Several months ago, yea - I am going way back in my archives, Gary Illyes of Google joked on Twitter that his clearance and controls within Google is a bit superior to those of the Google manual action evaluators.
He said "I have way better things in my toolbelt than the evaluators."
@pedrodias I have way better things in my toolbelt than the evaluators ;) @rustybrick
— Gary Illyes ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ (@methode) August 4, 2016
The context here is I joked that Gary should "press the big red button" to penalize a site or group of sites and Pedro Dias said "he can't. He's not cleared for that." Pedro is a former Googler. In which, Gary responded with that line.
Truth is, I personally would love to know what access Gary has versus John versus other Googlers on different teams.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
This post was scheduled to go live today but was written earlier - I am currently offline today.
Source: Search Engine Roundtable