How do they consistently mess things up ?
Current market cap 3.7T, only Apple and Nvidia are bigger. Youtube is a huge success, Search is still growing at 10%-15% which is crazy, cloud growing at 35%ish, TPUs enable them to be independent from NVidia etc. Gemini market share went up from 5%-6% early 2025 to 21% early 2026. I personally bet Gemini market share will keep growing.
They are executing well on all verticals imo, not messing up.
Exactly. You might not like what Google does, but you can't deny it's a massive commercial success. Just because their approach to creating and delivering apps might not be to your liking, you might actually be the niche.
Yeah but if we think about this in terms of "people love dumb things", then it makes sense what the other person is saying, no? As an example, compare it to how people are when it comes to tech, as in, they are tech-illiterate. Us, power users would not want an OS that is dumbed down... or compare it to YouTubers who are richer than an SWE and all they do is upload "brainrot". That is the audience, that is why these YouTubers also have "massive commercial success".
You need some qualifiers. Google is very good at engineering. For example, I hate that Google uses my data to serve ads, but there isn't a tech company I would trust more to safe guard my data.
Where Google has fallen down is trying to productize new things. Imagine if Apple had Google's software prowess, or Google had Apple's ability to conceptualize a complete product.
That's because Twitter only really does one thing. Also, despite not having any hard stats twitter has been down an awful lot more these past few years
I’m confused what kind of software engineer jobs there are that don’t involve meeting with people, “aligning expectations”, getting consensus, making slides/decks to communicate that, thinking about market positioning, etc?
If you weren’t doing much of that before, I struggled to think of how you were doing much engineering at all, save some more niche extremely technical roles where many of those questions were already answered, but even still, I should expect you’re having those kinds of discussions, just more efficiently and with other engineers.
> I’m confused what kind of software engineer jobs there are that don’t involve meeting with people, “aligning expectations”, getting consensus, making slides/decks to communicate that, thinking about market positioning, etc?
The vast majority of software engineers in the world. The most widespread management culture is that where a team's manager is the interface towards the rest of the organization and the engineers themselves don't do any alignment/consensus/business thinking, which is the manager's exclusive job.
I used to work like that and I loved it. My managers were decent and they allowed me to focus on my technical skills. Then, due to those technical skills I'd acquired, I somehow got hired at Google, stayed there nearly a decade but hated all the OKR crap, perf and the continuous self-promotion I was obliged to do.
> I’m confused what kind of software engineer jobs there are that don’t involve meeting with people, “aligning expectations”, getting consensus, making slides/decks to communicate that, thinking about market positioning, etc?
I’m not sure everyone would agree with that statement. As a more senior engineer at a big tech company, our execs still believe more code output is expected by level. Hell they even measure and rate you on lines of code deltas.
I don’t agree with it or believe it’s smart but it’s the world we live in
In a lot of larger organizations there is a whole stable of people whose job is to keep stakeholders and programmers from ever having to talk to each other. This was considered a best practice a quarter-century ago ("Office Space" makes fun of it), and in retrospect I concede it sometimes had a point.
* meeting with people, yes, on calls, on chats, sometimes even on phone
* “aligning expectations”, yes, because of the next point
* getting consensus, yes, inevitably or how else do we decide what to do and how to do it?
* making slides/decks to communicate that, not anymore, but this is a specific tool of the job, like programming in Java vs in Python.
* thinking about market positioning, no, but this is what only a few people in an organization have agency on.
* etc? Yes, for example don't piss off other people, help custumers using the product, identify new functionalities that could help us deliver a better product, prioritize them and then back to getting consensus.
It is a co-op where creators make videos without the threat of being demonetized or algorithmically punished - and it’s not garbage in the way you might expect people fearful of being demonetized might be.
Lots of excellent legal analysis, history, logistics, engineering content there.
It was initially founded by some of the most popular information YouTubers like CGPGrey, but he mysteriously left the project (I suspect one side wanted to be evil and the other side did not)
> I browse logged out. Interact when them I do not.
The logged out experience is closer to the interests of the average person. So if you're not pruning (and savings) your interests, that's hardly surprising.
It's inevitable that one of the major cloud providers will irrecoverably delete all customer data with one single fat-fingered command. Though in google's case I'll also consider the prophecy to be fulfilled if they delete their own data.
There are a few things that can cause tremendously widespread outages, essentially all of them network configuration changes. Actually deleting customer data is dramatically more difficult to the point of impossible - there are so many different services in so many different locations with so many layers of access control. There is no "one command" that can do such a thing - at the scale of a worldwide network of data centers there is no "rm -rf /".
Ah, but you fail to account for Google's incredible knack for building tools designed to do things at scale. Or put AI in things that don't need it.
The possibility Google will either manage to unleash a malicious AI on their infrastructure and/or develop a way to destroy a lot of data at scale quite efficiently or some combination of the two is far from zero.
"We deployed this private cloud with a missing parameter and it wasn't caught" is as different from "we wiped out all customer data" as hello world is from Kubernetes.
No one promised this "should be impossible". Did you confuse "we'll take steps to ensure this never happens again"?
You contend there's no global rm rf for a global cloud provider, but clearly a missing parameter can rm rf a customer in an irrecoverable manner.
The only half you're missing is... how every major cloud outage happens today... a bad configuration update. These companies have hundreds of thousands of servers, but they also use orchestration tools to distribute sets of changes to all of them.
You only need a command to rm rf one box, if you are distributing that command to every box.
Now sure, there are tons of security precautions and checks and such to prevent this! But pretending it's impossible is delusional. People do stupid stuff, at scale, every day.
The most likely scenario is a zero day in an environment necessitating an extremely rapid global rollout, combined with a plain, simple error.
And the most telling thing about most of these outages is that the provider later admits in their postmortem that they just didn't really understand how the system they made worked until it fell over and were forced to learn how it really works.
It's the sort of thing that used to keep me up at night.
The release process, monitoring checks, etc. for a customer's private cloud is generally significantly different from the release process for a global product. I'm not going to get any more specific for all the standard NDA reasons, but having worked for Google and Microsoft among others....no, the risk you describe doesn't translate from one to the other.
I understand you believe the checks cannot fail that catastrophically, and I agree that the likelihood they do is quite low.
But it can happen, and it only has to happen once. (Also FYI, telling me your work history just tells me you've drunk the koolaid, ain't proof you know more.)
The idea that all customer data will be deleted is far fetched, but I feel like there have been some massive incidents. Crowdstrike comes to mind, but I feel its entirely possible that Apple/Google/etc could push out some kind of config update which bricks phones in a way they are unable to download another update to fix them.
Though I'm sure the major players are all over this risk which is why it hasn't happened.
One thing I wonder is why design of experiments (DOE) methodology is so seldom used for these things.
Statisticians and operations researchers have spent a hundred years deciding how to do as few experiments as possible to tweak parameters in the ways that give the highest impact with statistical basis that the selections are good.
In the language of information and decision trees, these experiments are trying to in some sense “branch” on the entropy minimizing variables.
DOE is still very useful in many contexts, but when it's possible do use a sequential design these adaptive techniques really start to pull away in terms of optimization quality.
There's simply a lot of sample efficiency to gain by adapting the experiment to incoming data in a regime where one can repeatedly design n candidates, observe their effects, and repeat m times compared to a setting where one must design a fixed experiment with n*m samples.
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