Ah. A believer that software engineers are cogs and can just be “replaced” without training and learning of code bases.
Hiring software engineers, bringing them up to speed, and having them contribute to production features, is expensive. Also, you’ll never truly recoup the lost knowledge that goes.
All that said, I commend the folks who signed this letter. If anything, the fact that most of the folks who signed are in relatively junior positions shows how Google has lost its way when it comes to it's morals. The more senior execs feel the pressure of serving Wall Street and have more to lose, while these more junior folks, while taking a risk know they can get hired anywhere else in a heartbeat. It's the kid standing up saying the emperor has no clothes.
The fact this is posted on HN and the regular gauntlet of tech sites is enough to have a major impact on their recruiting. I, like many of the people here, am a frequent target for Google recruiters and Dragonfly is more than enough for me to turn down an interview with them. Maybe they will have more luck with fresh college grads and interns who are less discerning.
Does Google care about this cost? Hard to say from the outside. But for every signature on this you can bet there are many more inside being very vocal. One part of Google's culture is that it encouraged feedback from the engineers and the engineers take advantage of that freedom pretty frequently.
They invest extremely heavily in minimizing attrition and widening their funnel for recruiting. That's why their offices are crazy, they do 3 meals a day for employees, they pay a ton of money for people right out of college and for interns, everyone gets free massages, etc. They take any effect that narrows that funnel or increases attrition very seriously, as they view the company as fundamentally being a stable of the best software engineers they can get competing with the best software engineers other people can get to put out better solutions to problems.
It may be true that in some companies, engineers are treated as cogs, but this line of work is _heaven_ compared to those other industries.
In other words, every single person who is not a software developer, especially anybody in any form of "management"?