My personal experience is that the engineers at Google are really decent, capable people. I miss that crowd, actually. They were pretty solid. It's the rest of the company (including tech management) that's fucked up.

When you have a company that believes engineering is for smart people and everything else (people management, product direction) is Dumb People Work, well... who ends up fulfilling those (actually important) duties? Exactly.

However, my only gripe with Google engineers is that they tend to be closed-minded about "weird" programming languages like Haskell and Clojure.