Is there a lawsuit in the offing? Because that's how it feels reading this. It will be difficult to prove that the stress of a fairly standard difficult work environment in high tech caused memory loss and brain damage.
If there was, they wouldn't or at least shouldn't blog about it. To me it just feels like a well deserved rant, that hopefully lifts some weight off the author's shoulders, and gives us some interesting topic for discussion.
I've never heard of a lawsuit over emotional/psychological damage done by a difficult work environment (apart from those due to the racism/sexism/abuse-of-power/etc..). I do agree that psychologically difficult work environments are very common and many are not really avoidable even though some (like probably this one) definitely are.
IANAL but I think it would be easy for Google to argue that they're paying their workers exorbitant wages with the idea that they would be working at the highest tier of skill, responsibility, competitiveness and stress. Even though in this particular situation it doesn't seem very warranted.
How many tens thousands of workers are working in soul crushing zombifying factory lines and Amazon warehouses? I've heard that if you work for Amazon in Seattle you literally don't see sunlight for the entire winter. If we're going to defend the brains of our highest paid workers, what about our lowest ones?
Of course, ideally we would both, I'm just saying law makers are probably not very keen on opening that can of worms.
My sister actually successfully sued an employer for psychological damage due to workplace abuse. I never talked to her about what specifically they did, though, and this was a call center that I have to assume was far more abusive than a Google engineer experiences.
Of course, I myself get disability payments from the VA due to permanent injuries sustained while in the Army, but that's pretty common. I left that job with ten screws in my spine, which is a little easier to quantify than "I felt stressed." Ironically enough, in spite of having a few diagnosed and treated brain injuries, including one in which I wasn't allowed to drive for two months, I got nothing for that. I'm reasonably sure my memory is worse than it was, but it's nearly impossible to prove that. Before and after tests are no longer possible if you didn't do a before test, and who regularly takes any sort of test of cognitive function before getting injured?
My son was recently in a motorcycle accident and he did a multi-hour written test and determined that he could no longer do the math he did in college (not the average I forgot how to do that but in a much worse way). That might work for you if you have college classes to look back on.
