Google

The initial conditions of a company set a lot of vectors. Many of Google's initial conditions were good ones. The company still makes a big effort to be a nice place, not just because it's profitable, but because people (at least all the ones I see) genuinely want to get it right.

They also want to at least try to make the world a better place, even if, arguably, that's not the corporation's big goal any more. Don't underestimate the value of this attitude; I've seen what it's like in so many companies that lack it.

You see it in lots of things, big and small, that Google structurally makes an effort to make its employees' lives nice. Google got a lot right during COVID, including being one of the first to provide free testing kits.

I've got offers from a hot startup and AWS, and I'm pretty sure I am not ready to move.

Google is IBM. If you look at IBM in the 60s, they invented or reduced to practice so many fundamental ideas in computing (caching, virtualization, TLB) that we just take for granted now.

They also made a bad guess and got bit numbering backwards, and decided to go with EBCDIC, and we still deal with that today, in code, docs, and programs. They can't back out of 50-year-old bad decisions.

IBM has been around a long time, and it's harder and harder, post 1975, for them to innovate, as they are stuck in their cultural mold. Just look at the companies they keep buying. They break them every time.

Google is like that. They were the first to get to big scale in many areas, and you get stuck with that legacy base. It gets harder and harder to do something new.

Microsoft has gitfs, Google has an older, not nearly as good srcfs. Everyone uses git; Google is stuck with Perforce.

If you want to do anything really new, it's a giant effort because there are so many stakeholders of 'how we do it now.' I've seen good ideas gnawed to death by ambitious, envious, ankle-biters. And, yes, performance review really does drive a lot of people to break things for no reason. Another chat app, anyone?

Google is like IBM ca 1990: still one of the leaders, but it's clearly not leading as it was, and there's blood in the water. Can the management fix it? That's not clear.

The market is rewarding their current 'move slow and don't break things' model, so all the signals are green. As they were for, e.g., DEC or Sun or Intel, right before it all went wrong.

Is Google the next Intel? Maybe.

You are at least 5 years behind AWS in so many areas, not least because you don't have a way to support innovation.

You have started valuing conformance over innovation.

You need to start listening to disruptive voices.