Google employees alarmed that the company suddenly expects them to do work

The tweet you linked to is doubly funny, since it was in response to Dan Price, who is under investigation for rape and physical abuse. Should Gravity Payments deplatform itself in today's guilt-by-association world?

You want to bypass public decisions through proxy of corporations without public approval. That's a totalitarian/authoritarian future where a small group of corporate overlords rule general public.

I think the first step is probably identifying what exactly you'd like to do: smaller companies generally mean specialized roles (even if the engineers are themselves generalists). From that, there are probably local meetups and conferences in your area that are hosted or attended by smaller companies, consultancies, etc.

Edit: or do you mean that previously there was room for slackers as long as they didn't care about promotion, and the difference now is their jobs are at risk?

Anywhere where there are committees that decide who gets promoted are not impact focused.

Xoogler here.

I see how people may view Google as having an impact-focused culture, but I would argue that Google has a perception-of-impact focused culture.

Google historically has sought to hire clever people-- clever people that understand and care about optimization. It should be no surprise that Googlers also applied their cleverness to optimize their behavior toward what they understood about the reward system called perf/promo (some of those understandings weren't necessarily correct, but when enough people share an understanding or behavior, correct or not, it can have a reflexive effect on the system itself).

Google has reached a critical mass point where values it cultivated in its people through these reward systems now drive the culture and common behavior.

There are a few major components to this:

Perceived Impact: Perf/promo-optimizing Googlers optimized for things that they understood or believed to be perceived by promotion committees as "impactful." This does not mean that those things are actually impactful, but perceived as impactful.

Impact isn't Technical Skill: What counts as "impact" and the need for impact varies by an employee's ladder (job family) and their level. Generally for individual contributor SWEs, levels were meant to be representative of an individual's technical skill/ability and leadership. Generally, assessing and gating a technical individual contributor's performance rating and promotion based on business impact doesn't lead to fair or correct outcomes for the person when the business impact isn't associated or driven by that individual's work. Also, from the reviewer's side, a person's work/contributions generally needs to be viewable as the driving factor for the impact portrayed. This creates a bias toward things that can be seen as 'technically complex' or 'technically challenging.'

Perceivability and Overemphasis on Visibility/Measurability: Many important things in life and engineering are not easily measurable, nor can the explanation of how to appreciate the "why this matters" be condensed into ~300 words. You have likely had scenarios in life where your intuition, experience, or judgment for what the right or good thing to do made something obvious for you, but the explanation would probably take too many words to fit into a promotion packet or a few minutes during an short interview, so you'd have to select obviously understandable and relatable examples when sharing with others -- This drives a bias toward doing things that can be easily perceived and visible to group of reviewers in a calibration and promotion committee.

Lowest Common Denominators: "Perf" (performance review) ratings and Promotion are separate processes. Performance ratings are recommended by managers, and calibrated/adjudicated amongst a set of managers from the same calibration group, typically people from your own team or adjacent teams. Promotion nominations are adjudicated by small committees of ladder (job family) representatives drawn from across the company (this was later changed to representatives across the person's Product Area/Division as the company got bigger). Sometimes the important things for a person to do are contextually related to the dynamics, circumstances, or needs of the local organization, but those very things wouldn't be appreciated or understood by a person in a similar role elsewhere (see previous paragraph), so a person often has to make a tradeoff on where to apply their time -- doing the right thing for the team/organization, or doing something that could be more generally perceived as impactful by a committee of people that don't know you, probably wouldn't appreciate why fixing ___/paying off technical debt/etc was important, and might not understand that the nature of your work is very different where you are than in other teams/orgs/product areas.

Overburdened and Sometimes Lazy Reviewers: Calibration group participants aren't volunteers, but promotion committee members are. Both groups often have more packets to evaluate and assess than they have time to commit while also doing their regular jobs. In "perf" and the promotion process, the person being reviewed typically has to author their own statements for why their work represents the characteristics of strong performance for their level and/or the next level -- those statements can often be a lot, or hard, to read. Checking and verifying that a launch happened and that a person had associated code (CLs) and design docs is a lot quicker and easier than reading through a bunch of code, design docs, etc and trying to verify the "impact."

So you could imagine why "I launched _______" becomes a common focus for perf/promotion optimizers, and a common understanding amongst the larger community on what's important to be rewarded...

I assumed Valve decided that competing witu literally Apple, and Facebook, for VR headware wasn't clever.