Why does google (or any company for that matter) think this is a good idea? Especially with jobs in the tech industry being so abundant and people chomping at the bit to hire SWEs/SREs.
As for losing talent, Google is sufficiently established that the majority of freshly minted computer science and software engineering graduates are still desperate to work for Google if they can get in. And Google doesn't need to hire all the top talent to grow or run with the same profit margins.
I suspect software engineering salaries for new hires will start declining in nominal terms within the next decade or so, as (1) automation lowers demand for engineers on the business side (2) the labor supply keeps growing (3) non engineers in tech companies demand adjustments to their own pay to match engineers or start leaving for other companies that do, leaving less money to pay engineers (4) MBAs keep moving into management and start cutting labor costs for their most expensive individual contributors to increase profits and satisfy shareholders.
When new graduates make as much as doctors, with only a fraction of the education, while every other profession, with the exception of junior investment bankers, including technical ones and non-software engineering professions, are lucky to crack $75k, I don't see how the current job market is sustainable.
EDIT: debugging skills are earned through experience, not taught.
The amount of production outages we’re starting to see across Azure/GCP/AWS is telling if you ask me.
Even when I was there, the number of inexperienced grads who had never known anything except Google was growing rapidly. And they unfortunately seemed much more prone to bizarre outbursts, bad behavior and extremism of various kinds. They took where they worked for granted.
Except you are now stuck and can't transition back to a HCol area because all these years you were building less equity.
A 1M house in the Bay Area sells for 1M. A 300K house in Anywhere sells for... you guesses it, 300K.
No matter how good a doctor is, they can only treat so many patients and/or train so many juniors. A software engineer can scale almost infinitely in some respects. In this they are more like the investment bankers you mention, indeed in some circumstances interchangeable