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That's not a Google only problem. It's a cultural problem in Silicon Valley (ex drive to disrupt) and America (ex not respecting stay-at-home parents).

See the artwork of Mierle Laderman Ukeles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mierle_Laderman_Ukeles

Feels like someone higher up should walk through some of the now dead projects, and fire management team members, who wasted resources on those. Especially highly promoted and/or repeat offenders. Might actually spark some real innovation.

While I was there, we used to joke that the claimed strategy was “launch and iterate” but the career strategy was “launch and leave”.

It’s made worse by internal churn. An unstaffed service will blow up pretty quickly (because someone in infra wanted to go for promo) so you either have to justify staffing a project indefinitely or kill it gracefully.