I worked on Sundars team at Google in 2006. He is highly technical and understands the nuance of software.
Google is paying Jeff Dean, the guy who even after was famous for a lot of things, after imagenet challenge result came out, stopped everything else, read research papers for a week, and implemented a system that separates dogs from cats with unprecedented precision.
People like Jeff Dean or Demis Hassabis are the kind of people who can make me stop everything I'm doing and listen to them when they say that the company should go into a direction.
I wonder if maybe these people are too principled to spy on people to the extent that Google does to profit the way they do. Maybe they select for a CEO who is talented, but also driven by money enough to prioritize that at all costs.
Jeff Dean may not care that much about business, as he spent all his life on scalability, but he understands more than most people the exact data needed to be collected to be able to train the neural networks for launching / improving products. He may not want to be CEO, but I don't think that's a bad trait for a CEO.
If I were a shareholder of Google/Alphabet, I would be demanding a better CEO.
I understand everything my head of engineering tells me and don't need it ELI5'd. However being told it, and being asked to do it are two different things. I would be a very useful or productive coder if I went back in to the trenches.
Would or would not?
After being in management for years I sometimes feel like I would not be, at least not without 6-12 months of doing it every day.