Google is reportedly flooded with Yahoo résumés. We'd recommend an overtly modest approach to anyone who scores an interview: Google has lately been brutal in handling presumptuous, entitled transplants.

Blogger Joe Clark, still fuming over the mathematical mistreatment of Google designer Doug Bowman, explains that Google is populated by people with cases of "extreme male brain."

More layoffs are coming to Google, employees there believe. A Googler tells us top executives abruptly cancelled meetings across the Googleplex Friday.

How does Eric Schmidt do it? The computer nerd runs Google, has Obama's ear, parks his jet fleet in a NASA hangar, and has a rocking girlfriend. Is she the reason he flies so much?

After having her image frosted by the New York Times and Charlie Rose, Google VP Marissa Mayer, the cupcake princess of search, is hungry for more press. Luckily, Lesley Stahl arrived to spread more on!

The accountants have taken over the Googleplex, once a hotbed of amiably unprofitable innovation. The notion that ads would pay the way for everything has been dropped — and "fee" is replacing "free."

Since Valleywag broke the news that Google was closing two of its free cafés this week, they've been busier than ever as hyperentitled Googlers race to get one last taste. And complain about the lines.

"That's business," said Balek when Valleywag reached him by phone.

Googlers, used to being coddled by the luxuries of the Googleplex, now worry they'll have to pay to ride the company shuttle bus. It's the latest sign of the giant search engine's nervous breakdown.

How soul-draining it must be to work at the world's best company! Hence the introduction of Google's School of Spiritual Growth, an arm of the search engine's in-house university.

Google is throwing not one, not two, but three holiday parties for its New York employees this year. Such is the cash-flush search engine's definition of austerity.

The best place to work in America is becoming like every other big corporation. Google, at its heart an overgrown advertising agency, is most famous for its lavish perks. Now those are disappearing.

Click to viewThe immense former Port Authority building where Google now does business in Manhattan has an impressive history. Truck drivers once drove onto elevators and motored around the building's upper floors. Today, the place has been Googlefied with snacks, ping-pong tables, and a jillion Legos. Free scooters let staffers zip one part of the supersize building to another. But the best thing about this video? Google Docs manager Jonathan Rochelle talks up his office for 2 minutes and 42 seconds without once using the word "cool." We just wish The Big Money's camera crew had shown us the 50,000 sq. ft. Google is emptying out for sublease, too.

Ramsey Allington, the bad-boy manager of Google's book-search operations who stands accused of sexism and discrimination by his employees, has turned electronically shy after Valleywag's exposé of his misdeeds. His blog, Ramsey's World, is now friends-only — which just suggests he's got more to hide.For example, a now-yanked video of him singing a karaoke version of Britney Spears's "Baby One More Time." (Allington is wearing glasses, at right.) The occasion appears to be a party for coworkers in Hyderabad, India, where Allington helped open up a customer-support office for Google. How charming: This fellow has gone from sharing the worst of American culture in India, to showing the worst of Google's toxic insideriness at home.

Google's offices in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood are the latest to feel the pinch, with hours curtailed and snack service cut back, according to an internal memo. To understand what a shock to the system this is, remember how, when Google went public four years ago, cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin swore they would increase employee perks over time. Since then, Google PR has built the company's great-place-to-work reputation largely on its free meals. How fast things change: Just a year ago, the luxe perks of Google's New York office were a selling point, as the search engine courted the city's fashionistas. Now the food is just another cost to cut. Starving artists, don't count on mooching off free meals courtesy of your Googler friends: Google New York is also cracking down on guests. Here's the memo New York Googlers received Tuesday around lunchtime:

A coalition of book publishers and authors have extracted $125 million from Google in settling a copyright lawsuit they filed in 2005. The agreement should make Google Book Search vastly more useful, as millions of books get added to Google's index. The team at Google which deals with publishers should be busier than ever. Too bad it's run by a sexist tyrant who's seen 7 of his 13-person team — all women — leave in a year's time. Googlers who formerly worked under Ramsey Allington, the head of Google's book operations, say he's a terrible manager who has actively discriminated against women in his employ.Bad managers are everywhere in corporate America. But Google's supposed to be different — a new model of management, driven from the bottom up, where ideas, not rank or hierarchy, are what matter. Ramsey Allington never got that memo, according to his employees. Google's famous for its 360-degree reviews, where ratings from underlings matter as much as bosses. But Allington's employees say they were never asked to review him until very recently this year — and the negative results of that lone review process were ignored. His job was not easy. Online sales and operations, the area in which Allington worked, was famously called a "toilet" by top Google executive Shona Brown when Sheryl Sandberg, now Facebook's COO, ran it. Sandberg, Brown suggested, flushed people through the system. Eager young graduates from top schools who wanted to add Google to their resume signed up to answer email and field phone calls, in the hopes that they'd be able to transfer to other departments. Allington's job, more or less, was to keep them down on the farm, doing customer support. But Allington went too far, his employees say, in blocking their efforts to move up or transfer within Google. He may even have broken the law: He's said to have demoted one woman after a pregnancy leave, moving her from an account-management job into an entry-level position answering email — an allegation which may be a violation of the Family Medical Leave Act, which generally requires that employees who take leave be allowed to return to their same job. Several employees under Allington have taken medical leave for stress because of the hostile work environment they say he has created. They also say he demonstrated a pattern of retaliating against employees for expressing their concerns about the workplace, punishing them in employment reviews as showing a negative attitude. Allington is what they call an "IPO lottery winner"; he joined Google in 2002, two years before it went public, allowing him to make a tidy profit on stock options. Though he only holds the title of manager, he's well-connected in the company. He's said to have the favor of top executive Jonathan Rosenberg — who's something of a tyrant himself. Allington is also married to Shaluinn Fullove, a high-profile Googler recently written up in Fortune. Connections in the tight-knit Googleplex may well have let him escape scrutiny for years. He was close friends with his immediate supervisor, Laura DeBonis. By the time his employees raised concerns about Allington with her, DeBonis had a foot out the door; she left in early 2008. Her replacement, Doug Cook, responded to the complaints by ordering, for the first time, reviews from Allington's employees — but ended up backing him. Employees finally complained to David Fischer, the online sales and operation executive who oversees Book Search, who started a formal investigation. Turnover in HR slowed the process. One HR staffer told an employee that Google's human-resources department was ill-equipped to deal with complaints of discrimination because it was "such a young department." Google recently celebrated its 10th anniversary. But it's understandable that Google's management is ill equipped to deal with bad Googlers. People at the Googleplex take it as a matter of faith that their coworkers and superiors share the company's "Don't be evil" values; if you're a Googler, you're good by definition. There are processes in place that, in theory, route around dysfunctional managers like Allington. In practice, those processes are easy to game. And why not game them? Those in the tight-knit coterie of IPO lottery winners, like Allington, have convinced themselves not just of its goodness, but of its superiority; Googlers who joined the company too late to make a fortune must just not be as smart as them. Their bank accounts prove it. Why not discriminate against them? the market already has. At any well-run company, Allington would have been long gone, I believe. But the question isn't whether Allington should have been fired for sexual discrimination. It's how many Ramsey Allingtons there are at the Googleplex. And how long it will take us to find them.

"A space-age structure that could be the greenest office building of all time." "A living building that has no carbon footprint." That's the spin. So is this: Google spokespeople are telling reporters that plans are on hold. Charleston East, site of Google's planned superplex, used to be a parking lot for Mountain View's Shoreline Amphitheater, just up the road from Google's main campus Now the lot is idle, pending a bunch of paperwork by the city. But here's the truth: The building was planned when Google was growing by more than 100 employees per week worldwide. Last quarter, it added 500 Googlers to its ranks — about 40 a week. That's why Google has shuttered a café. There's green, and then there's green. Eric Schmidt, America's CTO, is not thinking about the tree-hugging kind right now.

Google's changes in the seclusion and segregation of its workers tempt us to invoke Godwin's Law — or at least Martin Niemöller's. Will cutting perks and benefits and firing people help push Googlers to wake up in Larry and Sergey's geek playland? Today's featured commenter is random_play, who waxes poetic about the pain of Google's cost-cutting:

Life has been good on the Googleplex, even for contractors; the search engine's legendary perks, spread across its luxuriously infantilizing office parks, have been enjoyed by all. Next month, that changes, a tipster tells us: Contractors will have to stick to designated "zones" based on the building they work in. The main object is to cut the cost of offering foods and other perks by preventing contractors from visiting cafés meant for employees, or using gyms and other facilities on the main campus. But the "zones" have another benefit for management, as Google girds for deeper cuts.They make it easier to group contractors away from employees, sparing Googlers from the painful reality of watching people boxing up their desks. Google is rumored to have laid off 500 contract recruiters — sensible, because the company barely added 500 employees in the third quarter — with more contractor cuts to come, as soon as next week. Will regular employees be spared? Unclear.

Food is at the center of Google's corporate culture, a sign of the company's Pollyanna worldview and the outsized financial success which enables this largesse. So why is Google is closing a café? Off The Grid, one of Google's 18 in-house eateries at its headquarters, abruptly shut its doors this week. Employees are being told the cut is "temporary," but workers are removing the café's fixtures, which suggests a permanent closure. What this means: Despite CEO Eric Schmidt's protestations, Google is being hit by the recession. And the blows are harder than the company has admitted to shareholders or employees.Off The Grid's closure is the harbinger of more cuts, a source within Google's kitchens we've nicknamed "Deep Fried" tells us. The building, 2350 Bayshore, is also having its "micro kitchen" snack stations closed. A large number of workers in the building were contractors, Deep Fried says, some of whom are losing their temporary jobs at Google. The closure also leaves a large area of Google's campus without breakfast service. Food is just one area where Google is slashing costs; under recently hired CFO Patrick Pichette, Google has been having a series of meetings about eliminating expenses, and Googlers have been implementing the cuts with the same slapdash speed with which it rolls out new websites. Google executives gave food-service operator Bon Appétit sharp budget cuts this year, which has only worsened the already troubled relationship between the companies. Google eliminated dinner at one café earlier this year. But the closure of Off The Grid was sudden, coming after a meeting between Bon Appétit executives and Derek Rupp, the café's executive chef, Deep Fried writes: