but ultimately, the "executives" making the decisions of what software to develop, which bugs to hunt, and so on, are all basing their decisions on data, report

but ultimately, the "executives" making the decisions of what software to develop, which bugs to hunt, and so on, are all basing their decisions on data, reports, and many sorts of 'metrics'. Additionally, I suppose in a company as big as Google, all this decision making is backed by written communications. All this written stuff is subject to legal scrutiny. All must abide by 'approved' rules, guidelines, etc.. Squinting a little bit (maybe some may need to squint harder) it's clear that in the end everything is being done according to a computational (written) process. this is essentially what 'skynet' (from the terminator) or the matrix actually means. if every human involved is following data and written guidelines, the decisions are being made by a computer program running across many hundreds of humans pushing "paper" around.