> I think the bar for who gets to be a Googler has dropped significantly, but assumptions of prestige from without have not changed over time.
The former is obviously true, if you go back far enough. Aiming for concentrating talent, the bar you can set if you need 10-20-30 engineers a year is wildly different than what you can do if you need thousands. Same applies at team level; it's possible to put together a top world-class team of 10 people, a struggle to put together 100, and beyond that order probably not going to happen, for a host of reasons.
The latter though, doesn't seem to be true at all. I don't think I know anyone in tech who holds google technically in the same regard they were held in 15 years ago as an organization. Individual teams, sure.
I think the problem is Google is significantly less productive with their thousands of incompetents than they used to be their their dozens of professionals.
Google does not need thousands of engineers, they simply don't have enough financial pressure to stop themselves from hiring dead weight.
The former is obviously true, if you go back far enough. Aiming for concentrating talent, the bar you can set if you need 10-20-30 engineers a year is wildly different than what you can do if you need thousands. Same applies at team level; it's possible to put together a top world-class team of 10 people, a struggle to put together 100, and beyond that order probably not going to happen, for a host of reasons.
The latter though, doesn't seem to be true at all. I don't think I know anyone in tech who holds google technically in the same regard they were held in 15 years ago as an organization. Individual teams, sure.