I really don't like their series of blog posts of flaky tests. The first one literally used the phrase "fact of life" and implied that nothing could really be done about it (suggesting avoiding high level tests as a result, which was dangerously bad advice) while this one reports a rate that is staggeringly high (16%!) and assumes an intrinsically hard problem ("world class engineers did this!") rather than a fault in their approach.

They could do with being a little more humble and focusing on improving their engineering practices.

If any Googlers are reading this and have the knowledge, I’m curious whether things have improved since that article. The numbers are sobering.