The way I prefer to think of it is: it is not your job to protect people (particularly senior management) from the consequences of their decisions. That's a re

The way I prefer to think of it is: it is not your job to protect people (particularly senior management) from the consequences of their decisions. That's a really, really good line, and also a good guiding principle. None of this would've happened if people had just heroically fallen on their own sword and burnt out doing work nobody cared about. Slight disagree here: it was entirely possible that many people could have sacrificed their health, happiness, and quite possibly lives to the altar of Google's code quality... and changed absolutely nothing about Google's trajectory because Google would neither have noticed their efforts nor, had it noticed them, cared. That's not one of my periodic elbow swipes at Big Daddy G, by the way, that's just Life At A Megacorp. It was substantially the same way at my old day job -- I managed to convince myself that with just a few more hours and a few more tech talks and a little more quiet politicking I was going to get us on the Modern Web Applications (TM) bandwagon, and yet, seen from the clarifying distance of a few years, I bet it is highly likely that you'd have to be really adept with the subversion command line to find traces of my lasting impact on that company as employee #4,256. This is one reason I really prefer (personally) working for smaller companies. I like knowing that the stuff I work on matters. (And I totally get that there exist compensating differentials for working at Google, both for you personally and the other Googlers. You've previously mentioned "It feels great to have millions of people use something I made with my own hands", and I agree, that does sound awesome, and it's a flavor of awesome which will likely not be accessible to me for quite a while if ever due to the don't-work-for-e.g.-Google decision.)