I think Google's biggest challenge is they are still (even at their ridiculous scale) pivoting from a small company to a big company. You can't manage a 100-pe

I think Google's biggest challenge is they are still (even at their ridiculous scale) pivoting from a small company to a big company. You can't manage a 100-person firm and a 100,000-person firm in the same way. Not unlike large distributed computer systems, personnel and management systems that work fine in the small do not scale in the large. So Google is (slowly but surely) coming around to being a traditional company with checks and balances and process and protocol, but because self-motivation, encouragement of independence, and the remaining veneer of "the company that will save the world" is still there, these systems clash hard and can make for the occasional miserable outcome. I can't tell how many anecdotes I picked up of people who gave it there all like they felt ownership of the company only to realize it's just a company, and promotion is driven more by salary budget constraints, headcount, very arbitrary quotas, and market and social forces uncontrollable by one employee than by effort. It's made worse by the aspects of the old system that are still there, such as your work being evaluated by a team that is intentionally chosen to know very little about your project (to minimize favoritism), which has the side effect of encouraging self-promotion and communication skills that aren't particularly valuable in the day-to-day of software engineering (in other words, good engineering can be overlooked in favor of good self-promotion).