Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is sad because I spent nearly 10 years at Google and nearly all the people I met were well-meaning, seemingly harmless, engineering-oriented, and data-driven. But the configuration of people that makes up the superorganism that is Google nowadays is driven by both local incentives and a broad top incentive to grow. Scale to more computation, more storage, more bandwidth, and with lower overhead--morally, those are…
The overall problem -- and this is not specific to Google -- is that managers at all levels are incentivized to grow head counts. Google has at least 10x as many employees as it needs. That's based on decades of revenue being decoupled from costs, and from monopoly profits. It's the double-whammy of being in tech (where costs and revenues don't couple since incremental costs are close to zero), and having a super-pro…
No one is incentivised to grow head count. They are incentivised to do more, produce more revenue, and expand the reach of the company; most of these goals require the application of more smart people to a problem. They are not getting a promotion or salary bump because their group increased from 200 to 300 people over the previous quarter, they are receiving rewards for being able to effectively direct those people in order to achieve some specific goal. Increasing head count by 50% while delivering 250% growth in revenue/engagement/view/etc is what is being rewarded.