Interestingly, Matt has invented a variant on the retpoline [1] which _intentionally_ missteers the branch predictor to prevent various speculative attacks. (Invented by my former Google manager.). It's pretty cool how much simpler a retpoline would be in aarch64, since we have explicit control over the link register rather than having to play stupid games with stacks.
(Real retpolines have a little more magic, naturally.)
> Do they have special interview channels for 'regular devs' and another for people who can write dynamo ?
Not special interviews, but certainly different pieces of headcount. There are Googlers and there are Googlers. Being the second is a lot more work, but a lot more interesting.
Wait a minute, wait a minute: if I just decide I'm not going to work anymore, they can't fire me if I say it's because I'm protesting for higher wages? And they have to keep paying me?