[dare944]

Ex-googler here as well. I'm not sure the distortion was worse outside of the core business. In the peripheral businesses (if one can call them businesses), I think you had more of an opportunity to ponder the larger implications of your actions. As an early Nester I argued vociferously for designs that would specifically dis-empower Google as a central service, in deference to the end user and as barrier to future misuse. Of course many of these ideas were not accepted. But my sense was, had I been part of the core Ad business, many of these ideas would have been third-rail topics, subject to immediate shutdown. Whereas within the Nest org I was able to foster discussions on the topics at multiple levels.

Indeed, my impression was that people within the core Ad business were more adept at maintaining an air of integrity while doing substantively the opposite for the goal of optimizing revenue. I suspect that the closer you got to Google's "center of gravity" the more distorted your reality and motivations became.