[anaccountexists]

This seems more oriented towards tech interviews, which are rightly critiqued. I do think that it would be wrong to equate product decisions with “bad engineering,” though. There’s a lot of Google engineering in particular that made waves in distributed systems and AI. Many NewSQL DBs are all based on the Spanner white paper, and BigTable was one of the bigger NoSQL DBs that people looked at as inspiration. Even things like protocol buffers have seen more usage lately as a way of sending typed messages between systems more easily.

Now, none of that means that Google can actually build and market a chat app correctly, but I’d say these are all “top engineering talent” foundational infra that only are needed at companies that operate at that scale.