Although I don't work at Google, I feel like this just patently is not the case. I firmly believe the vast majority of devs at Google aren't writing the next ma

Although I don't work at Google, I feel like this just patently is not the case. I firmly believe the vast majority of devs at Google aren't writing the next massive distributed and concurrent datastore with strong guarantees on transaction sequencing, aka F1 on top of Spanner. The vast majority of people aren't writing the things that get, or would get if they were publicly available, research papers at Google. They're using those things, written by the 1% of the 1%, to do things really, really generic, like display advertisements or store emails. There are some people in language development (Dart, Go, probably some others and some DSLs), there are some people doing hardcore database design, they probably have some people working on hard problems in their datacenters, from reducing latency on commodity hardware to networking infrastructure. Are the majority of Google employees writing things that only the 0.1% of the 0.1% can solve? No, they don't even employ enough software engineers for that to be the case.