Yup, I heard this rumor at Google when I worked there, and it does make some amount of sense. If the best engineers aren’t working for the competition, then nobody else can compete. I doubt it’s true, but it did often felt like we were paid to work on trivial tasks.
It’s a shame because there was work that could have been done to improve Google’s business, but execs took engineers off of them to move to Google Cloud (AKA, “sit on your hands and wait 2 years for your doc to be approved”). Google had so many good products that engineers truly wanted to work on like Stadia, Domains, and Area 120, and they cancelled them all. It happened so often that a couple of my coworkers pretended to hate working on their team “so it wouldn’t get cancelled”.
Yup, I heard this rumor at Google when I worked there, and it does make some amount of sense. If the best engineers aren’t working for the competition, then nobody else can compete. I doubt it’s true, but it did often felt like we were paid to work on trivial tasks.
It’s a shame because there was work that could have been done to improve Google’s business, but execs took engineers off of them to move to Google Cloud (AKA, “sit on your hands and wait 2 years for your doc to be approved”). Google had so many good products that engineers truly wanted to work on like Stadia, Domains, and Area 120, and they cancelled them all. It happened so often that a couple of my coworkers pretended to hate working on their team “so it wouldn’t get cancelled”.