One things alluded to but not mentioned explicitly: many Googlers (especially in middle management roles) have work at Google all or almost all of their career. If you left university and went straight to Google, you might have a warped perception of the tech world and what's "normal". I think this contributes to the arrogant culture at Google because if you firmly believe that this company is the best of the best and you've never seen actual industry best practices, you might not even be aware of how weird and bad some of the internal processes and tools really are.
Had the exact same experience in Goldman Sachs. People with 20 year tenures in the bank still advocating for CVS and Ant build system in 2017. They're just stuck in their narrow mindsets and don't know any better. That and the superiority complex made me leave quite quickly.
pshh thats everywhere. and yes I know Im shadow banned but I thought it was important to comment on this thread BECAUSE I am shadow banned due to the fact that I bring facts to the discussion but the current "lets disrupt google" forced zeitgeist moment. This "lets disrupt google" marketing push happening on ycombinator right now reeks of bad ideas from people who dont work in search.
Worked for a few exchanges and couple of investment banks and in my youth also in a big five consultancy and GS was the only shop with archaic tech. But I can now see how you could get shadow banned with comments like this.
It's even worse that these Googlers (managers in particular) are picked up by other companies as a shining example, e.g.: "They'll know how to run a team / organisation."
And usually it's just them doing things like they did before which apparently isn't necessarily a good thing (sometimes is but often isn't). I cannot fault them, given the hiring expectation. But that's the problem. There's this cult that if Google does something ot must be the right way. It's filling books.
