She'd only been there for 2 years. Sabbaticals in most institutions are for people with 5+ year tenures.
In a fast-growing company like Google that's still hiring, having a good performance record and keeping in touch with coworkers is practically as good as having a sabbatical, anyway. If she were to reapply to Google and her resume said "Google: 2008-2010" and her old performance reviews were good and she had good code leftover in the version history, do you think Google would turn her down? I know of a bunch of people that left Google for startups or FaceBook or other companies and then returned, and it's basically as if they never left (except that for legal reasons, Google can't preserve their old option grant and has to start fresh with stock compensation).
In a fast-growing company like Google that's still hiring, having a good performance record and keeping in touch with coworkers is practically as good as having a sabbatical, anyway. If she were to reapply to Google and her resume said "Google: 2008-2010" and her old performance reviews were good and she had good code leftover in the version history, do you think Google would turn her down? I know of a bunch of people that left Google for startups or FaceBook or other companies and then returned, and it's basically as if they never left (except that for legal reasons, Google can't preserve their old option grant and has to start fresh with stock compensation).