I remember a well publicized story that talked about a startup trying to poach a google engineer (they offered him $1M but he turned it down because Google was paying $3M). So I guess some startups want them depending on the skillset or reputation.
Funny because you poach the Google engineer, and probably they are hamstrung because the startup doesn't have Google's infrastructure. E.g. you are stuck with Kubernetes, not whatever Google now uses. I could understand maybe Microsoft poaching for the long term brain dump value.
I think they were headhunting him because he had a reputation for being excellent in a technology that wasn't specific to Google. He definitely wasn't just an average employee (Google was paying $3M/yr!).
