I agree with you except for this part. People at the FAANG level sometimes actually do care about fixing problems for both good and bad reasons. Some people take pride in their work and want to see their product succeed; it can be immensely gratifying to see your work garner positive press and be used by tens of millions of people. Some people tie aspects of their identity to pride in being at a FAANG; arguably this isn't healthy but if it motivates them to create better products, who are we to judge? Some people care because being seen to point out and propose solutions brings them visibility and promotions and this, for good or of ill, does work. And last but by no means least, some care because fixing problems hopefully will increase share price and make them even wealthier.
If they actually didn't care, they wouldn't have bothered to write their posts after being laid off.
He left recently, but he wrote this blog while still being employed there, as mentioned at the bottom of the post.
Then later, you have been at Google long enough you’re relatively wealthy. You feel free to speak your mind.
For almost every amazing 'web scale' tech or developer tool that google has, there is pretty darn good open source equivalents now. Giving employees stock for retention and rewarding high performers is now much more common, as well as snacks and perks and pleasant offices.
Most companies have a more consistent hiring bar to some degree. When I joined the industry in the early 2000s, many companies didn't make candidates code at all, so half your coworkers might be fakers. Now that's a lot less common.
Say what you will about the pros and cons of whiteboard coding, but some coding to have a consistent bar is probably a good thing overall for the industry.
Google still has pretty darn good free food and pays pretty well, and most people who work there are at least fairly smart. It still has plenty of hard problems to solve at scale, which is the most fun part of the job.
However, it's not 2007, where the choices were the fantasy land of Google or Office Space. Now there are a lot of great companies to work for.
People tend to think big tech companies are somehow immune from human behaviors but I would counter that any organization beyond a certain size is going to have a fair amount of dysfunction (bureaucracy, politics, sociopaths, etc.) it doesn't matter what industry the company is in.
FAANG are likely to operate similarly to IBM, GE, ATT, and any other large mega-corp except they have hip furniture and cafe's.