You shaved off the enclosing context: $100M payouts to nontechnical executives when regular engineers can't even transfer without permission of the perf-industrial complex. I'm sorry, but I just can't defend a company that behaves that way. Seriously, you think it's okay that engineers have to deal with phony scarcity ("calibration score" and "headcount" nonsense) when non-technical executives make several hundred times more?

I think you're arrogant, disrespectful, and that you over-simplify problems to an absurd degree.

It's more that I don't have patience for junk complexity that exists only to keep power for those who don't deserve it.

Did yours have a lot to do with Google Maps responding quickly to an emerging tragedy?

Yes, actually. It's good that they updated their map quickly. If they paid the same respect to internal problems, they'd be a much better company.

Every quarter, managers get together to horse-trade "performance points" (or "calibration scores") and generate a company-wide stack ranking of all engineers. If you end up in the bottom 5% (which sometimes happens to people just because their managers don't show up) then you end up on a PIP and your career at Google is over. That monstrosity is called Perf.

The "Perf Room" is a metaphor on most campuses because most of the smaller ones don't actually have a dedicated room "where it happens" for calibration.

"Take you into the Perf Room" is a common managerial threat, but actually everyone is calibrated and the meeting happens in secret (most engineers never learn their scores) so people don't actually literally get taken "into the Perf Room". It's just an expression for a bad review.