Google is paying some people around half a million dollars not to go to Facebook, a senior Facebook engineer has confirmed. Googlers, prepare to get spoiled and entitled again, recession be damned.

Unemployed techies, take heart: At least your soul isn't being shredded by an awful job. It sounds like that's the case with Macintosh co-inventor Andy Hertzfeld, who says acclaimed employer Google has smothered him and drained him of creative joy.

What happens when Google swallows your life? A new hire at the internet company is blogging the experience, from waking in his Google apartment to taking a Google car to Google dinner and then Googling home via Google.

Google's hiring process is supposed to be a utopian system for identifying superhuman staff. Yet it needs a surprising amount of correcting. And we're trying to figure out if this "stage 2" interview test also needs fixing.

How selflessly cool is Google? Every now and then the company removes from consideration one of its superhuman job candidates, to avoid an over-concentration of brilliance. Google, you see, doesn't want to become a black hole of awesome.

Techie office accoutrements like razor scooters and free food faced mass extinction at the end of the last dot-com boom nine years ago. Google brought them back in full force, judging from pictures of its New York office.

It would seem Google failed to effectively use its flagship service before rolling out its much-ballyhooed new programming language "Go:" Another language already had that name, and a significant profile on Google's own servers.

Google strives to hire "the world's best engineers,"and has crafted an "interminable" interview process dotted with puzzles and brainteasers to do so. One little problem: the process tends to give the worst scores to the best future employees.

Google used to say its lavish perks bolstered productivity and, if anything, would only grow more posh. But a recession changes things. Now the official line is more like, just be happy you're working, you ungrateful fucking pigs.