[repolfx]

The problem is not the promotion criteria. That's fine. After all, promoting people for successfully completing projects is hardly a stupid or irrational way to reward people. The alternatives are all worse.

The problem is there are too many Googlers, so they keep inventing busywork projects that don't need to exist (like reinventing messaging over and over) because otherwise there's nothing for them to do. The ideas:people ratio is completely out of whack.

Why are there too many Googlers? Because Google would rather spend money on hiring than returning excess profit to investors.

Why would they do that? Because their stock voting structure prevents investors from forcing their hand, and because of an essentially delusional culture/belief amongst senior management that they hire the world's smartest people, that they will never run out of ideas, that there's always more to do etc etc. Management can't accept that Google might have tapped out, ideas-wise, and maybe its natural size is smaller than today not bigger. It takes quite some humility to say "we're spinning our wheels, the profit we generate could be better deployed elsewhere" and they can't do it.

Watching this process play out gave me a new appreciation for why shares have voting rights.