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First of all, it's not like most engineers at Google are working on Bigtable or Borg, with a "very simple interface and tons of hidden internal complexity".

I would say that most engineers are working on something like that. Those two examples are from google cloud/technical infrastructure, but other products such as search and ads have tremendous complexity behind them.

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I feel like this hubris is why almost every google product I use is riddled with horrible bugs. The cursor move functionality on Gmail for iOS has been broken for TWO YEARS. It’s also why the tensorflow API is a horribly over-engineered abomination when Pytorch is almost at feature and performance parity with something exponentially simpler and more consistent/elegant. That “biggest baddest solution” culture makes sense for Bigtable; it’s god-awful for anything remotely customer facing.

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