While optimizing for promotion is definitely a corossive aspect of large company culture, it's simply not true that you can't "fire" people in Google. There is a bi-annual perf cycle, and there are ratings, and they mean things, your peers are involved, ratings are discussed among managers, results are callibrated, and there are "needs improvement" flags and "performance improvment" processes.

No you can't fire a person on the spot, but the assumption is that if they got into Google in the first place there's something of value there, so the company has a commitment to fix the problem before jettisoning the person.

What this guy seems to be complaining about is his inability to make personal arbitrary choices from his own authority and only his.

Yeah, you for sure can't do that at Google. Thank god. It's not a feudal kingdom.