This article speaks to me.

> But very few Googlers come into work thinking they serve a customer or user. They usually serve some process (“I’m responsible for reviewing privacy design”) or some technology (“I keep the CI/CD system working”). They serve their manager or their VP. They serve other employees. They will even serve some general Google technical or religious beliefs (“I am a code readability expert”, “I maintain the SWE ladder description document”)

From my short time there, this is absolutely spot-on and was a driving factor behind Google being the only place I've worked where I legitimately hated my job.

> You don’t wake up everyday thinking about how you should be doing better and how your customers deserve better and how you could be working better. Instead, you believe that things you are doing already are so perfect that they are the only way to do it. Propaganda becomes important internally and externally. When new people join your company, you indoctrinate them. You insist on doing things because “that’s the way we do it at Google”. Never mind if most people quietly complain about the overall inefficiency and incompetence

When I got into Google, our team was using a unified and centralized logging system for everything. This system made sense, though it took a bit of time to grok.

By the time I groked it a few months in, I learned that this logging system was getting deprecated and that we shouldn't use it.

The alternative? It wasn't in production yet.

Deprecating something in favor of something else that hasn't even shipped was CRAZY to me. So much value wasted.

At the time, I felt like there were examples of this EVERYWHERE. Despite having the world's largest monorepo, there was SO. MUCH. DUPLICITY. Bike-shedding to bike shed the bike shed in hopes of chasing that promo to P4 or whatever (which, let's be real, everyone's chasing for the RSU grants).

> At the junior levels, Google has a challenging interview process and the general caliber of hires is good. Most of this raw talent is wasted and their skills gradually atrophy (but enjoy some free massages to help get over that!).

The Leetcode interview they foist onto candidates is completely unnecessary and is, I believe, a major driver behind the rot that they are experiencing.

When you over-index on hiring devs who can solve LC hards, you get devs who are very good...at solving LC hards.

They'll build hella interesting data structures and algorithms that have been built, like, seven times before. But building boring "soft" stuff to help drive adoption, like documentation or bugfixes? Not impactful enough. (Documentation was not weighted heavily in promo decisions when I was there, and it showed.)

I am particularly salty about this because I was down-leveled due to a single question I didn't answer well (despite nailing everything else) on a topic that I never EVER used during my time there. The guy that asked it was a nice guy, but it was definitely trivia.

> Google Cloud in particular has grown rapidly by hiring mid-level and senior talent from every enterprise company around. In most cases, the skills needed to become a director at not-so-elite enterprise company X are not aligned with the skills needed to become an effective director at Google.

If I had to guess, these might be strategic hires to build deeper roots into their prospective/current customers to help proliferate GCP. I think AWS and Azure use the same strategy.

> And finally, for all the employees, don’t spend your time on memegen. It is a wallow chamber and all that internal finger pointing doesn’t help anything.

I wasted so much time on Memegen. I agree with Praveen. It's a huge time sink and (at the time) was about as FUD-laden as /r/popular.