"... automating account bans past a certain earning threshold ... seems easy to implement, with a massive earning"

More earnings than not banning them and letting them continue to make money for Google?

On average, how often do you think accounts will be banned on the day before a payout, assuming no malintent on Google's part?

I think a lot of the skepticism here is drawn from the experience people have with companies that are culturally very different from companies like Google. Those companies are intensely management-driven, heavily siloed, and have very little internal inter-departmental communication that doesn't go through a layer of management. Difficult questions never get asked because management doesn't want to make waves or risk their fiefdoms. Documentation is hidden by access controls. Employees keep their heads down and do what they're told.

Bay Area tech companies such as Google are culturally very different from this. The silos largely don't exist, and management is not used as a way to funnel and control communication. Internal candid dialogs of surprising vigor can be found about any controversial issue. People are not afraid to ask pointed questions to high-ranking people. Policies and documentation are widely accessible.

It is, quite frankly, unthinkable that something this wrong and this blatant, involving thousands of people, would be allowed to happen for years in a culture such as this. And in a company like Google, "asking around" is indeed productive and would result in open and honest responses.

Culture isn't a great answer to throw around when people are asking hard questions about a program that is the financial backbone of a company. In fact its downright snooty to presume that allegations like this stem from folks who have experienced a different corporate culture. People generally get to know what a company's culture really is like from the folks who leave that company. And there are tons of those folks from Google. The point is, whether you appreciate Google's internal culture of candour or not or its lack of silos, that's just not the way to respond to allegations regarding the way Google makes serious profits.

Generally the hiring pipeline at Google does not involve a hiring manager until after the individual has been accepted. There are exceptions for special roles and people, but for the software engineer case, we require that someone be generally competent across the board. Once they're in, then their specialties and interests factor into what team/project they start on.

By generally competent across the board, you mean adept in a variety of disciplines, but only within the general discipline of Software Engineering. Of course, this covers a lot of ground, from networking to kernel development, to web frameworks, database system (RDBMS and NoSQL), and even old-school assembly...

Or no? Perhaps you look at the fundamentals of algorithms, such as types of sorting, binary data operations, that sort of thing...

Either way, many people will not be able to know enough across the board to make the cut, who in one or two particularly focused areas may be quite talented, and there may be people who, having spent all their waking hours in the deep study of bits and bytes, pass all such tests with flying colors and who, once in the company, poison the well of goodness because of their inability or unwillingness to adapt to rapidly changing surroundings, because of their inability to endure tenaciously under, shall we say, difficult managerial arrangements, and because of their inability to genuinely care about the welfare of their peers, Google customers and clients, and Google investors, both in word and deed?

Perhaps this is not what happens, but, from the outside, as far as I can see (and I remember the pre-google days of Lycos, HotBot and metacrawlers) Google the Company behaves as one would expect a talented yet socially awkward and uncouth twenty-something; brash yet caring, uneven in his affections, vacillating between opposites, such as standing up for freedom and privacy one year, then chucking freedom and privacy to the wind the next for a sizable windfall. This person can charm yet irritate, seem brilliant in one area but somewhat novice in another.

This is how I see Google, and I see very little, standing on the outside as I am, that leads me to believe that there sill be change for the better anytime soon.