Does Google have mentorship as an official responsibility? As an engineering led organization, I imagine it should. Ideally a mentor should be someone politically separated from your people manager and technical lead. They would be an advocate for your development as a professional and would be like a good college counselor (Between two majors and switching majors and schools once I had five college counselors and two of them were indispensable.). If you're good enough to make it through the Google hiring process for engineers, then you are good enough to deserve an advocate/counselor that can coach you and represent your position as an outsider to a conflict.

Ideally a new engineer would get to choose their Google Counselor and they wouldn't be allowed to transfer to work for their counselor without finding a new counselor. If they didn't find a counselor within 2-3 months they could choose to attend "counselor speed dating" events where people who enjoy coaching and advising can show up and meet promising new googlers and take them under their wing. People who are really good, knowledgable and wise are often not only happy to mentor/coach others, but actually enjoy going out of their way to do so.

In the case of a conflict between an employee and manager (or tech lead) like you experienced, the counselor would act as an advocate for the employee and suss out the truth like a lawyer helps a defendant in prosecutorial proceedings where there is a clear asymmetry of power between the prosecution and defense (like federal cases); The counselor provides a system of checks and balances against the types of managers you've railed against in the past. Having been victim to such a manager myself several years ago, I know that such a mechanism is sorely needed as a company grows and certain poor managers become entrenched in a defensible position despite their toxicity to the organization.

That's a great idea but, no, Google doesn't have anything like that.

You can find mentors, in the sense of people able to teach you things, and there are a lot of great people at Google, but there's nothing like what you described, and managers have unilateral power and the system seems to be described that way (project expediency, I assume).

I would reckon it's more likely due to lack of trying than project expediency. A C-suite sponsored mentorship directive would be a managerial innovation that few is any companies have tried.

A bad manager like the one you've described previously doesn't get a product done faster, cheaper and better. Quite the opposite actually.

In a previous discussion in a subthread started by you there was a concise reply with the most crystal clear example I can imagine about the stupidity of inflexible closed allocation from "russell" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5177884):

This describes my son's experience at Google exactly. He is a computer engineer with strong software and chip level design experience. He sought and was offered a hardware design job at Google. When he got there he was given a job writing python scripts to manage hardware, not the same thing at all. When he tried to change jobs, he was told he had to wait 18 months, so he quit.