Personal opinion, take with a grain of salt:

Once you hear the term 'organization' used within an organization (i.e. "project alpha is moving under person x's org") there is a decent chance that Trouble Is Afoot.

The trouble is that alignment is no longer guaranteed to be around the company's stated mission. There is a good chance that it is about territory building and poaching of internal staff and competing for important projects. And even if those aren't occurring, it's hard to prove to staff that they are not.

A strong leadership team can manage these frictions carefully and turn inter-team and inter-personality competition into results, while reinforcing and repeating the overall company mission. But to an employee on the ground it may no longer be a transparent case of "we're all pulling in the same direction".

One possibility to break through this scaling barrier might be to promote smaller organizations which assemble on-demand, akin to a film production team, and work on projects which the team is genuinely motivated to deliver. That requires a strong stated vision that a team can band behind.

The next question becomes: who maintains such projects if the initial team moves on? I'm biased but my preferred response would be that open sourcing each project can lead to sufficient community collaboration and maintenance in the case of successful projects, or in the worst case (if no adoption occurs) a corpus of code which may still provide gems of value for future projects searching for snippets of functionality.

> The next question becomes: who maintains such projects if the initial team moves on? I'm biased but my preferred response would be that open sourcing

This does not seem to be a realistic option for many Google projects, due to dependencies on internal technology and hardware scale.

>One possibility to break through this scaling barrier might be to promote smaller organizations which assemble on-demand, akin to a film production team, and work on projects which the team is genuinely motivated to deliver. That requires a strong stated vision that a team can band behind.

aka strong unions.

It's interesting. Many large companies routinely fire the bottom 10% of their employees every year. I wonder if they would perform better if they routinely fired the top 10% of their employees (by org chart, not by performance ratings) and let talented new blood bubble upward. The Peter Principle says that people rise to the level of their incompetence, and in general new employees enter at the bottom of the organization, so logically you would have more incompetent people at the top than at the bottom.

There're a bunch of organizational anti-patterns that could be avoided with this scheme, too. Empire building would be disincentivized because it'd always become someone else's empire after a short period of time, and organizational politics is reduced as the players keep leaving, and you'd have to think in terms of building institutional knowledge from the beginning of your tenure unless you want everything you've accomplished to be undone by the next guy.

The "fire the bottom 10%" thing is called stack ranking, and it has been studied over and over and it never leads to good results. At this point I don't think that many companies are still doing it- the biggest example, Microsoft, killed it off in 2013.

https://www.theverge.com/2013/11/12/5094864/microsoft-kills-...

Everyone is still doing it, they just aren't transparent about it now.

Source? I've literally never worked at a company that regularly fired the bottom X% of workers.

Large orgs regularly do this. E.g., most of the banking industry, esp. the non-wall st side, have had layoffs every few years for awhile now. It can be called all sorts of things, and it adds up.

When you think about it, it makes a sad sort of sense at scale. Hiring mistakes mean, at scale, a good number of jobs aren't fits for the people you hired, half the people out there are below average to beginwith, and a good number end up toxic (they slow down orgs!), and over time, these folks cost more money and suborgs decay. We've all inherited WTF+NIH projects and worked with people who drain energy. So even if an org doesn't do explicit layoffs or stack ranking, and hiring committees and employees have good intentions, a healthy org should be fixing hiring mistakes somehow: it can't all be retraining / reshuffling the deck. Arguably, the numbers mean most tech companies are _unhealthy_ orgs because the high demand for engineers makes the healthy level of rehiring tough to do.

The result is toxic devs get retained and the tail wags the dog from a business perspective. E.g., I bet some of the #MeToo issues in tech, deep down, relate to the difficulty of curating a top org at scale, with very few exceptions (Netflix?)

At Microsoft itself. If a manager has $100 budget for hikes and rewards, she has to invisibly stack rank to distribute it with some logic (and not give $10 to each in 10 people team)[0].

Stack ranking was not about firing at Microsoft (or any other place), it was about distribution of bonus and hikes.

[0]Spreading the peanut butter: https://www.compensationcafe.com/2014/03/spreading-the-peanu...

There are several notable companies still doing it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve#Companies_using...

Of course it’s not called that

It’s called a corporate restructuring. Or they’ll just fire a few people here and there until they get to 10%. They call it “we re heading in a new direction”

> I wonder if they would perform better if they routinely fired the top 10% of their employees (by org chart, not by performance ratings) and let talented new blood bubble upward.

IIRC, the US military follows something like that practice. It's called "up or out":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_or_out#Military:

> ...the 1980 Defense Officer Personnel Management Act mandates that officers passed over twice for promotion are required to be discharged from the military.

IIRC, the idea is to prevent people who lack greater potential from hogging the intermediate positions that others need to advance.

I think it's slightly different in that it would only apply to the top 10% of the org chart. A first-level manager passed over for promotion wouldn't be dismissed; only VP or C-level executives would, and they would be regardless of whether they were recently promoted. (In fact, because the positions are periodically vacated, they are guaranteed to have been recently promoted.)

It's much closer to term limits and the elected-office/civil-servant split in a democratic government. That has its own set of problems, but is generally fairly good at discouraging empire-building. It also differs in that civil servants generally can't transition to being elected officials (despite their qualifications, they face a lot of obstacles to winning elections), while here executives would generally be drawn from the ranks of ordinary management, keeping the ranks under them dynamic.

Why not apply this to first-level managers, too? I've seen more than one first-level manager who wanted to build an empire. I think all of the issues mentioned here about VPs also apply to managers.

Why would anyone move to management then? At Google a lot of L6 swes are put in the position of TL/M due to their ability to guide technically. This would probably vanish.

> A first-level manager passed over for promotion wouldn't be dismissed

This system will encourage first-level managers to do everything in their power to be "passed over" every single time. I can imagine the ridiculous shenanigans they'd pull, walking the fine line between not being too competent lest you get promoted, without being too incompetent that you get fired outright. Sounds like the making of a truly middling culture: questionably competent-ish, but not ambitious.

I think I'd watch a Office Space/Silicon-Valley-type show based on this premise. The overachiever character perennially delegated to bug triage, doing endless interviews for a perpetually open position on the team and being sabotaged when they manage to put some real work in after-hours (for comic relief. In real life, they'd get fired)

Why would you prefer to do this rather than not up-and-out. Your original reasoning seems well-met by up-and-out. Fresh blood comes in, Peter-principle people get kicked out. Looks pretty good.

I do like the idea, though.

Lol. These orgs are often defined by great games of empire building.

There’s no meaningful pay differential for senior staff, so ass-count is the measuring stick.

When you reach term limits, you don't get kicked out of the country. It would create a powerful disincentive for people to move up at all, unless they wanted to leave the company soon anyway.

> the US military follows something like that practice. It's called "up or out"

During my time as a DoD contractor, I saw this happen.

One particular case was a mid-range officer [I'm never good with ranks so don't bother asking] who was up for promotion; it was an open secret that if he didn't get it he'd retire into civilian [and presumably commercial//industry] life. He didn't get the promotion, retired from military, and was duly replaced.

It would have the same effect that culling the bottom 10% would have. You promote mediocrity. Think of it like this: employees game the system by avoiding the "fireable" qualities and rush to the "hireable" qualities.

So everyone in the org wants to appear like a young firebrand and hide in the school of fish. As outliers are singled out, those who blend in well and play politically with their managers have the highest survival rate despite not being the most productive, as they devote most of their energy to not standing out.

In any persistent environment when you add pressure, you develop a counter-reaction. You can't change human behavior with simple levers, but you can bring out very human behavior by doing so.

Good managers are extremely valuable, and new blood is not necessarily talented.

Maybe a solution could be to make time-limited leadership positions. After you finish your time, you get another different position but you stay in the company, with the same or higher pay, so that it doesn't feel like a demotion. Permanent leadership positions will be given to those who did their best during their temporary stay. As a bonus, because these managers tried out different jobs, they will have a broader understanding of what people under them do.

The most powerful (director level & above) members of an organization would never agree to a plan to fire the top 10% of their own annually.

You'd have to encode it in the bylaws at the time of incorporation, and then enforce it upon pain of dissolution of the company (so that if a rogue CEO decides they want to stay after all, the rest of the world is like "But now there is no company. Have fun with your paper throne.")

It's a lot like how no ruler will ever abdicate and still remain ruler, so for millenia there was no way to remove a king short of death or coup. We got around that with the invention of the constitution and the definition of a nation-state in terms of that piece of paper, which states that the ruler is defined to have set terms and be subject to an election every so often, and if they don't you get undefined behavior.

They aren't as powerful as you think- it's not like they get a huge say in how things are run. If the board was a reorg they have the power to put the people in place to make it happen, regardless of what some random Director or VP has to say about it.

> They aren't as powerful as you think

It's pretty common for C-level executives, and CEO's in particular, to be pretty chummy with the board of directors. They're all in the same social circles.

Often the CEO of company A will be on the board of company B, and and the CEO of company B is on the board of company A, so there may even be a quid-pro-quo element.

While the CEO officially answers to the BoD, in reality there's a lot of "understandings" and "gentleman's agreements" going on. This is why under-performing CEOs seem to stick around so long.

Yeah, but that's a world of difference from "director level and above", particularly at a company like Google where there are literally hundreds of VPs and Directors (if not a couple thousand).

You’re just replacing one power structure with another, less obvious one that will be worse given the stakes involved.

Empire building is already dead in many ways, ping-ponging executives aren’t building empires, they are positioning for their personal benefit.

I saw the link here on HN first. Seek out the Gervais Principle. It is a more interesting view of a person’s place in a company. I have seen the Peter principle in action and have myself benefited/detrimented from it. But the Gervais principle is a whole ‘nother level.

Edit to add:

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/14/the-gervais-principle-...

Cool idea. It would take some courage to implement this, though. A lot. :)

> Google could solve a lot of problems by essentially firing every VP they have.

What's shocking was there was a time at google where management was forced to prove their existence was necessary.

https://rework.withgoogle.com/subjects/managers/

One of the problems of course is giving managers feedback. It's hard. It's ugly sometimes. It's always fraught with risk, since you are the one without typically any power in the situation.

But the true canary in the coal mine is when the good employees feel like their feedback isn't heeded, and then they leave. And they can because well, they're good. And HR, having gone through all the trouble of hiring the best and the brightest, are just walking them out the door.

If HR stands up for the employees, then that's a different story than HR being lap dogs for the powerful. Currently turnover numbers probably just sits on page 248 in a footnote of the quarterly HR report and lands on some executive's desk who may or may not care about it.

As an aside, I once told an HR director that the problem with HR is the name: Human Resources -- as in "Humans are Resources". She told me the inside joke at her company was that HR stood for "Happiness Removal".

I'm sorry, what's wrong with the notion that 'Humans are resources"?

“We need to stop confusing human value with economic value. We don't exist to serve the market. The market exists to serve us.”

The market exists to serve us? Cool. But who is providing this service?

In the US, it's the government that created the free market, and did it for the people. The US government is "of the people, by the people, for the people."

...Or at least it used to be. Now maybe in 2020 now, "people" can be replaced with "corporations".

Wow, Andrew Yang tweeted that just yesterday. Prescient. I like him more and more.

It is upsetting to some because some people assume a resource can't have feelings. Like saying "women are objects." Obviously this isn't what is meant with Human Resources but in today's world people want to argue over naming conventions as if their perspective of a name or even a definition is the only right one because it fits their goal. Make no mistake if you called Human Resources instead Team Builders someone would eventually a few years down the road get mad because you can only build buildings with objects and so the name doesn't do justice to the feelings of people again.

It's simpler than that. Things and people inherit the properties of what they're called. That's why slurs are so powerful. e.g. n-word, c-word.

I don't believe I've ever seen a post on HN about how wonderful a Human Resources department has ever been, or ever treated anyone fairly. Feel free to prove me wrong here.

If you can dehumanize humans, then you can treat them like objects. It's easier to do firings or layoffs, or cut back on pay raises and benefits.

The problem is not that human are resources. They are.

But from a production point of view, the problem is when you think that a human is equivalent to another with the same title and they are easily interchangeable.

> Google could solve a lot of problems by essentially firing every VP they have.

I know you weren't being 100% serious, but I'll say this anyway: of course they can't fire those people. They'd be buried in lawsuits.

More to the point, this is the problem with bad hiring practices. A few years (or, in this case, 10+ years) of misguided hiring practices can bury you in a cultural problem that will take much longer to dig yourself out of.

It's even worse when you're talking about top execs, who can only be fired by a risk-averse/change-averse Board of Directors and will take a massive golden parachute with them when they are fired.

In America anyway employment is largely “at will.” Is there something illegal about firing VPs?

Still better to fire them than atrophy the company slowly. Just fire your VP of legal affairs last.

I don't see any evidence that the company is atrophying based on its own measures of success: stock price and market share.

That's part of the cultural problem. You can't know if your culture helps or hurts because there's no control group.

Since Google is doing well financially, they'll have to conclude that their culture is good (or good enough) and stay the course. Firing VPs is rocking the boat, and any Board would be infuriated by it.

Google is doing good now, but they’re literally hewing down their support columns at the moment.

"The sailors saved the boys, but who will save the sailors?"

I'm pretty sure the title of VP(E) is like the Ice King's crown in Adventure Time. It makes you a bumbling autocrat driven to secure your own position. Re-orgs, re-writes, etc are great instruments for this end.

It's possible. I also wonder if often times the type of behavior necessary to attain the title in the first place, filters out the people who are not willing to engage in the behaviors you describe.

I am not currently an employee at Google but just looking at the products I have noticed for at least 3 years that something at Google has been changing... and not in the right direction. When I talked to some friends in product management that worked and used to worked there, I was told Google is stronger and mature than before.

The last example top of mind is when I saw the Pixel 3a coming out with 2 months old security patch and they tell you that it going to be updated the next month (with 3 months security update gap).

The old Google would never have compromised on security to edge instability risks during the launch of the Pixel 3a. But some people wanted to play it more "safe" for themselves than for the users.

It seems Google is quickly becoming just another big corporation where people go to make money wanting to work as little as possible and keeping their job as safe as possible avoiding risks.

I am not saying it is like that in every part of the company, but in enough places that it start showing...

No wonder the founders stepped down. Who may want to see their baby and an unique culture like Google slowly deteriorating without having anymore enough power to change it.

Can you give more example like this when you get time? Can we such things in Google Cloud as well?

I did not use Google Cloud so I cannot tell. I would not be surprised if Google Cloud is well run. Since the product is intrinsically a product for engineers, I would expect that it is run by people with more engineering background and rigor.

If you want anther example, one that come to mind is Google WiFi. When I installed it for a family member, I noticed that (1) You needed to install an app on your phone in order to configure it (2) The Google account on your phone (and you needed one) was going to be the one that "manage" the Google WIFI network (3) The phone needed to have a working internet connection to be able to configure it (4) Google WIFI lacked some standard options (5) Once the Internet connection is down Google WiFI also shuts down the local intranet.

That made me think that whoever was running Google WIFI as a product probably did not know a lot about the last 20 years of how a router has been working and has been configured.

So they ended up making a few assumptions that are problematic. For example: - My phone did not have reception where my family member lived. And since I did not have a working Internet connection I could not download the app and use it at their house. - The family member did not have a Google account, so I had to use mine or create a new one just for configuring the router. - I could not configure something (not remember exactly what) that any other router could. - When the Internet is down, and it regularly happen in that area, you cannot print.

For at least 10 years, the standard home routers have been having a web UI where you can configure them. This is a pretty basic thing. How could have Google WIFI ignoring it?

People with limited tech background that never configured a router must have been in charge.

> There's an old Dilbert strip basically saying that managers reach a point of constant reorgs and responsibilities churn to the point that no one is around long enough to be held accountable for their actions

I believe it.

During my time at Google as a TVC [recent times], whatever department du jour I was in was having a reorg about once a year. I//we had about 4 different managers in 3 years.

The proliferation of VPs started under Eric. At one point I counted twice as many VPs per capita as what we had at Microsoft. There were VPs reporting to VPs and directors reporting to directors, as well as VPs and directors with zero reports. It's nuts. I suspect it's gotten much worse since then.

Also, as the chairman of the board, there's no way Schmidt did not know the "DOD ML thing". For the record, I think the "DOD ML thing" is an appropriate "thing" for a US company to be doing, including Google. In fact I think GCP should accept (and seek out) all workloads legal under US law, same as AWS and Azure.

Disclosure: same.

Sounds like the type of creep that naturally occurs after a company has existed for a long time. They offer higher level titles so they can recruit people with experience who want a move upwards when really all that changes is their title. Look at banks where President and Vice President are so over used that basically every relationship manager is called a "VP" even though they have no reports.

fun fact, I believe that the (V)P roles exist mostly as a satisfying hack of financial software development regulations applied to public and high-revenue companies, where all software changes impacting the ingress and egress of money requires "director-level approval".

The least-burdensome solution to that regulation is to make every "Tech Lead" a director, hence the title creep! :)

Devil's advocate. What if everything Google has done and is doing is actually good for what a company is actually generally meant to do... generate revenue. The company has been growing and as it is now publicly traded, stockholder value very much becomes the drum beat.

Of course one can argue that Google is no longer the altruistic, everyone has value place it used to be, but perhaps it no longer wants to be. This is not necessarily a failure, just a re-prioritization of goals. For every story of someone leaving Google and blaming X, there are a thousand people eager to fill that now vacant role.

The stock is doing very well and the company is the undisputed king of search and actively targeting other industries. It appears what they are doing org. wise may be accomplishing exactly what it is meant to do.

Companies are meant to generate profit, not revenue.

Google generates a lot of both. It could probably double profits or more by just slashing a lot of the fat. Do they really need 100,000+ people? I feel like they used to launch amazing new products with far greater regularity when they were closer to 10,000.

BTW you say "as it is now publicly traded" as if that's some recent change. Google's IPO was 2004!

To generate revenue should be the default assumption about what companies do. And what their employees do. And what the employees believe about their purpose.

Is all the internal company discussion about people valuing and improving the culture? Or are they are just whiny self-important shits?

I literally have no idea.

(fwiw I am not and probably never will be a G employee)

I always wondered why Google needs hundreds of VP's? Is i just a scheme with them giving each other great peer feedback and promoting more to extract huge salaries from the company?

"VP" has become, not just for Google, a title you get instead of a raise. You know, to make you feel you are getting somewhere with your career without breaking the budget.

Haven't worked for Google but I worked for couple large banks (Credit Suisse, currently Citi) and VP is currently synonym for line manager. You can be Associate VP without having anybody report to you, just a senior contributor.

Banks and Wall Street are pretty liberal with "VP" titles. There they give you that title so the person you meet (to make a deal) thinks you are serious and sent a VP to sell.

Tech companies, not as much.

Can confirm. Source: American Psycho

"Let's see Paul Allen's card.

Look at that subtle off-white coloring.

The tasteful thickness of it.

Oh, my God. It even has a watermark."

It’s not the same at Google. Yes, someone 2 years post-MBA with 5 direct reports can be a VP in banking.

At google VPs have hundreds of people reporting to them.

At Google VP is equivalent to CXO roles, so it is not that kind of "fake" VP.

Are you thinking of SVP?

Even if you just take SVP don't they have like a hundred of them? I feel it would go a lot better if they put more wood behind fewer arrows (VP+ people). Then maybe a few projects would stick.

SVP is a big deal in Google actually.

Yes that is the problem, having like a hundred people who are a big deal means that the company has no direction.

The company is tens of thousands of people. At some point theres a limit to how flat one can be.

The current system is too flat, it is not like Sundar can control that many SVP's alone. Instead you have SVP's managing SVP's etc. Who is there to put the foot down ? I'd be fine with it if there was a level above that who kept them in check.

And lo the Executive SVP position shall be created!

This might be true, but also anybody who is a VP is making $1M+ a year. They're certainly in good hands.

How many VPs company with 100+k headcount should have?

Funny that you mention that but the comment you're replying to prompted me to do some back of the envelope calculations.

Things to note:

- About half Google's staff were technical

- There are ~80k employees?

- So assume 40k engineers

- Most engineers are ICs

- ICs are given levels from T3 (college grad) to T9 (can walk on water) with there being like a handful of Google Fellows beyond that (your Jeff Deans).

- Managers are M1s through M3s with M1s being baby managers. Most are M2s (equivalent to T6) who are managers of ICs and M3s (T7s) who are managers of managers (and higher level ICs).

- Higher level ICs (T7+) may well directly report to M2s or even directors or VPs but there's so few of those (~1%?) that they don't really change the math.

- In terms of rolled up head count you're looking at 5-20 for an M1/M2, 20-50 for an M3, 50-200 for a director, 150-1000+ for a VP.

- Directors have levels, D1 (T8) and D2 (T9). Sometimes you end up with 2 or even 3 directors within a management chain.

- The archetypal management chain is: CEO -> SVP -> VP -> Director -> M3 -> M1/M2 -> IC

So my opinion is the structure should ideally look something like this:

- M1/M2 average 10 ICs

- M3s average 5 M1/M2s

- Directors average 5 M3s

- VPs average 4 directors

with the following constraints:

- There is only 1 VP in a chain

- There is only 1 SVP in a chain

- There is only 1 director in a chain

- There are at most 2 managers in a chain

So 40K ICs need:

- 4K M1/M2s

- 800 M3s

- 160 directors

- 40 VPs

Now this "ideal" scenario obviously ignores some realities like a management structure built around products and infrastructure may not fit these numbers so neatly but then again some M1s could have 12 ICs while others have 8 and it all sort of works out.

I don't know what Google's numbers are here but I suspect it is MUCH MUCH higher than this.

Great job at deriving a Fermi estimate! (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem)

I don't know if your math is right but I enjoyed reading your comment.

It seems to me that as a back of the envelope estimation might be:

Suppose we say that an organization has n employees and that everyone in a position of leadership leads m people. The result would be a m-ary tree whose height is roughly:

h = log_m ((m - 1) * n))

If we say that there are l levels of seniority before one becomes a VP, then anyone not in the bottom l levels of the tree is a VP.

h_vp = # of levels of VPs = h - l

The number of VPs would then equal the number of nodes in a complete m-ary tree of height h_vp:

n = (m^h_vp) / (m - 1)

(Forgive me if I made any mistakes in my math, it's been a long time since I took algebra.)

How many employees should a search and recommendation engine have?

Theoretically you manage about 10 people effectively, so:

CEO: 1

CXO: 10

SVP: 100

VP: 1000

Director: 10000

Employees: 88889

Most companies have line managers. Line managers are not directors, they are managers. There are also senior managers. I think your schedule is good but I think you should add at least 1 layer maybe two.

Yeah, I just ran out of employees to cover and I worked backwards, so I didn’t get to use the term manager. I guess the system is good until the 1.000.000 mark ;)

I think line manager is a generic term for the person you explicitly report to though (e.g. the one who approves your time off), not a role in specific.

You can have higher ratios at the CXO and SVP level, and need lower ratios below director because at the higher level most people dont need as much day to day oversight.

From my experience at the bottom, it’s the higher level people that need more oversight.

5k people per VP seems reasonable, so 20? Then they can have 10 senior directors each with 500 persons under them.

two pizza team = 8 ICs max reporting

every 8 ICs + 1 manager = 9

every 8 managers = 1 director = 8 * 9 + 1 = 73

every 8 directors = 1 sr director = 8 * 73 + 1= 585

every 8 sr directors = 1 VP = 8 * 585 + 1 = 4681

every 8 VPs = 1 SVP = 8 * 4681 + 1 = 37449

every 8 SVPs = 1 EVP (c level exec) = 8 * 37449 + 1 = 299593

Clearly the problem is one of the large distribution of team sizes, rather than just "have less VPs".

Certainly an anomaly, but there's a distribution to the number of ICs assigned to the lowest level managers (M1/M2s). I've seen anywhere from 3 to 30. The people with 30 basically just jumped from 1:1 to 1:1 on repeat biweekly.

It's interesting how closely these estimates correspond to military TOEs. It's almost like we've figured out over the course of thousands of years what the most effective general-purpose hierarchical organization is.

Problem is that there aren't enough people to every VP, so they fight for headcount and projects leading to frequent reorgs or projects shuttering to make room for VP's pet projects.

Sounds like what typically happens to companies that get too big. It's just a question of sooner or later, IMO. Google has become part of the megacorp establishment and finds itself besides IBM, Microsoft and Apple. It's dead, Jim.

Sounds like BS I dealt with in defense. Lot of emails of people way up the chain moving around. Then in the off chance I see them in the halls and say hello they say nothing and look past. Also alot of large meetings where half the time is spent looking at org charts and praising some senior jackass for some minor accomplishment.

I might have misunderstood your point but I don't follow why this is a thing you would want to remedy at the business level. Has modern Google been shown to be less effective as a business than past-Google due to ideas like the DoD contract? Companies exist to service an identified demand and there doesn't seem to be a reason technology companies would be different in this respect. If people don't want companies chasing the demand for services like Dragonfly then they should vocalize those concerns as clear demands at the political level so that additional regulations can be implemented. Unless the strategy itself was unsound, which I realize might have been your broader point, it seems weird to consider these sorts of changes as a negative thing for the business.

I feel like lately Google has become more and more mission driven (organize the worlds information and make it universally accessible and useful). This is because, this doesn't require taking any risks, it is straight-forward/easy to follow and very cost efficient (a change that occurred with Ruth).

Before under Larry and Sergey there was an openness to ignore mission and take bets on interesting projects and to try things.

No one on the executive team has a product vision of how Google should evolve so it remains stuck working on old projects and fulfilling the remnants of it's old mission.

Every single time I've fallen in love with a new Google product, they have sunsetted it. It's probably not a fair comparison, but it's the reason you couldn't get me to touch Flutter with a 12 foot pole today.

I don’t know why you got downvoted. This is a very valid concern regarding any new tech, especially one that wraps every underlying platform under its own api and programming language.