I checked how 1,512 people who worked at TCS actually got to Google. Only 176 went directly. Most took three or more companies in between.
TL;DR: 88% of them went through at least one other company first, and half of those went through three or more. Amazon is the single most common last stop before Google.
what i did
i work on hiring data. the archive is public job postings going back to 2019, about 1.87 billion of them, plus public professional profiles i can look at across time.
pulled 1,512 people currently at Google who have TCS somewhere in their work history, and looked at what sat between the two. every one of them had dated positions so nothing was guessed.
the number i did not expect
176 people went TCS straight to Google. that is 11.6%. and of those 176, about 12% show a one to two year gap between leaving TCS and starting at Google, which is usually a masters nobody listed. so the real direct number is lower than 11.6%.
where the other 1,336 went first
exactly 1 company in between: 21% exactly 2: 26.1% 3 or more: 52.9%
more than half took at least three stops. the median time from leaving TCS to starting at Google is about 6 years.
the last stop before Google
Amazon and AWS: 133 Microsoft: 58 Oracle: 38 VMware: 20 Cisco: 19 SAP: 17 Qualcomm: 17 Accenture: 16 Intel: 14 Deloitte: 14
Amazon alone is more than Microsoft and Oracle combined. the pattern in that list is the actual finding. the last company before Google is almost always a product company. Accenture and Deloitte are on there but far down, and they are the only services firms in the top ten.
the real transition here is services to product. once someone is at Amazon or Microsoft, Google becomes a normal lateral move, the same as it is for anyone else sitting there.
one thing that surprised me
Amazon was not always the gateway. before 2018 it was about 3% of these paths and the list was fragmented, mostly Microsoft led. from 2019 onward Amazon runs 11 to 13% and leads every year since. this only holds from 2019 onward, and it lines up with Amazon expanding hiring in India.
limitations, and these matter
this is survivor data. i can only see the 1,512 who reached Google. i cannot see the far larger number who went TCS to Amazon and stopped there, which is most people who take that route. so this tells you what the ones who got there did. it does not tell you the odds.
everything is self reported from public profiles, so dates drift and short stints go missing. i also only counted companies that were properly linked as entities, so smaller employers in between are undercounted, which if anything means the real number of intermediate stops is higher than what i found.
and i have not run Amazon or Microsoft yet, so i cannot tell you whether Amazon is genuinely a gateway or just the biggest employer in the pool. that is the next thing to check.
happy to run this for another company if someone wants it. i have the data sitting there and not enough good questions.