[Husafan]

I don't see how any of this is specific to Google. Everything you've said here is how companies function. If you want to work on things that are not important to your manager, why should you expect anything? And bad managers exist everywhere.

My point here is that my managers thought the latency of Google Maps was important, doing good work on it got me promoted, it was not a product launch, and things like this are happening all the time across the organization.

[kajecounterhack]

Sure. I was just pushing back on the idea that "you can get promoted doing whatever work appeals to you the most." The "dot dot dot" that is required in order to make that work is a lot of luck, because your manager and their incentives factor so heavily into that. You got lucky -- plenty of folks do similar work and don't find as much support.