> having too many self-directed engineers with no management vision I personally feel it's the opposite. I think management, and Google's internal incentives,

> having too many self-directed engineers with no management vision I personally feel it's the opposite. I think management, and Google's internal incentives, lead to a lot of their issues. As one obvious example, the leveling system is totally flawed and creates incentives for their greatest issues, such as releasing many competing projects only to deprecate/ abandon all of them. That's on management, not the engineers who are explicitly being told "To get a promotion we need you to do this type of work, we don't really care what happens after that". A little more control for engineers might mean that passion projects can be taken further, can go in directions that management maybe can't see the immediate "promotable" value from. You wouldn't be incentivized to compete as much, but maybe to collaborate - because you wouldn't need to lead a project to get a promotion, just add value and do good work. If you look at Google's earlier years I think this is evidence. They used to feel a lot more moonshotty, a lot less managery, and perhaps a bit more culty due to the engineering driven culture. There were flops, but it didn't feel quite as ridiculous. Just my observations though, as an outsider with some colleagues there.