[mianos]

This is peak corporate drivel—bloated storytelling, buzzwords everywhere, and a desperate attempt to make an old idea sound revolutionary.

The article spends paragraphs on some childhood radio repair story before awkwardly linking it to STPA, a safety analysis method that’s been around for decades. Google didn’t invent it, but they act like adapting it for software is a major breakthrough.

Most of the piece is just filler about feedback loops and control structures—basic engineering concepts—framed as deep insights. The actual message? "We made an internal training program because existing STPA examples didn’t click with Googlers." That’s it. But instead of just saying that, they pad it out with corporate storytelling, self-congratulation, and hand-wringing over how hard it is to teach people things.

The ending is especially cringe: You can’t afford NOT to use this! Classic corporate play—take something mundane, slap on some urgency, and act like ignoring it is a reckless gamble.

TL;DR: Google is training engineers in STPA. That’s the whole story.

[sepositus]

I'm not sure if things have changed over the past five years, but this is exactly the stuff you'd throw in a promotion packet or maybe in a performance (perf) review to hit that mythical "superb" rating.

The breaking point for me (and why I left after almost a decade) was when people started getting high ratings for fixing things they had an original hand in causing. Honestly, the comfiest job in the world if you're a professional bullshitter.

[dataflow]

By "had a hand in causing" do you mean "they should have prevented it", or do you just mean "they were involved in the causation"? Because sometimes you're forced to do things you know are wrong, because that's what other people are making you do, and in that case you still "have a hand" in causing.

[praptak]

Something in between. Like "pushed to implement a feature without the safety measures". When outages started to happen implemented Outage Prevention Program, i.e. implemented the safety measures that should have been implemented from the start.

Subsequent data collection demonstrated X% outage frequency drop clearly demonstrating readiness for promotion, data driven.

[sepositus]

Exactly this.

[AStonesThrow]

It's not easy or popular to link Dilbert these days, but there's a classic cartoon of the PHB announcing their bug bounty program for dev employees, and one of the fellows exclaims that he's going to “code his way to a minivan”!

[SlightlyLeftPad]

What I’ve been seeing from Google’s products lately suggests that these are the only ones still there. It’s a house of cards built with professional bullshitters. Google’s culture has entered or is already deep within the bullshit era.

[z3t4]

It will happen in all companies that has a monopoly status. If they start to struggle they will just increase the rent.

[ikiris]

You can’t swoop in and be a hero and make impact without a meteor.

[hansmayer]

The point about basic engineering concepts is spot on. But I wonder how much it has to do with the creeping in of superficially educated "tech" people across technology sector. Not to downplay the value of self-learning (am a bit of autodidact myself), but the amount of people who switch into the mythical "tech" who have never heard of a differential equation is worrying. Hence companies unfortunately really seem to need to explain concepts like feedback loop to people who only ever heard of it in the context of performance review. The article itself is a word salad though, the start reads like a SEO-optimised cooking blog ;)

[tekla]

Woah, hold up, why does anyone need to know math?

[agumonkey]

Oh wow, shallow communication performative piece in a way ?