This sort of thing is extremely bad news for Google.
One of the open secrets about how advertising works in the modern era is that brand synergy demands planning years in advance. Google employees, back in the day, could see the marvel cinematic universe release plan out to several years if they knew where to look, as well as console launch dates, major product releases, and other things of that nature. This is because the advertising sector has high-touch, high-value customers, and those customers expect their marketing plan to go off without a hitch. So Googlers have to make time and schedule things like DiRT testing and new feature validation sensitive to those schedules; Warner Bros isn't going to want to hear it if their Superman ad dropped 2 days early because a feature flag was misconfigured.
When Google was smaller, this was fine. But as a 100,000 person company, I believe it is completely infeasible to expect every Googler to keep those secrets. At those scales, you can't really even use the threat of firing to maintain secrecy because you can't really guarantee that the person who's going to replace the fired one is going to be more loyal. So inevitably, either Google locks down its internal infrastructure (turning it into a company other than the kind of company it was in the past), they cap their employee growth (which implies capping their growth in general), or they start losing high value customers who can't trust them to keep a secret.
In practice, they are definitely doing the first two to some extent and that is changing the flavor of the company internally. Part of the secret sauce of old Google is it didn't keep secrets from itself.
Well that's what happens when you put a McKinsey shrill at the helm and let them go on a mass hiring then mass layoff spree while bending a knee to activist investors to lower wages. You end up with employees who dgaf.
One of the open secrets about how advertising works in the modern era is that brand synergy demands planning years in advance. Google employees, back in the day, could see the marvel cinematic universe release plan out to several years if they knew where to look, as well as console launch dates, major product releases, and other things of that nature. This is because the advertising sector has high-touch, high-value customers, and those customers expect their marketing plan to go off without a hitch. So Googlers have to make time and schedule things like DiRT testing and new feature validation sensitive to those schedules; Warner Bros isn't going to want to hear it if their Superman ad dropped 2 days early because a feature flag was misconfigured.
When Google was smaller, this was fine. But as a 100,000 person company, I believe it is completely infeasible to expect every Googler to keep those secrets. At those scales, you can't really even use the threat of firing to maintain secrecy because you can't really guarantee that the person who's going to replace the fired one is going to be more loyal. So inevitably, either Google locks down its internal infrastructure (turning it into a company other than the kind of company it was in the past), they cap their employee growth (which implies capping their growth in general), or they start losing high value customers who can't trust them to keep a secret.
In practice, they are definitely doing the first two to some extent and that is changing the flavor of the company internally. Part of the secret sauce of old Google is it didn't keep secrets from itself.