How selflessly cool is Google? Every now and then the company removes from consideration one of its superhuman job candidates, to avoid an over-concentration of brilliance. Google, you see, doesn't want to become a black hole of awesome.

Google VP Bradley Horowitz (pictured) explained things at the annual Supernova conference in San Francisco the other day. He said the company intentionally (and selflessly!) leaves some brainpower outside its walls, according to the Register.

"I recently had a discussion with an engineer at Google and I pointed out a handful of people that I thought were fruitful in the industry and I proposed that we should hire these people...

But [the engineer] stopped me and said: 'These people are actually important to have outside of Google. They're very Google people that have the right philosophies around these things, and it's important that we not hire these guys. It's better for the ecosystem to have an honest industry, as opposed to aggregating all this talent at Google.'"

This is very generous of Google, given that it hires "the world's best engineers" via a grueling interview process, complete with quizzes. Some of its best employees had to short-circuit the system, but that only makes it more perfect, right?

Thankfully, Google is using this system for good, rather than evil, by turning down job prospects, for being too awesome. Now that's Christmas spirit: It's a sort of gift to the world. Not to the possible hires, of course, but in this economy they'll be working for an awesome company like Google in no time, right??

(Pic by Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten)