IT culture in general and Google especially puts too much pressure on engineers to re-invent the wheel to get better visibility and promotions.

(Plenty do out of love for the product/customers/etc, but man it's soul crushing to not be recognized for it)

My understanding is that not everybody there knows where the corporate ladders are. If you don't (yet) know the terms of promotion at the GOOG, you'll be happy to knock out bugs and tweaks day in and day out. You're a Googler!

For example everyone says value "work life balance is balanced here and encouraged". But irrespective of whether they actually do it or not - if the two people output around the same ballpark but one is visible as more serious/responsible and seems more invested usually by virtue of more hours at work that becomes more "visible" than the "casual" 7-8 hr person with the same output.

My social group was dominated by BBM & Skype until iMessage & Facebook Messenger took over. I've always assumed Google's efforts around messaging were because they had a niche product inside Gmail that they wanted to make more consumer friendly, hence the constant attempts to rebrand it.

The reason I jumped out of Google ecosystem is, as you have mentioned, they forced me into closed ecosystems and I remained there for sometime but then the tools offered to me in the form of app, UI, and interfaces were beyond pathetic so I was out. So were my friends, family, relatives, and other acquaintances.

Orkut > Buzz > Wave > Chat > etc they did it one after another and they are still doing it. I mean you would think they would learn at some point.

I live in one of the wealthiest and advanced countries in the world. Ask a 12 year old girl what SMS is and she will not know. She will know WhatsApp.