I doubt many Googlers will 'start looking elsewhere'... where exactly would they look? Dubai? China? Heh.

Most of that stuff can be paid for with pre tax dollars as opposed to having to pay for it yourself with after tax dollars.

The place I used to work paid for my phone, breakfast, daily lunches, insurance and metro card. My only fixed costs each month were groceries, dinner, rent, cable/internet, minor personal items & student loans.

Its not like Google is best company in the world(those days are gone). Even if, company doesnt matter to me,what matters is only the work(and the smartness of co-workers) what Iam doing. I would any day better compromise on the smartness of co-workers as opposed to compromising the quality of work. By this, there could be a lot of better jobs elsewhere.

TechCrunch does one thing very well, which is up to the moment headlines (on a rapidly changing industry) with just enough commentary that you can get a feel for what happened. It's one very small notch above a Twitter feed. If you're looking there for in-depth analysis, you're always going to be disappointed.

Quite the contrary; I want TC to report start-up news. That's it. I don't want any editorials, op-eds, or analysis. Why? Because, as many many articles including this one prove, they are nearly always completely ignorant of the situation and say ridiculously stupid shit as a result.

They do that well, as you said, but it's when they go beyond the bare necessities and actual facts into the realm of "analysis" that the writers (and editors and everyone else between an article and my face) fall flat on their asses and cause my blood pressure to rise in the process.

"Shit, I can't swim. I know I can't. So you know what I do? I stay my black ass outta the pool."

For them, the value is long comment-threads and inlinks/clickthroughs. And bad analysis often gets more such attention... so bad analysis is what they prefer to provide.

Sadly, your point is an oft-relevant one so my only recourse is to read TC even less than I do now, which is to say stop reading the articles that show up here.