Things were already pretty screwed up atleast a decade ago when I was there for a short while, this was around the time Google+ was being "dogfooded", so it was

Things were already pretty screwed up atleast a decade ago when I was there for a short while, this was around the time Google+ was being "dogfooded", so it wasn't even quarter the size it is now. I was only an intern but the other older programmers I was working with were all bored and doing minimal work, with no sense of pride or purpose, treating it like a government job with a good lunch program and free massages. The pay is high and work relaxed, so a lot of 'local maximizers' tend to seep in, the type of people who want to do just enough and avoid any sort of extra effort or experiment with anything new. The kind of people who would choose courses based on how easy it is to get a high grade and not based on how interesting or useful it would be. For people to innovate constantly, they need to feel a sense of pride in service to customers and a sense of purpose as to why they are doing their work. For an organization to innovate they need fear that they will go extinct if they don't. As long as the firehose of revenue that is search keeps going, they will keep sucking at everything else.