[ashark]

I have an entirely unsupported hypothesis that much of Google's software/documentation inconsistent quality and seemingly strange product strategy can be explained by their preference for hiring "A" players or better, but only having enough truly interesting work for the smaller number of "A+" players they've got, so that at some point "A" folks get assigned something really boring but necessary and before long they're applying other places with Google on their work history so they can take on much more interesting work at some (possibly smaller) place that gives the boring stuff to "B" or "C" developers--or else they manage to get on or agitate to create some greenfield project, and that keeps them busy at least until the boring stuff on that project begins to overwhelm the interesting work. Result is there's too much churn among any personnel assigned to boring stuff for them to be very good at that kind of thing, as a company.

[flukus]

My theory is that google isn't filtering out the "less than A's" anywhere near as much as they think they are.