a) Not everyone in Google Research has a PhD, though of course there is a bit of a correlation (also, plenty of "research" takes place in general engineering) b) You do generally have to be very familiar with one of the Big 4 to get hired (C++ in my case) c) Plop is kind of a weird edge case insofar as it is very long-term research, and really cries out to be implemented in a language where you have the same features at compile-time and run-time, and can conveniently represent and manipulate code as data (i.e. a Lisp). For doing plop in any other language, your first task would be to implement these features, which is rather a lot of work (believe me, I've tried ;->). For most anything else one of the Big 4 would be used, for the reasons Steve Yegge outlines...