Wow. I've gotten glimpses of this from friends who have almost all now left Google. From the outside, it seems that the political structure in place within Google exists purely to perpetuate it's own existence as a political structure, vs driving towards a deliberate balance of customer value/employee happiness.

My friends used to talk about how they loved it there, and got to work on impactful things. But slowly that shifted to "all we do is take a half year to add a field to a proto", and then "at least it pays well".

I don't have anything in particular to add here, but it seems a shame that Google has fallen so far.