I'm personally aware of a very incapable 22 year old, fresh graduate, who has been hired for north of $200k.
I'm also aware of a whole bunch of other folks who have been variously hired within months of graduation, so I'd wager there's some selection bias from your corner too.
Base salary? Unless said 22yr old had done some significant research, had an awesome open source project, is an all star Phd, then I'm temped to call bullshit on this one, and your acquaintance is blowing smoke up your ass. $200k base salary puts you into Level senior staff engineer/director software engineer territory. Most college grads AFAIK are slotted at 3-4 slots slower. You're effectively saying the person your aware of was hired almost as a Director level engineer at age 22. Most high level Google engineers are promoted at this level because of the cross-functional aspects of their experience -- they've taken the lead on several mid to large projects and worked across many Google product areas/teams. Experience impossible to achieve in college.
To give you perspective, I've seen CEO and CTOs of acquired startups in the $50-100 million range can land at mid level engineering levels at Google. If incompetent people with no experience are landing director level jobs @ $200k base salary as a common practice at Google, I want in on this scam!
No, sadly. This person cannot think their way out of a paper bag. There must be some talent I'm missing, but in a decade of knowing them I've not seen it. Bit mystifying as the role is secret.
I'm also aware of a whole bunch of other folks who have been variously hired within months of graduation, so I'd wager there's some selection bias from your corner too.