I realize that Bloomberg probably slants this for clicks but it is another example of why I left Google when I did.

All organizations that I have been a part of have something which might be called a 'dissonance' level. That would be defined as the difference between the policies that were being pursued by the leadership versus the messaging and communication on policies that were being communicated to employees. When dissonance is low, there are only small, and insignificant, differences between the two. When dissonance is high there are large differences between them. Two examples during my tenure which highlighted this were a change to the employee store and the other a change on juices.

To set the background, when I joined every employee got a credit for the employee store, and the prices in the store were half off for employees. This was a nice way to give new folks some logo wear which would show off the brand but in a way the knew they could use. Later this was changed to no credit when you were hired and a flat 20% discount. The actual reason this was done (and came out eventually) was because it was money management didn't want to spend any more. They wanted the store to be 'revenue neutral' with respect to employees. It was presented first as a way of correcting "abuse" where people would do their Christmas shopping at the Google store, or managers using it to give everyone on their team some schwag as a spot bonus. At the time, free cash flow (aka net money going into the bank account every quarter) was nearly $2B, with a cash flow per employee of $100,000 a quarter (or $400,000 a year) and management was upset that they "gave away" $150 to every new employee and "lost" about $15 per employee per year on margin in the Google store. The new CFO at the time (Pichette) was extraordinarily cheap. But the problem wasn't that they took that away, the problem was that they didn't own it like a grown up company would. Instead they created this fiction of a "big problem" that was being corrected that deflected anger from management for taking away a "perk" to fellow employees who were "abusing the system."

Similarly a year later they swapped vendors for juice from Naked Juice to Odwalla, and then pretty much stopped restocking juices. It was presented as a problem with Naked Juice being able to provide for Google's needs, and yet once again it wasn't actually the story. The story was money. Odwalla was cheaper and not as many people liked it so overall consumption would go down, by not restocking popular flavors the juice refrigerator could have "juice" in it and give air cover to manager for not taking away juices while insuring that as little as possible would be consumed.

The pattern was very clear, the messaging was "We're this hip company that is employee focused and care about what you need to do great work" but the actual policy was "We're just another greedy corporation who will lie to our employees in order to extract and keep as much value as possible out of the people who work for us."

Not exactly a ringing endorsement. And now we find they say "express yourself, we're open here" to the employees while they lobby to get the laws changed so they can fire trouble makers? Not a big surprise to me.

That said, it can be a fun place to work and there are amazing people there to work with. If you don't care about "fair" compensation and treat all of the company messaging as fiction, it was a place where you could take on tasks that no where else was ready to take on yet. I got to play with a huuuuge storage cluster to do some really useful research on that. No storage company in the world would have been able to field, much less give a couple of engineers pretty much exclusive access to for a couple of months. Eventually though, I just couldn't continue to look away from the dissonance and had to leave.