[mike_hearn]

The validated for their intelligence thing is a problem. Googlers in the early days constantly told each other that they were the "smartest people in the world". I noticed this immediately after joining and found it quietly troubling, because there's all kinds of smart and the interview processes were really only selecting for skill with computers or maths. A lot of Googlers wouldn't survive long on the streets or alone in the wilderness, as these require different kinds of smart to what they had. Some colleagues were troubled by those statements for other reasons: they didn't personally feel like one of the smartest people in the world, and this led to imposter syndrome. But we said nothing because, hey, the company was doing great and people did seem pretty smart overall back then. Plus nobody wants to call themselves out as an imposter, and Google had a certain degree of institutional humility to it as well. The company was very much about empowering everyone, no matter who or how "smart" they were.

What you're seeing from Google in the last ten years is a maybe predictable consequence of that culture, where some Googlers really do seem to think they're generically much smarter than everyone else, about everything. You started to see mass scale social engineering via manipulation of search results and products, driven apparently by the immense faith they have in their own wisdom. Is there any claim Googlers cannot immediately resolve as true or false given nothing more than a few ML models and a team of contractors in LatAm? Apparently some of them think that's all it takes.

This quasi-misanthropic culture is miles away from the trusting "make it universally available and useful" culture the company once had, but the seeds of that culture's end were clearly visible even at the start. You can't constantly validate people by telling them they're super smart before some of them come to actually believe it, and that leads naturally to the belief that if they're really the smartest people in the world then surely that means they should be running it.

[commandersaki]

I think when you're hiring people like Russ Cox, Rob Pike, Van Jacobson, Jeffrey Mogul, Jennifer Rexford, Bram Moolenar, Vint Cerf, etc. (and that's just a tiny fraction of their well known amazing talent) it's hard not to think they're hiring the smartest & brightest.