Contractor SWE's at Google are very rare. In my several years there as both a SWE and EM (I'm no longer at Google), I never encountered one. My understanding from other EM's/Directors was they were only hired for non core product work, which did not overlap with the work that Google FTE SWE's did, and was very routine work. Most likely without internal code access - it was that separate.

Core product/infra work, and anything non-trivial, is always done by FTE's.

Opinions are my own. I also make no claim on the expertise of contractors.

The common saying in engineering is you use the right tools for the job. Likewise, you place the right people to the right job. It would be a mismatch to put an L5+ to do some low impact work. That would be an inefficient use of limited resources. The SWE would also be unhappy since that affects their perf/promo. Depends on the potential impact/difficulty/urgency, it might be more appropriate to save that work for an intern, fixterm, or TVC.

It's not about "so against having good old employees". It's business.

Just speculating (I work at a FAANG) – a lot of "software engineering" at these big tech companies is just centering divs and refactoring code – you don't need a 10xer to do that stuff.

sometimes you just need someone who can write super simple scripts to help process/clean some data or do grunt work that none of the devs want to do. And sometimes this need is just temporary for 4 months etc.

I wouldn't waste a google dev's on grunt work that any coder could do.

It's funny how arrogant you seem to have gotten working at Google. Looking through your post history a couple of years ago you were doing grunt work you would see as below you now. The belief that all Google employees are doing hard innovative work is untrue. A large portion are centering divs and wrangling JSON.

Hey now...this is Google we're talking about.

They're wrangle protobufs.

this account has had multiple owners.. i’ve never done grunt work

Why?

> who can write super simple scripts to help process/clean some data

If you can figure how to make that process "super simple" you can make staff engineer. Source: am L5 SWE at Google spending most of time wrangling unclean data