Your experiences sounds very similar to mine. > I could see right away what Google was, just a money printing machine with everything else they did a way to fl

Your experiences sounds very similar to mine. > I could see right away what Google was, just a money printing machine with everything else they did a way to flush some of the excess gravy away. And because of that it all lacked purpose or real motivation. This is precisely how I would summarize it too. Very well stated. > Agree about the ADD thing, but I think it's more a product of Perf economy than stock price. That I agree with, and I already regret implying stock was a bigger part of it than Perf/Promo-- I just wasn't thinking about them when I wrote that. Perf was a bigger factor for sure from our ground level (L3/L4/L5 presumably) and was the main reason I left, as all I saw around my on my team was people doing things that added zero value or even subtracted it, but at least they created a new project that would sound good for Promo committee. Managers helpfully shepherded their team in that direction, which was kind and all for growing our careers and helping us get more slop from the trough, but it still felt gross. I couldn't bear seeing that as my future. Sometimes, when I look at the housing market, or think about colleges for my daughter though, I regret not playing a long a little longer. I don't know. THAT SAID: I don't think the stock incentives affected decision making at your or my level, but at higher middle management levels, where GSUs started to become huger both in absolute value and percentage of compensation. At the levels of the people actually deciding what products to close down or pursue. I wasn't up at that level so this is just a theory I admit. Yeah, fair enough -- I still don't know if I've done a good job of successfully explaining to myself what the fuck it was I experienced working there and why, but it sounds like you and I had very very similar experiences. Everything about the internal incentive structure was fucked up and incentivized very low value producing behavior. And yet, I did learn some really valuable things there - napa cabbage is delicious - celery root is a thing - fresh made pasta is better - quiche and arugula pair great together - oh my god legit ramen is amazing Oh wait, outside of the food: - monorepos, with the right tooling, are unbeatable. all the monorepo haters just don't have the right tooling. google did - doing meetings right, with agendas and minutes, is also unbeatable, strictly better and more effecient than the alternative - doing planning right, by circulating proposed design plans for comments, is strictly more effecient than the alternative - doing cloud deployment right -- this is irrelevant now, most everyone knows how to do this now while google is stuck with legacy borg configs, but for a while, google actually was far ahead of the industry on this Despite having some fundamentals like that that made certain things way way more effective, it was squandered pursuing cockeyed goals.