Oh I "understood" it, California is a "Right to Work" state and signing the agreement was clearly a requirement of working and by not signing the unchanged agreement, it was a voluntary action of elimination etc etc. So Google was well within their rights to rescind their job offer as they did.
That said, it was at a time where Google was complaining bitterly about how hard it was to hire engineers, and their much vaunted hiring process would only offer 1 in 10,000 applicants.
That they would have a candidate who had made it through the gauntlet, and some manager was waiting for them to show up, be turned away at the last minute based on an explicit clarification of a clause that Google, through the HR rep at the intake session, had already said was consistent with the intent of the agreement? That surprised me.
If the HR rep was speaking truthfully, then I would have expected to Google legal to just adopt the updated text in this agreement and all future agreements. It literally got tweaked at least once a year so the problem of "multiple agreements" wasn't really a problem.
So my amazement was first the cognitive dissonance between what they said and what they did, then the realization that what was written was what they meant, and thus what HR had said was a misrepresentation of the intent.
I don't know how many people have lawyers review these things, I do, but I may be unusual in that regard. My lawyer said that there were a number of things in the agreement that were unenforceable, and a few that were likely unlawful, but when they came up I would probably already be on my way out so it wasn't particularly harmful to sign. And some advice on how to avoid getting on the wrong side of the agreement and thus giving them a reason to separate me "for cause." (legal or not).
And now we have this story where the NLRB which suggests that Google is not above doing illegal things to protect their interests.