This article relies on a single former (disgruntled) employee as its source. We should definitely not be making inferences about the top priorities of Google's management based on his claims.
Ad hominem is not really a good strategy for this these days. While we need to be cautious about veracity of any statement, using "disgruntled" is disqualifying anyone who uses it.
They probably do it because it still works. Muddy the waters, suggest there’s another side, play to people’s desire for a middle ground. Then the dust will settle and they’ll get to set the narrative again.
Media coverage really needs to be relentless to get through their tactics.
But the real point of my original comment was that this article is subpar journalism. The implication of the article, at least to my reading, is that there is a trend of declining morale at Google and dissatisfaction amongst the rank-and-file with the company's senior leadership. As evidence we are given... one guy's opinions.
He's having a good run giving the media what they want.
1) A bias in the media and on Hacker News against Google?
2) Evidence that Google is doing a lot of bad things?
There’s certainly a cadence of stories that appear which seem to assert that Google’s practices are as scummy as/ equivalent to Facebook.
It feels like farming “whataboutism” and fud. That may be a coincidence, but I doubt it.
Certain things become popular clichés, such as complaining about Go generics or Atom's alleged slowness, and so they get repeated in the comments about about that entity.
The tipping point seems to be when low-information comments start getting upvoted rather than downvoted. At some point people stop seeing anything wrong with them as long as they're on the same side.