Comment by potatolicious

I agree with you somewhat, having spent ~4 years at Google... though I think "perf-driven development" is IMO a symptom and exacerbating factor, but not a root cause.

Advancement and fulfilling of personal ambitions is a common thing in basically every sufficiently large company. Google isn't unique in having that problem - nor is their promotion process markedly different than everyone else's!

What is different is that Google is extremely metrics and OKR driven, combined with a near-total absence of product leadership. There is often no broader product strategy besides "grow X by Y".

This results in a critical weakness where you can get promoted for shipping Obviously Dumb Shit, because it hits some ill-defined OKR. It's practically an annual tradition within Google's management: creatively interpret pointless and vague OKRs so that you can make a (contorted) argument that Projects X and Y contribute to it, so you can ship it and get everyone involved their promos.

People in other companies are ambitious and want to get promoted too! The difference is that in many other companies there are other sanity checks in place that you don't get promo'ed for shipping Obviously Dumb Shit.

Google's root problem IMO is that there is an extreme lack of product leadership and product vision at the very top levels of the company. This results in a near-total inability to mitigate meta-hacks of internal promotion systems.

At companies with more product strategy at some point someone at a high level goes "Projects X makes no damned sense!" and puts the kibosh on it. At Google Project X will ship, and then after its badness becomes inescapable, get shut down.