What's that mean? They'll fly planes in to buildings? Strap bombs to themselves and blow up their buses?
> I would give them the gory details so they are prepared for what may happen
It sounds like you discovered office politics. It doesn't sound particularly unique to Google.
Despite claiming that it has a "peer review" performance system, Google has secret "calibration scores" which are set unilaterally by the manager and regularly destroy people's careers. (That they exist is not secret, but the specific numbers given are hidden.) There's a known problem with managers using low scores (but positive verbal reviews) to keep their reports captive but unable to transfer. I managed to find mine out, and it was substantially below the (completely respectable) 3.4 that I was promised, but that's another story.
Whoever came up with that idea (a parallel performance review that can silently ruin your career) was either deeply stupid or thoroughly evil. Google claims to hire only smart people, which leaves... evil.
A decent company will know that this is an opportunity for corruption and take performance reviews out of the transfer packet.
Sigh. Adding inflammatory rhetoric like this really doesn't help in painting you as a reliable commenter, either.
Yes, I do believe that "calibration scores" were injected into Google out of a malicious schadenfreude. These people were not trying to do good for their company. They were trying to hurt Google for their own amusement.
When a company has a reputation of a cultural leader as Google did throughout the 2000s, there are people out there who want nothing more than to "hack" it and make it destroy itself.
You make one point: the people who destroyed Google's culture are not terrorists. That was a clumsy metaphor. Rather, they're saboteurs who are destroying the company for their own amusement, as I clarified in my comment below.
I didn't know which side of this argument to give credence to, but that quote just helped me make up my mind.
There are a lot of things I admire about Google, and I think highly of most of the engineers. 95% of the engineers I met there I would gladly work with again.
In fact, I would recommend most people I know, if they get a Google offer, to take it. I would give them the gory details so they are prepared for what may happen, but if you join Google and end up on a good project that gives you visibility, it's a great place to work. Sure, there are unethical managers, but they aren't all bad. Why shouldn't they give the place a try?
The whistleblowing that I engaged in was in response to (a) incidents of management doing things it knew were counterproductive, to costs in the millions of dollars, just to keep rank, and (b) upper management refusing to discipline people for doing things that were immensely unethical.
What's amazing to me is that people will go to the mat to defend a huge company, when what they're actually doing is defending its rather abysmal management, which wouldn't do a thing for them.
Let me say it like this: Google is a fine company in most ways. It has built some excellent products, and the internal engineering tools are great. There's an incredible amount of talent. However, becoming an Argentina for disgraced technical managers who think constructs like "calibration scores" are a good idea is not a good business move.
If anyone is a friend of Google, it's me, because I've drawn light upon the managerial bloodsuckers that have been working to destroy the place.