Worked at Google in its glory days in the '00s, left, and came back for stupid amounts of money.
The problem is that now the work is not fun outside of the money. In the '00s we were working on problems that mattered, we had a green field to play with, smart coworkers that could understand a crazy new CS innovation, and just a sense of discovery and excitement. Nowadays, we are trying to squeeze blood from a cash cow for shareholder benefit, every innovative new product gets killed by some exec who's afraid that it'll make them look bad, the codebase has ossified, most of the employees are also just in it for the money, they have no passion for software or deep understanding of technology, and we're basically just noodling around looking for the one tiny feature that we can launch within the constraints of org politics and crappy code and legal/privacy restrictions and innovator's dilemma.
Attracting employees that don't need money to have fun requires that you have fun in the first place. Sundar is doing a shit job at providing an inspiring vision or even a reason for the company to exist in the first place, so of course he attracts employees that are just in it for the money.
Around 2010-ish Google was such a an interesting platform company. APIs and integration options abound. They were trying to create social media protocols with Buzz & Salmon. Google was a gateway to cool, was giving developers reasons hand over fist to be excited.
It just feels like Google has been on a long long slide into becoming just another product company. G+ promised eventually they would have APIs but actually shut down before that became a thing (aside from a single limited & sad read endpoint). Like everyone else, they gave up on chatbots & have 95% shut down the 3rd party custom actions & hub integrations system. Android has erected ever fiercer sandboxing, eroding more and more the possibility of apps & the ecosystem working together.
We just had Google IO which is nominally a developer conference. But it was overheelmingly Google talking about how they are building AI into products.
Tim O'Reilly's maxim used to be writ large & obvious, implicitly, on the walls of every product at Google. But today these words feel forgotten: "create more value than you capture."
Having a teaming ecosystem of other developers and companies hacking with and extending & rolling with your shit is the sure-fire way to have fun. Every action you do is echoed back with a dozen fold excitement. Withdrawing into your own product cycles & planning & keeping tight ecosystem control is boring and lame.
The problem is that now the work is not fun outside of the money. In the '00s we were working on problems that mattered, we had a green field to play with, smart coworkers that could understand a crazy new CS innovation, and just a sense of discovery and excitement. Nowadays, we are trying to squeeze blood from a cash cow for shareholder benefit, every innovative new product gets killed by some exec who's afraid that it'll make them look bad, the codebase has ossified, most of the employees are also just in it for the money, they have no passion for software or deep understanding of technology, and we're basically just noodling around looking for the one tiny feature that we can launch within the constraints of org politics and crappy code and legal/privacy restrictions and innovator's dilemma.
Attracting employees that don't need money to have fun requires that you have fun in the first place. Sundar is doing a shit job at providing an inspiring vision or even a reason for the company to exist in the first place, so of course he attracts employees that are just in it for the money.