I don't think that's a fair characterization. Newer engineers have no idea what to do, by virtue of having no job experience. While spending 4 years getting a degree, things like design patterns are drilled into their heads, and they think people ahead of them in their career won't respect them unless they make things as complicated as possible. As a result, things end up too complicated and too abstract, to the point of unusability. What you really want is someone that is the Matt's Script Archive of the modern day, modulo the shit that actually matters: maintainability, reliability, security, etc. Google hires a lot of people early in their career and the result is stuff that's TOO abstract. Eventually people progress and make simple and elegant solutions to very difficult problems. I can assure that every engineer at Google knows design patterns and how to abstract stuff. But the best among them know when not to.

I've always been impressed by the software quality at Google. My biggest complaint is... I'm kind of a test fanatic. In my mind, 100% code coverage is a great starting point for software that might run OK in production and delight customers. But at Google, people are so smart that they can keep a million line system completely bug free just out of sheer willpower. Every CL they write or review, they know exactly what it will break, and just tell the author to not break that. The end result is that there are 0 tests for the most critical software around and it all works out somehow! Ever visit google.com only to see "google.com is not responding"? Nope! You don't need tests when you're a super genius.

Overall, I think Google builds really good software internally. Everything I used while I was there, I long for in the "real world". Github's code review system just makes me cry every time I use it, even 6 years after I left Google. Critique was so much better! It looked nicer, the UI told you who actually needed to approve the CL, there was a dashboard that told you what work you actually needed to do, etc. Great software. Monarch is another favorite of mine. It is light years ahead of anything you can get in the open source world. When I left Google I begrudgingly selected Prometheus and Grafana as my "hey is production down?" system of choice? And every day they make me sad because they're so fucking primitive compared to what I could use at Google. I remember a long discussion thread between me and an InfluxDB founder on HN about whether or not it's possible to write certain queries. The query in question was a query that I had on a public dashboard at Google, that ran in milliseconds over a stream of 1 million plus cardinality. "There's no way a computer can do that efficiently," he told me. I don't know, I've had a computer do it efficiently before with the literal first query I typed in. And that's the market leader in time series data, probably two decades behind some unloved internal tool at Google. Their software is top fucking notch. They just have no idea that it's even something that can be sold. (The people at Google selling software rewrite or acquire sub-par alternatives. At least there's Cloud Spanner. That's a good database!)

I think I'm inclined to agree you about management at the highest level. Like I said before, Google has no idea they can sell their internal tools and make more money than most startups rewriting the tool from scratch could ever dream of making. They choose to go on multi-year tangents that yield nothing. Google Buzz? Google+? You got slapped on the wrist by the FTC for that shit, it didn't sell a single ad, and then the market leader you were trying to kill died anyway because everyone got bored with social media. Dumb. Let's talk about GSuite. As a card-carrying Google fanboi, I never believe that anyone else could make good webmail or a calendar. The startup I work at got acquired recently and we had to switch from Gsuite or actually is it Google Workspace For Your Domain or something now, anyway we had to switch to Outlook. Outlook on the web is great! The web design is beautiful, it's super fast, and it has a million more features than Google's stuff. Thinking back, I'm not sure anyone has typed a single line of code into any of those products in over a decade. They're just a dinosaur waiting to die! (Microsoft has it's own problems, though. They write a bunch of great code, and then ... just specify dumb shit. Like at work, my name is "Rockway, Jonathan". Who the fuck calls anyone by their last name? It's dehumanizing. It makes me not want to go to work. But that's how some intern coded up Active Directory Nineteen Ninety Four edition, and so it persists to this day).

I don't know where I was going with this comment, but yeah, the tech behemoths of yesteryear area dead. Remember "FAANG"? Facebook, completely dead, fired all their employees. Amazon? I guess they still exist to take CFOs out for golf in exchange for paying $1,000,000 for a $2000 server and $20 of electricity, and send me the best fire hazards from the Shenzhen market overnight. Apple? Honestly they're doing OK for a big company. Sure, they're working on VR goggles instead of a Clock app that works, but you know... marketing. Netflix? Dead. Google? Top Three In Cloud. Amazing. You know what they say, if you can't be second best, at least you can be third best.

This post was long and incoherent and I am now quite inebriated. I hope it was moderately enjoyable to read. I'm not a crazy person, I promise. It makes me sad to see what the MBAs and CFOs did to Google. Great company, and I'll never stop loving it.