[qdog]

Conversely, a business needs to generate the most profit per worker, not the most work. This might work out well for Google, or it might not. All the work metric systems I've seen essentially become a random number generator that hit all teams, rather than pushing up the top performers.

Although Google's cash cow is ad revenue, and it may be that they have decided to stop funding most other endeavors. I would expect some of the actual 'rest and vest' people were on some of the many projects Google cancelled and weren't successfully moved to a new project (or ended up being part of something they just don't care about, but can't quit).