[germanjoey]

It is interesting reading that second paragraph many years later. Most of the things that Steve Yegge brags about that Google "does right" (e.g. how they do recruiting, their engineering "standards", SREs running products rather than the engineers, their cushy offices and benefits packages, etc) now read to me the opposite of the intended way. As in, they read more like a list of reasons why Google slowly declined from being the shining city on the hill to the dysfunctional embarrassment it is today.

[endtime]

Having recently left Google after more than 10 years, I don't think those are the reasons for any decline at Google. I think it's very hard to scale a company to that size without many layers of middle management, and I think it's very hard to be an effective middle manager at Google (and maybe anywhere).

Until I see a more functional company with 100,000+ employees, I attribute all the issues to scale.