Street View is such a missed opportunity. In 2007 it was visionary and essential to create the map data that allowed Google Maps to win. In 2026 it is a symbol of Google's stagnation. Essentially zero improvement in user experience for more than a decade, in a time of incredible advancements in computer vision. By now we should all be flying around the planet in a seamless 3D reconstruction unifying street level and…
I think the drift is specifically tied to the introduction of leetcode in the interview process. Which may sound like a wild connection at first but I’ve now lived through being blocked and seeing how creative devs can’t get through leetcode gatekeepers who are microfussing and blanket critiquing devs as bad when they don’t have leetcode answers pre memorized in a mental hasmap to be able to regurgitate from memory which allows the extra mental capacity to free up in order to hold a performative class lecture about it at the same time.
You can spend your time memorizing the test taking skills to be good at tests. Maybe memorize the answers too. Or you can be coming up with grand ideas like maps and street view and thinking about how all these things in the world come together to be able to do that.
Not many are good at both and the entire stack of people doing interviews is currently blocked at fixing this. Nobody wants to have wasted their time memorizing leetcode to just not gatekeep people who didn’t put in “the same effort,” and no hiring team wants to gamble on somebody who fails the leetcode test processes and turns out to be the occasional bad hire with the only paperwork saying they didn’t pass the industry standard test and shouldn’t have gotten hired in the first place.
So we’re now blocked with only slop workers getting hired who don’t feel the same comfort to take big risks and we get slop like Microsoft notepad plus copilot 365 as a result.