> calling people amateurs without really substantiating is a huge smell IMO. The average Google engineer isn't a genius or particularly amazing by any stretch

Note that Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat -- the original creators of Protobuf -- aren't average Google engineers. They are literally the highest-ranked engineers at Google (Level 11, "Senior Fellow", a title assigned only to the two of them last I heard), and they basically invented MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner, and a variety of other foundational distributed systems technologies. Jeff now leads the AI division while Sanjay continues to focus on systems infrastructure.

So yeah, "amateurs".

(Disclosure: I wrote Protobuf v2, but it was just a fresh implementation of the same design.)