I'm not taking anything away from chefs, but Google is an engineering, product, and advertising company, so chef isn't a core skillset and should probably be compensated thusly.

You assume that because a person's job is not in the company's "core skillset" that their contribution must inherently be less than that of an employee whose job is in that "core skillset".

This is the incorrect perception that the author here is attempting to fix. From the sound of his experience at early day's in Google, your assumption is flat-out wrong.

based on what?

You are assuming something about an individual's contribution to a group of people based on nothing but the job title.

Based on actual evidence from an early Google employee, this guy's contribution was huge. Will all chefs at company's have similarly large contributions? Not likely. But it doesn't change what this guy contributed and to assume something like this seems really unfair and useless.

based on what?

Why do you think engineers get paid more than secretaries, on average? There's your answer.

But that does not mean that an engineer's contribution is inherently greater than that of a secretary based on nothing but their job title.

If you mean stock options, then employees aren't given stock options based on their skill sets. They are given options commensurate with the risk they undertook. That's why early employees have higher stock options.

The Google chef got $20 million worth of stock options not because of his cooking skills, it was compensation for the risk he took, by cooking for the engineers of a firm that might have folded in months.

Startup Economics 101.

There are a broad variety of roles within a company.