Yeah, and there will be some noisy exits while people say "man Google has really lost its way" and they will open up the hiring spigot a bit and replace all of

Yeah, and there will be some noisy exits while people say "man Google has really lost its way" and they will open up the hiring spigot a bit and replace all of those exits with new employees for whom Google has always had a pay per meal policy (or no cafes in the satellite offices) or what ever method Google used to prevent the hit to their profitability. After a few years nearly everyone will think this is the 'regular' Google and won't know anything about the 'old' Google way. When I was working there, there was a tool called 'percent' that would tell you what percent of the employees were newer than you were. What astonished me was how rapidly one became an 'old timer' in the sense that > 50% of the employees had arrived after you had[1]. I watched this process in real time as people got fed up and left because they felt that the company had "let them down" or "failed to meet their commitments." It was a lot like university where every 4 or 5 years its an entirely different set of undergraduates. You tell them "how it was" and they believe you because, you are there and they just arrived. [1] That particular astonishment, combined with the reported employee numbers, led to another investigation which was how Google could replace 50% of the staff without anyone noticing, and discovered that churn was a pretty big thing.