I gets attention, and forces Google to be yet again needlessly seen as an exception to the rest of the work-world, where leaving an employer to find work closer to your interests is natural and expected.

Would love to tab through a collection of the reasons the last 10-20 people left any particular company, and I believe we'd still likely fare far better in appearance and substance.

(Disclosure: I work at Google)

I would imagine a company like Google would have the foresight to include clauses in their NDA that forbid former employees from including the kind of specific and substantive reasoning for their departure that the public might actually find interesting. Not to mention a severance package goes a long way as far as taming that salty post-employment flavor. Oh, and there's the small matter of fact that they tend to pay well. I can only assume these factor into a lot into the standard reason being, "it's kinda personal but I felt like I'd be happier doing something different." Wow, what a revelation...

If you have to offer a compromise agreement (the legal term for what your suggesting) when people leave the company has major problems.

Forcing companies to publish the number of such agreements made might make an interesting metric to use when evaluating companies.

Man, I wish they actually offered departing staff severance and an NDA. Maybe if you're a VP. I know VPs who get booted out for sexual harassment get to keep their stock.

Sex harassment cases are hard to prove it's often a case of he said she said and hr (and the employee side) have to be very careful to be scrupulously fair and not jump to conclusions.

So its often easier to settle - this is true for those harassed being brave enough to go public and possibly be cross examined by a £2k a day barrister is a nontrivial thing to do.

If you're asked to leave, many people probably won't mention that.

Working on projects that never release must be frustrating.