> From what I saw at Google Cloud, they could do a lot better identifying and nurturing talent, moving talent to the best fit roles, and overall optimizing the

> From what I saw at Google Cloud, they could do a lot better identifying and nurturing talent, moving talent to the best fit roles, and overall optimizing the people already in the company. Instead, the pattern seems to be wait till someone is unhappy and leaves, then just open a req to replace them. Way back in time, when employment was a lifetime gig and jumping between companies was rare, IBM invested a lot of effort in an elaborate internal mobility computer system that did this sort of thing. The system could do succession planning, training needs analysis and much more. Companies talk tht talk on this stuff nowadays but hardly anyone does it effectively because of the core problem - when talent is scarce and employees have no loyalty, what's the point of training someone up only to see them jump ship to a competitor who gets the benefit? This simple economic fact also underlies the strange anomolies in the marketplace for talent, such as your best bet for a big pay raise being to jump to another company rather than to strive at your current gig. Over the years, job hoppers (as long as it's not taken to excess) will do much better than loyal employees who stick it out. I don't know if things are any different for Google. Perhaps the great pay, the gifted colleagues and the opportunity to work on the very biggest systems make Google special, the sort of place that can invest heavily in internal development and internal talent mobility. I suspect not though, making it just as hard for Google to meet up with the article's lofty recommendations as any other mega corp.