As someone who's been working with them a lot at the moment I'm going to say that the problems that google has are not anything to do with tensorflow or programming language theory and everything to do with the fact that the place is absolutely jam-packed with MBAs and other ex-McKinsey-type professional meeting attendees. This is really apparent if you are reasonably senior in an enterprise and deal with google as a vendor.

Every meeting I attend with them has one or two engineers[1] struggling to breathe because there are at least 6 or 7 sales people, relationship managers or other non-doing non-technical middle-management spreadsheet jockeys stealing all the oxygen in the room.[2]

I can only imagine how terrible it is to work there given that these folks have all the power internally. I've genuinely never dealt with an organization that seems this bad.

[1] who are usually pretty good.

[2] It's an internal joke at my enterprise how every meeting another new person from google shows up introduces themselves as head of some other microscopic facet of the corporate relationship.

As someone two years into working at Google this resonates hard and has absolutely been my experience as an engineer there too. It's certainly not the culture I was expecting for sure.

Longer-time Googler here. We went blindingly fast from "A few engineers decide to use the most powerful computing cluster in the world to make a meme generator because it would be a cool project" to "Let's have a sync meeting with 15 people, including five managers, to discuss buying a $20,000 test instrument, which will need to be approved by four directors, three of whom are OOO for the next two months."

Something changed recently though because yes there are those MBA types but the engineer in the room used to be not a sales type person. Now (earlier this year, just before IO), even the engineers are becoming more like salespeople in my experience. My guess is there is pressure for everyone to make more money somehow?

this is the end result of all publicly traded companies. eventually you'll hit Sears-level of selling where the CEO just straight up puts departments in conflict with each other until the whole thing just falls apart.