It's pretty easy to imagine that when Gosling was employed by Sun, he enjoyed significant power to shape his own job. Under Oracle, he clearly did not have the power to make his own job into what he wanted.
It's not much of a stretch to believe that lower-tier technical staff didn't have that power to begin with, and hence did not feel the same sting of new management.
Yes, that's probably very true, in part this is Gosling being a similar sized fish in a much larger pond.
But if I compare that to google where there are lots of 'names' from just about every era of computing working and being reasonably happy I can't help but notice the contrast.
That changes the atmosphere of the place and that definitely does filter down to lower levels.
