To return to the implicit point that helicalmix appears to be making - timmg was not saying that "a lack of self-awareness makes this post invalid" (in fact, they specifically led with "This is a good article and it does a nice job of explaining some of the problems at Google") - it was acknowledging the quality of the article, and then using the form of the article as a jumping-off point to a related observation.

A conversation which remains laser-focused on one particular topic at the expense of all others is (sometimes!) helpful in narrow technical domains - but expanding to broader context is usually more interesting and more illuminating.

It’s funny that he cites the Waze blog, which similarly gives the impression of a blameless author

I am of the opposite sentiment. I think it would do wonders. It's very easy in a mega-corp to completely lose track of what the product is, who the customers are. And my intuition is that most VPs at mega-corps think about products in the abstract and focus more on politics & empire building/strategy than actually caring about the customers - and it definitely shows for companies like Google.

Just last week I tried to spawn a GPU instance on GCP, and despite being very familiar with the space (I work on cloud infra), after 20 minutes of fighting the overly complex UI and ridiculously broken flows, I still hadn't my instance up. In the next 3 minutes, I signed up for Lambda Labs, entered a CC, clicked a single button and ssh'ed into my VM.

That's what any start-up focuses on: the product. And that's why they always win over bloated mega-corps focused on internal processes and infighting, whose employees self-select for being complacent about mediocre products as long as the monopoly keeps printing fat paychecks.

Google’s products aren’t bad because the VP’s have lost the meaning of holding your customer dear. Maybe their senior managers are stuffed with former startup founders, all visionaries in their own minds, who collect big windfalls to join, play at empire building for a few years, then quit in a huff and blog about how it’s everyone else’s fault.

This assumption that every manager has complete agency over their own meeting schedule is equally flawed. I've never attended a meeting for fun, but I've attended countless meetings that were of absolutely zero value to me just because someone up the food chain from me decided I should be there.

> who get to use already stretched resources to herd untrained, resentful managers

I'd argue that managers being untrained in customer service and, especially, resentful of being forced to do it illustrates the author's point pretty well.

Large contracts are locked behind FedRAMP compliance, DoD ILx, and so on, and I happen to know that all large cloud providers listen very closely to customers in this space.

Your harsh criticism is valid under the assumption that GCP is an unsuccessful consumer product. I think it is only partially so and features are mostly driven by larger b2b and governments, where it is successful (in the sense that it delivers most features customers care about).

If you think talking to customers for an hour is pointless, then you are part of the problem...no matter who you work for.

Doesn't the culture, as described, exacerbate certain flaws in certain people while hiding flaws of a different kind in others?

At google it's easy to see how a flawed engineer might suffer from impatience, lack of tact, inability to read the room, poor social skills, not being attentive to details or to everyone's needs. It's easy to ascribe flaws to someone who makes mistakes and, instead of writing a lengthy postmortem and installing a process, goes ahead and fixes them while pleading for everyone to move on and keep shipping.

Yet at the same time, the sins of complacency, cowardice, inability to make decisions or take calculated risks, rigidity, and aversion to hard, uncomfortable work remain well-hidden. Sometimes, they are even elevated to praise! At Google, it's better to waste everyone's time or do nothing, than take a risk and ruffle some feathers (and I'm not even talking about taking externally visible risks here--a decision to build a certain piece of infra or shut down a project).

And the cycle repeats. A brilliant but "flawed" engineer realizes they can't work in that culture. They blow up and move on. Everyone says "eh, they make mistakes, can't read the room, and are difficult to work with. Poor culture fit". Well, for them, a bunch of complacent do-nothings is also extremely difficult to work with. But the do-nothings are in charge, and they are not. So they leave. Rinse and repeat.

In each case, it is easy for one to point out flaws in the other. And in some cases, "the other" is the only one that has flaws. But in most cases it is probably a combination.

Just because a company has culture issues doesn't mean that every employee is blameless or perfect. When someone doesn't work out for a job it is hard to disentangle how much of the blame belongs on each party.

In this case, I'm fairly familiar with a lot of the facts on the ground. As I said above the article makes a good critique of the real problems Google has. But it also blames some of those problems for mistakes/failures the author himself made (in my opinion).

Since you're more familiar with the facts of the case, I can contribute nothing more than to offer a different angle to look at this.

And I'll leave the author's self-improvement journey to the author.

Which in no way impacts how right or wrong his criticisms of Google are, and is unrelated to the topic he was speaking about.