The workers I had at Google were definitely metered, just that the quota we have was very high so a thousand workers was no big deal as long as you turned them

The workers I had at Google were definitely metered, just that the quota we have was very high so a thousand workers was no big deal as long as you turned them down after. I mean, if you give engineers cloud computing resources equal to a few percent of the cost of having said engineer then you can do this easily. And why not give them that? 20 engineers and $100k worth of experimental cloud quota is worth a lot more than 21 engineers and very limited cloud quota, at least if they are working with data pipelines and such.