Google is the new IBM. There are certainly amazing things being done but 90% of the employees are just doing boring CRUD and have never done anything special.

Best engineering? Ever tried hiring some of those ex Google contractors?

There is plenty of good engineers in Google and plenty of terrible engineers.

So their vaunted gruesome job interview process is no more effective than any other company's boring old normal one.

Someday I hope to read an article or watch a talk explaining Googles approach to UX.

The best UX in a Google apps seems to be Gmail, and that’s honestly not that good either.

Google is able to build insanely complicated infrastructure, design cool languages, they produced fantastic backend software and the they completely forget that people need to interact with it.

The best UX is in products they killed, like Inbox or Play Music.

Gmail at some point had a good UX. Nowadays I've switched back to a local mail client because their webmail is weirdly sluggish for no reason.