Even at its prime, Google experienced a high rate of management turnover at all levels. There was a time when I had been with the company longer than the combined tenure of the three levels of management above me, and this trend has only escalated since 2022. The process of rolling out a feature can be quite protracted, often taking months, due to the complex bureaucratic process of Ariane. Upper management occasionally introduces new initiatives with rigid deadlines, seemingly out of the blue. Reorganizations are a frequent occurrence. The caliber of managers varies widely, from exceptional to surprisingly subpar. The performance review processes used to stall company operations for weeks biannually. Although they've since been revised, the execution left much to be desired. Competition for resources and advancement opportunities is intense, leading to unfortunate instances of colleagues undermining each other either for personal gain or out of insecurity. There exist several large-scale systems that have been operational for years, yet no maintainer has a complete understanding even of just their part. Long-term projects are undertaken to rediscover and document this lost knowledge, only to be abandoned or lost due to turnover. A significant portion of engineering effort is directed toward continuous migrations. At one point, technical debt in Cloud had deteriorated so badly that a VP reprimanded the entire organization, and everyone received a badge as a reminder. YouTube's highly compartmentalized structure often overlooks opportunities that span across organizational boundaries. The quality of Chrome code has declined to such an extent that substantial parts need to be completely overhauled - inter-process communication and memory management are particularly problematic, but performance in general needs attention. Even the Search and Ads departments have not been immune to leadership-related issues.
