Maybe 10 years ago when they were pushing the envelope. Nowadays, I just don’t see it to be honest. There are a few brilliant engineers for sure, but the new generation are mostly Leetcoders that brag about TC on another social network. You can see it in their open source code too. Critical bugs not fixed for an entire year. You read the code and it doesn’t stand out as anything out of the ordinary. I get the feeling most are focused on promotion packages to raise their TC.

If you read what the majority of them recommend, its similar to the banker's path in the early 2000s. Graduate from Ivy League, spent 3 years at FANG, then 2 years at Ivy League MBA, then back to FANG or join a startup for a few years so you can get a title bump when you do go back to FANG. The type of people that join Google nowadays aren't the type of people that were early employees. They have a very standard charted course to their careers.

Google has reach maturity stage of the company. They have leeway to screw up like what Microsoft did with Windows and Office in the early 2000s. Will they have the ability to push out something completely new and amazing like Gmail or Google Maps (although Maps was a clone of Mapquest, they executed better), where the end users aren't developers themselves? I highly doubt it with an organization as big. There will be a lot of politics involved to get anything done. They have lost the talent to innovate.