For me, the only reason I will never go back to GOOG is blind allocation. IMO that's a bug, not a feature.
Google et al often do general hiring. This means that they hire you and then later decide where to assign you afterwards.
I had thought at Google hiring managers could bid on you and some kind of choice could be made. But maybe that's only in big enough offices with good enough resumes.
It's bad because you don't know which team you're joining and the quality of the manager. It's good because it lets the company assign you to the most important areas first.
Contrast this with a normal process where the hiring manager for the team you're joining is in the interview loop. You know ahead of time which team you're joining.
That hugely slants the purpose of the interview toward Google, as the candidate really has no idea who they will be working with, or how they think. The interview should go both ways and provide information to both sides on if it's a good fit, but at Google, they go only one way.
This might be a small point for most, but for minority candidates, knowing who you will be working with and having confidence they won't actively cause you grief is a big sticking point. At least it was for me (I turned them down).
That's why I mentioned that I've been asked to do lunch or a phone call with prospective hires. I'm not a manager, just a grunt, and these candidates wanted to speak with people from the team.
I mean, thats the problem with vertical schemes and bureocracy.. the guy who is micro-managing is also micro-managed by some sort of results that actually ends not being very pragmatic, end give him good points in this blind objective system who ranks him and the people he manage according to some parameters that in the end they 'game' to look good.
Of course we want to fight the impermanence, but we should not create a bubble to feel safe inside of it as a virtual environment with rules that doesnt change, just because we miss the peace in the maternal woomb.
The impermanence and uncertainty is a reality, we should not fight in order to avoid it by being alienated of its nature, but to use our science, math and tools after all to understand it, and to navigate better through it.
The XXI century requires a deep change in our philosophical disposition and culture.
Its not just about Google, the corporate culture of Google is a side effect of our culture as anything else that grows inside of it.
But the rigid schemes are a clear sign that it will stop innovating more and more with time as the old startup status-quo defying spirit is completely gone.
But yea, things are not always rosy and maybe Google indeed isn't the right fit.