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It’s not about hiring top players. It’s about the incentive structure of getting ahead. From all of the leveling guidelines I’ve seen at major tech companies,

• mft_ 4y ago
  Rational beings typically act according to the incentives they are provided, so if coders don't want to work on Reader for this reason, and management don't want to keep it around, it does point to the incentive structure being part of the problem. But it therefore follows that many of Google's bad decisions could be partly traced back to how the company is organised - probably the interlinked combination of the incentive structure, and success metrics. What's interesting is that even the most biased insider must see that Google really sucks in some domains - and recognising (and/or generating) user value seems to be one of them. Several times, they've either spent big on products which just missed the mark from day one (Plus/Currents, Stadia, multiple text/chat apps), or killed products which already had major engagement (Reader, Inbox, Orkut). What's interesting is that if they made user engagement the only major metric that mattered and incentivised accordingly, it would likely drive interesting behaviour - a real focus on user needs, iteration to optimise engagement in the longer term, improvements in customer service, etc.