I've seen amateur programmers produced great code, due to cultures of code review, peer mentorship, high professional standards, and time to think deeply throug

I've seen amateur programmers produced great code, due to cultures of code review, peer mentorship, high professional standards, and time to think deeply through problems and talk things over. I've worked in companies where great programmers produced horrible code, due to cultures of optimizing to productivity metrics / features shipped, rushed timelines, and interrupted work schedules with meetings, requirements changes, and people multitasking projects. I'm not arguing one of those is better than the other. Running a business is about tradeoffs. I am not particularly impressed with anything Google has engineered in the past decade or more. The original search, gmail, Google Docs, Android, Maps, and a few others were brilliant, but those are a long time passing. On the other hand, I'm not ready to condemn anyone working on those over that. Competence is situational and context-dependent. I also don't have insight into Google business decisions. Google revenues are growing exponentially, so they're clearly doing something right.