James Whittaker was not a "low level employee," he was a director of engineering. This is the same level as Kurzweil. At that level he was responsible for many management decisions, some of them probably "stupid."
A company the size of Google has 100's of "Director"s. There are probably 3 or 4 layers between a director and the CEO... if not more. I doubt he had much to do with the actual market direction of the company (ironically... since the word "Director" would lead you to believe that it had something to do with directing).
Fair enough. I may have read that incorrectly by focusing on him saying "shipping code", but he's still not the part of management at the very top making company wide decisions that have the power to crush large swaths of innovation (i.e. everything has to fit into google+) and that is more what I was referring to.
