[Disclaimer: Two-time Googler here, obviously speaking only for myself.]
Sure it does. Collaborative software development is a low-pass filter, not a high-pass one. If you put 100 people on a team and tell them to develop a product, the product quality will track the least controversial ideas, not the best. With more people, the set of uncontroversial ideas gets progressively smaller, and trends toward the features that nobody really cares about because those are the only ones that don't provoke strong emotional reactions. The simple fact that you added more people is what made the product shitty, not that the people were incompetent or poorly-skilled.
I've been in design discussions where we've had a room full of incredibly accomplished people, folks who've written major open-source projects or launched consumer products with billions of users, and the eventual decision was more brain-dead than anything that any one individual in that room could've come up with. And everybody knew it too, but you don't want to piss off highly intelligent and accomplished people, so you make the decision that everyone can kinda live with rather than the one that will wow users.
The lesson here should be "Don't hire unless you absolutely need to", not "Google hires stupid people."
Surely this is a consequence of management and corporate ideology, rather than a natural outcome of having some arbitrary number of devs in a room. A good project manager doesn't allow great ideas to die on the vine unless there is pressure to do so, and that pressure is not coming from the team or customers -- it's coming from the top of the company.
For all of his and Apple's faults, Jobs aggressively fostered a culture of "good is the enemy of perfect," which placed the focus on polished features instead of the dull hum of incremental development. And that bucking of homogenization is what led to such a rabid base of loyalists, as consumers tuned in to that momentum of (albeit perceived) innovation.
Google, on the other hand, has never really had a fan base to speak of, and the few remaining loyalists are rapidly disappearing. I genuinely have never met a consumer or dev who believes Google is at the bleeding edge of any feature. That is wholly reflective of Page and Brin's ideologies, who fostered a culture of "over-engineer, refactor and ship incomplete," which is exactly what you're describing. Angular, for example, is the perfect representation of the Page/Brin ideology, and that's why nobody uses it.
HP, IBM, Cisco, Sun, Netscape, Google - they were all visionary when they were small and bloated and inefficient once they got big. Apple too - do you remember the late 80s and early 90s, when Apple had a zillion PowerMac models, plans for Copland that never shipped, multiple new programming languages, the Newton, and basically a lot of ideas but shitty execution?
Steve Jobs basically managed to rein it in by being an asshole - he had both the product taste to be right, the charisma to convince everyone else of it, and the insensitivity to not care whose feelings he hurt. Elon Musk is similar. But note that the flip side of this is often a crisis of succession: IMHO Apple really hasn't been that visionary or helpful since Jobs died, and have basically pushed out a series of incremental improvements.
Don't put 100 people in a room. Put 4 or 5 in a room max.
You need a feedback loop to sanity check features some how, but you also need vision and the courage to release stuff that not everybody wants. Every good product I've worked on has had team members who thought the newest features were stupid. Too bad, you aren't the target audience, get over it.
Accept that you'll be releasing features that are either wildly liked or hated. You are going to be hitting both ends of the bell curve more often this way, embrace and accept it.
The discussion here isn't about code. It's about quality of engineers hired. If their software and product quality is steadily declining then that says something about their team. Perhaps they are incredible coders but don't have good business skills or "customer obsession".
> If their software and product quality is steadily declining then that says something about their team.
My understanding is that Google internal politics are completely dominated by their promotion process [1]. I view the outcome of google products not as the result of poor hires, but the inevitable consequence of the organization's incentive structure. If pay (doubling or tripling) is dependent on launching new stuff, your best people will ship new stuff! If pay does not go up for maintaining old stuff, it will not be maintained. If pay does not go up for improving old products, old products will not be fixed. It doesn't matter which people you plug into that system, you will always get the same results.
User opinion is one of many success metrics that Google tracks but it isn't the most important one. Up until the recent recession their stock performance indicated that their product quality has been doing just fine.
That's not a valid metric. Every effective monopoly has a climbing stock price while it's product quality is declining, this is why they have such a terrible time when there's finally a market upset, they can have decades of bad practices to overcome just to stop their descent.
