I don't see anything wrong with their phrasing. The full context of the quote: "The engineering help disappeared. Within another year, some engineer in India t

I don't see anything wrong with their phrasing. The full context of the quote: "The engineering help disappeared. Within another year, some engineer in India told us our API access was going to be rescinded." seems to imply that Google had outsourced engineering help to India to save on operating costs. This type of outsourcing [1] was pretty common back in those days. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Is_Flat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Is_Flat