I wonder how the blind allocation process will treat him. His domain expertise is AI, but he didn't do any of that At Google, which means it doesn't exist. So is he going to have to spend 18 months maintaining a legacy ad-targeting product while the 26-year-old Staff SWE next to him works on its replacement? How is he going to handle that?
Why would you ever think that he is being blindly allocated to the position of Director of Engineering? In that position, he'll pretty much be in control of his own destiny at Google.
When I was there, Directors were still above the Real Googler Line, but it may have moved up in the time since then. Also, he lives in Massachusetts, which means he'll only get the work that MTV doesn't want (unless he moves). Finally, with his visibility, he's going to get a lot of prank Perf and his manager is going to have a hard time promoting him because of that.
Anyone can write unsolicited reviews for anyone, with an option of it being visible only to the manager (aka graffiti in the executive washroom).
If someone gets pissed off about his transhumanism (especially if he starts talking about the Singularity on eng-misc, or if he has questions related to assigning Real Names to AIs, or if someone just doesn't like Canada and won't forgive him for his work with Our Lady Peace in 2000-1) and decides to "Perf" him, he could be in trouble.
If someone like Ray Kurzweil ends up on a PIP I will call the fabric of the universe broken.
Google is badly managed but they're not going to subject a heavyweight like that to their typical nonsense (blind allocation, manager-as-SPOF) and if they do, I'm sure he'll be just fine.
