data and statistics research. Not really what they are looking for, from what I can tell.

Don't sell yourself short. I also am a college dropout with no formal Computer Science education and had limited professional developer experience and I worked at Google for 7 years.

Google's whole business is built around hacking data and statistics. You may very well be exactly what they are looking for.

I know someone with a data science degree from a top school whom google recently passed on. No idea what they may have been really looking for.

Ah well. Too late anyway. Entrepreneurship bug can't keep me pinned down! Got out of software dev as a primary business.