I guess I'm at a point in my life where "people go home on time and nobody wants to work entire weekend just for funsies!! :-<" is no longer as scary portent of doom as it may have been intended by the author.

Other note - I understand the author's point of "we don't have executive vision, engineers do random things and sometimes it works". But I've also read posts complaining of "engineers are not allowed to try things, we are forced to follow executive orders".

Google is a massive organization. The only thing that's likely true of majority of the disparate, heterogeneous, wildy different teams, is that they're unlikely to feel like a 5 person early-stage startup. At that size there'll be governance and HR and investors and stakeholders and SEC and politics and competing priorities and layers of middle management etc. All of which is not everybody's cup of tea granted. But not all of which is necessarily nihilism and doom.