BUT, I don't doubt that if someone high up at Google wants to fire you (like they know you're union organizing - for example), then they /could/ query your data and /possibly/ find an excuse.
I'm definitely not defending the actions of Google here but I do understand them - it's quite likely this HR rep couldn't legally agree to this contract modification and it's entirely possible that when it was forwarded to legal they didn't have the power to approve this change without consulting up the legal ladder and possibly passing the question by upper management.
To contrast, if this person had said "I can't agree to that clause for my personal property but I am happy to be issued and exclusively use (for business purposes) a phone from you folks." - that problem has a solution that's pretty negligible in cost when compared to the cost of employing someone and it doesn't go against the contract they've been asked to get people to sign on to.
I mean, Google could also have made that their response, rather than terminating the relationship right there.
"We're sorry we can't change the contract; would it work for you to use a work phone? We can pay for that."
I'd be kinda surprised if legal couldn't approve a change like that. Isn't it the bread and butter of legal departments to review all kinds of contracts (with customers, vendors, etc.)?
If you make a system where people are unable to behave reasonably, you still get to be responsible for their behavior.
And indeed this is a thing that many people at Google do.
my understanding that is just a propaganda. They would do very low offers much more frequently than that, and the people like me and some others i know of would just not take those offers.
>a candidate who had made it through the gauntlet
it seems like they actually have special low complexity interview track for low offers - so called "benchwarmers" - and i found nothing special about their interview for the resulting L5 offer.
So, it seems that Google really has an excess of people, and thus until a new hire is an unique star in his field it is just an easy replaceable cogs which is much simpler and cheaper to drop than to deal with its even slightly different shape.
That said, it was at a time where Google was complaining bitterly about how hard it was to hire engineers, and their much vaunted hiring process would only offer 1 in 10,000 applicants.
That they would have a candidate who had made it through the gauntlet, and some manager was waiting for them to show up, be turned away at the last minute based on an explicit clarification of a clause that Google, through the HR rep at the intake session, had already said was consistent with the intent of the agreement? That surprised me.
If the HR rep was speaking truthfully, then I would have expected to Google legal to just adopt the updated text in this agreement and all future agreements. It literally got tweaked at least once a year so the problem of "multiple agreements" wasn't really a problem.
So my amazement was first the cognitive dissonance between what they said and what they did, then the realization that what was written was what they meant, and thus what HR had said was a misrepresentation of the intent.
I don't know how many people have lawyers review these things, I do, but I may be unusual in that regard. My lawyer said that there were a number of things in the agreement that were unenforceable, and a few that were likely unlawful, but when they came up I would probably already be on my way out so it wasn't particularly harmful to sign. And some advice on how to avoid getting on the wrong side of the agreement and thus giving them a reason to separate me "for cause." (legal or not).
And now we have this story where the NLRB which suggests that Google is not above doing illegal things to protect their interests.