Google executives see cracks in their company’s success
Anecdotal, but I&#x27;ve talked to a few people at Google who are happy with the pay and perks but absolutely hate the product management culture.<p>Basically, performance reviews and incentives are structured around doing something with &quot;big impact,&quot; so there are a lot of needlessly &quot;ambitious&quot; (quotes intentional) reboots, revamps, redesigns, repackaging, etc. of existing products, mostly so that teams and PM&#x27;s can say they went big and get a good performance review.<p>The flip side of that is that there&#x27;s no incentive to fix bugs (and usability issues) in existing stable products, because unless the bug is losing tens of millions of dollars for Google it&#x27;s considered wasted time from a performance review perspective.<p>This is why Google is constantly relaunching and rebranding products, even making them worse, while neglecting long-running problems in, for example, Gmail.<p>Recently, my main Gmail account was upgraded to the new Chat interface. It actually looks worse (subjectively the new font seems less readable) and has removed the &quot;Pop out to separate window&quot; feature that I used to use all the time. But hey, now the interface has animated transitions and I can forward individual parts of a conversation to an email with one click! Wow!