Importantly, this is a personal choice. I don't want to be in a team where members don't take personal responsibility, and I am willing to contribute the same. If Google does not allow such a team to operate with its own norms then the author is justified in saying it's not a good fit.
And to be clear, are you seriously saying that any person saying, "what? Sushi again?" Is actually going to have a real empathizable reason for saying so? Honestly Google sounds like it's filled with what can be considered the modern equivalent of upper middle class government administrators of past eras who don't really contribute much, couldn't give a rats ass about much more than what their weekend plans are and what their paycheck is and I will be more than happy that they are happy they don't work with someone like me if that thought process ever came up.
Of course, companies like Google have found a way to factory-fy this system of getting "maybe mediocre but never truly bad" engineers and scale a massive software conglomeration that runs the world. But this is only possible because of massive excesses these companies procure through counterproductive and anticompetitive revenue streams like ads and data aggregation, so in some ways people in HN want to complain about how these big tech companies are evil but at the same time draw heinously enormous paychecks from them and act as if they truly deserve them. That seems to be the problem.
