I take treatment ideas to real doctors. They are skeptical, and don’t have the time to read the actual research, and refuse to act. Or give me trite advice which has been proven actively harmful like “you just need to hit the gym.” Umm, my heart rate doubles when I stand up because of POTS. “Then use the rowing machine so can stay reclined.” If I did what my human doctors have told me without doing my own research I would be way sicker than I am.

I don’t need empathy. I don’t need bedside manner. Or intuition. Or a warm hug. I need somebody who will read all the published research, and reason carefully about what’s going on in my body, and develop a treatment plan. At this, AI beats human doctors today by a long shot.

Here's my data. Google values consensus - fact. This "wisdom of the crowds" philosophy was core to founding google - Larry & Sergey's brilliant insight that the collective votes of hyperlinks was a stronger signal than things like H1 tags and HTML titles in picking good search results.

But consensus means, in a literal sense, that everybody needs to agree on the right thing to do. Problem is in reality people don't always agree. So what happens when the group needs to reach consensus but people disagree? Since Google doesn't have a respectful way to disagree, the holders of divergent opinions must be minimized - either pushed out of the group or proven to be not smart enough for their opinions to be valid.

God I hate myself while I'm writing this. I left for a reason.

Google needs to celebrate heroes. Like Jeff Dean. Or Sanjay Ghemawat. Those are Great Men. They are "Living Gods" because they solved Really Hard Problems. Getting into that class of people requires being a "lead" which necessarily means other people around you aren't leading. So you need to prove why you're worthy of being the "lead" which means proving the others around you aren't. This is toxic masculinity. Not solving hard problems.

> choose between doing what’s best for users or what’s best for their career

But the root cause isn't that people want to get promoted. It's that Google promotes people for the wrong reasons. Put very simply, the problem is that Google promotes people for "solving hard problems" not for solving USEFUL problems.

Imagine if people did get promoted for fixing bugs instead of building a new product (to be abandoned)! Or if maintaining an existing system was somehow on par with building a new system (which is just a bigger more complicated version of something perfectly good). The googler would say "well those useful problems are too easy to merit a promotion. Anybody can solve easy problems - we're google, and we're too smart to work on those easy problems." Grow up.

Y'all value the wrong things. That's why your culture is broken.