The free snacks, drinks, food are most definitely NOT gone. Have there been some cut-backs? Sure. So now the perks are merely incredible instead of ridiculous-verging-on-embarassingly-good.
So yeah, the micro-kitchens now have ~75 types of snacks instead of 100+ and we are now limited to 40-ish types of free drinks in the cooler instead of twice that. And now we drink filtered water instead of Smart-Water. Life is hard ;-)
Also there are still fresh-made sandwiches, sushi and salads delivered to the kitchen every day and I can still walk to one of the dozen-plus cafes and get three hot meals, prepared fresh each day by talented chefs.
Oh - the article neglected to mention the fact that Patrick's cost-cutting measured resulted in the annual bonus being paid out at over 100% this year, instead of the much lower amount that we were on target for before he showed up. So yeah - I would say a lot of people would consider Patrick to be a bit of a hero.
Would have to strongly disagree on the snacks. In 47, our snacks disappear very quickly, and there's definitely not 75 different types. There's maybe 10. Tech Stops have disappeared, they run out of bikes for interns, don't even get me started on how crowded the gyms have become, it's definitely worse than before. Perhaps I'm bitter because I got no annual bonus as an intern :)
The tightening that [CFO] Patrick [Pichette] in particular did, who I think is the current Google hero