As with all mchurch comments, you need to take it with a grain of salt. He was with Google for less than a year and has been extrapolating his short experience into a generalization of the company.
I think the problem is he comes here every couple of weeks and writes almost the exact same rant [1][2][3]. People are tired of point-by-point responses because they know he'll just be back a couple of weeks later and write the exact same thing again.
Honestly, I don't know why his comments always seems to get voted up. I assume they're voted up by people who have not read the previous exact-same rants...
His comments get upvoted because many readers of HN are looking to hate Google for some reason, and he writes a verbose "damning" description of Google's internal politics that makes Google seem very hate-able. Good writing + what you want to hear = instant upvote.
The only way to really refute what mchurch says is to post evidence of his work from when he was at Google, but that's a massive violation of his privacy, so nobody is going to do that. The only thing to do is dismiss his argument with vague statements like, "no, that's not true", which nobody is going to believe when compared to his well-written rants.
If you want to know the full mchurch story, I suggest you get a job at Google. Then you will have enough information to decide whether or not mchurch's rants about Google make sense.
I don't think people want to hate Google; I just think they're attracted by the controversy. It's like the faster-than-light neutrinos. People weren't interested because they hate Einstein, but because it's some apparently new information that contradicts what they previously thought to be true.
I'm interested simply because Google seems highly influential in the new-school tech sector management. These collections of anecdotes feed into the folklore wisdom held by managers.
As someone who started at the same time as mchurch, and observed what happened on the google-internal mailing lists, the full story probably shouldn't be shared online without his consent.
