Ex-Googler: promotion games make Google fumble its top priorities while second-tier products thrive
deedydas · x · 2026-10-04
A long-form reflection on why Google repeatedly underperforms on its #1 priority (Search, Google+, Assistant, Cloud, and now AI) while crushing it on second- and third-tier bets.
Key points:
- When a company-wide priority emerges, ambitious L3-L7 employees treat it as a promotion opportunity: knife fights over "high impact" projects, credit grabbing, and hidden concerns about juiced metrics. More effort goes into promo packets than the actual work, and Goodhart's Law takes over.
- The costs: product polish, core innovation ("why take a risky bet when I can get promoted copying OpenAI/Anthropic"), and cultural cohesion all suffer.
- Second-tier projects attract genuinely interested people playing long-term games, so products like Chrome, Android, YouTube, and Waymo grew when left alone.
- The author, who worked at Google, argues the billion users lose out each time this dynamic plays out.
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