There's lots of interesting projects going on at Google and an internal system for applying to other teams, and usually no shortage of teams asking for people. There's not a lot of CRUD apps with the exception of Corp-IT stuff.
Sometimes I wonder what all these engineers do every day. Their main apps are not getting exponentially better, and they have fewer of them. Why is all this algorithmic knowledge really needed? Do they spend all day optimizing or engineering and planning new features?
Not trying to insult Google, but I'm not seeing a ton of new features that would justify this kind of indepth theoretical knowledge. The ability to actually code, to do so efficiently and quickly, and to properly unit test and profile it, seems more important than any algorithmic knowledge. Mastery of the toolchain and the language, and that comes down to - "What have you produced?"
Maybe this is why Google hasn't had a new hit product in what seems like awhile. It doesn't need one as long as they maintain their position as search leader, but it doesn't seem like they have one.
Most of these apps listed above are not CRUD apps. The service based ones have significant and non-trivial data processing on the backend, lots of machine-learning, or algorithmic data processing.
Google apps have been getting better over the years, but Google updates them almost continuously and incrementally because they are web based, and so most of the changes go unnoticed like a frog slowly being boiled in water.
Is Google Search the same as it was 5 years ago? No, it has Google Instant, voice search, Knowledge Graph, direct answers, better spam filtering, it's index is far fresher, etc. For example, just the interactive chart knowledge panels (https://www.google.com/#fp=9a975e048e4bd6d6&q=population+of+...)
Google Maps has gotten radically better, and the latest beta maps is probably the most complex and sophisticated web application ever engineered.
Google search within G+ and Drive actually does object recognition with neural networks. (http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2013/06/improving-photo-s...) This is a huge improvement in image search, and most people are totally unaware of it. It just works and they don't notice that it found it image without even needing descriptive text or tags.
Google apps are slowly getting smarter each and everyday but there's no "Jobsnote" to laud them, so the improvements are invisible.
They promote many of these changes via Google I/O (although I think the audience may be smaller).
Believe me, I notice. GMail and GMaps get slower and slower every day. I can't actually use GMail anymore; clicking anything takes several seconds. Wasn't this way in 2005, and I had a crappier computer then.
Knowledge graph and instant search are amazing feats, but with thousands of engineers working all day at Google, each of these products seem to be only incrementally improving, as you say, and I would almost expect quantum leaps forward in terms of new products. But Google probably has all sorts of things in their pipeline.
These products were already incredibly impressive, as well as huge hits, and I use them every day, so I'm not really dissing them so much as I'm noticing a lack of new, hit products.
CRUD to mean has traditionally meant traditional database applications, CREATE, UPDATE, and DELETE, after all come from SQL keywords. These apps are primarily table oriented.
Google Maps isn't even close to being a CRUD application in the traditional sense. How many CRUD applications have you worked on that used Octrees? And why does "web based" make something CRUD? Is a native Android app that does SQL RPC calls and just manipulates a typical entity-relationship database quality as CRUD?
Anyway, back to hit products. Google Now was released only 1 year ago and is a new hit product. How many new hits per year do you want? ;-)
Also keep in mind that Google has moved from launching lots of tiny apps with separate branding, to unifying their various platforms and implementing things as features across app. For example, the neural network based image search is a really a service that appears inside of Drive, G+, etc, just like Hangouts appear in multiple apps, as well as Google Local data.
The general thrust is to get away from launching an array of dozens or hundreds of sites, and to make stuff just "work" within the apps you use already.
Good luck with that. I fear the day when my Apps domain is forcefully migrated to Hangouts. Hopefully there will be an alternative to Apps by then that is actually worth using.
(One of the people present during my firing needed to summon his boss using internal Hangouts. He eventually gave up, went back to his desk and got his laptop because the experience is completely unusable while mobile. It was hugely amusing to watch, and drove home the dogfood drama for me -- you know what I'm talking about.)
Sorry to hear about your firing BTW, hope everything works out. I believe in second chances and I don't think people should be blacklisted for all time for something far in their past, with certain exceptions (e.g. sex crimes and working with children, etc)
It seems disingenuous to have the achievements of those companies be co-opted by/as Google/'s
These days, most software isn't developed in a vacuum. WebKit was a fork of KHTML. Does Apple get no credit for the changes made to it?
Google Maps and Google Earth were acquisitions as well, but the state of those products when they were acquired compared to where they are not is completely different.
Agreed there have been few home grown innovation from Google, those are all from early days.
Current achievements are all leveraging on their existing user base, and are not necessarily due to the merit of their products.
But I have had the experience of co-workers transferring off my team to other teams and semi-regular turnover, so it may be a matter of finding the right place at the right time.
Ah but from the linked article, if the only selection criteria is ability to answer weird 5-minute-depth trivia questions about data structures, not actually knowing anything about GEO/GIS wouldn't even be discovered, much less an impediment.
Of course, they might have a totally different, less pathological system for internal transfers than for external hiring...
Even if you take Google's ad platforms, they use machine learning techiques on the backend, as does YouTube.