Remember that bit about billions of dollars every quarter in free cash flow? That's after spending on things like 'recruiting' and 'building another 50MW data center' kinds of expenses. If you're a startup, recruiting costs are an annoyingly big chunk of your burn, if you're Google, not so much.

Another big thing at Google was data science, or "Using data to win arguments" as a prominent Google engineer once wrote. I would not be surprised that someone has code that assesses the cost of replacing people where they figure out "current pay package of existing engineer" - "recruiting costs" + "new pay package" and the manage the list of people who are now 'replacable' because that number has gone in favor of replacement.

I was pitched a project to work on when I was there called "find and expert" or something which was designed to identify individuals who were 'experts' and relied on by the organization. Reasonable thing right? Know who your experts are. But the folks putting this together were also associated with People Operations trying to replace people. It didn't take too much effort to connect the dots on that. Was it evil? Yes? No? Kind of? It was more like "we want a company where everyone is easily replaceable without risk to the company." That certainly plays well with the shareholders. Felt a bit like the Borg trying to integrate ones technical distinctiveness into the collective.

It has always been a career limiter of mine that I care about the people more than I care about the company.