I started at Google right around when this deck was made. I never got a holiday gift. I got three "badges" for this (one for not getting a 2016 gift, one for, at the time presumably, never receiving one, and one for being in the first year of employees to have such a distinction). In a very characteristic example of Googliness all three were silently rm'd from the central server in between when I got my morning badge summary email and when I got to my desk. To be explicit, that means it became company policy sometime in that hour for those badges not to exist.

They re-architected the promo process for 95% of promos (according to another comment itt, but for sure closer to 80% than 20%), making it more conventional. Allegedly to prevent orgs from promoting wildly (for... Some reason I guess), "promo budgets" were floated. This rightfully pissed people off because Google only promotes you after you demonstrate consistency at the next level, meaning you would be working at LN getting paid as an LN-1 for at least another cycle if not longer. It also really upset the orgs that are structured by function rather than area. Allegedly these budgets never existed, but personally, after my management chain bluntly and directly lied about the Maven contract, I never believed anything they said. I'm sure they're all excellent people, but capitalism gives us all incentive to do things we otherwise wouldn't. Lying about Maven, and restructuring promo to make it your managers decision, were certainly company policies. Budgets might not have been, but then, even if there's no evidence now, it took us decades to find out the truth about Tonkin Bay.

So, for a brainstorming deck, a lot of stuff from it actually happened. Given that, you have to start questioning how accurate other parts are.

I left Google recently, though I knew what a "company" was going in and didn't expect anything different. I was very sad to leave my immediate team, but not at all sad to leave Google, mostly because of how glaring the difference is between what they say they value and what they actually value. I wouldn't even begrudge them the honesty; every other "conventional" company somehow manages to keep employees.