As a person who views our current method of organizing firms in our economy as deeply flawed, the conclusion of this article is incredible to me. The author goes out of their way to describe a structural problem as being regularly blamed on the wrong cause - executives - and then proceeds to blame it on a different wrong cause - engineers. I appreciate the point of the article as written, which I think is to encourage engineers to push harder against the grain when their plans for the product really are the right idea, but to me the very obvious conclusion is that the structure of the business is wrong.

That is an unsatisfying conclusion as the general structure of Google is unlikely to ever change, but it does seem correct to me.

The real structural problem is that the needs of the shareholders and by some extension the needs of the high level executives and managers at Google are simply not aligned with the needs of the users. This is why the “nudges” inch along in a direction which is often at odds with the needs of the users.

The solution to this broad class of structural problem in our economy, as argued by economists like Richard Wolff, is to build our economy out of firms which are largely cooperative in structure, where the workers and members of the co-op are representative of the users of the product or service. For example if your local water company is a co-op of users, with cooperative decision making power, the co-op isn’t going to vote to raise water rates unnecessarily against their own users.

A middle ground in many cases is unions. So if anything this article is unintentionally making a case for a tech workers union at Google. This would change the structure at Google in the most significant way currently possible under today’s legal system.

I think the idea that engineers should take more responsibility is a noble one, but it’s not the real problem here. The problem is the structure of the firm.