I have to question the judgment of the manager talking shit about another team and its leader to a junior engineer. Going and looking at the author's LinkedIn history (it's available via his About page) makes it pretty clear that this was happening within Google.

I think it speaks poorly of their manager's professionalism, and what sort of behavior they consider to be acceptable with regard to colleagues.

If someone shits on the floor, sometimes you have to let it sit and stink until someone else makes them clean it up.

If you clean it up, you're taking responsibility for it that might not be yours to take, and in an organization with many managers, that can permanently wreck your chances for advancement if those above you perceived your involvement as intruding on their territory, or trying to make them look bad, or trying to make the culprit look bad, and so on, and so forth.

Rarely is it "wow, there was a problem and they fixed it, without even being asked!"

Organizations that are rational and have good management let people take responsibility like that, and it's a good thing. Most organizations are not like that, and the bigger they get, the more likely it is you'll have an adversarial, territorial, hyper-political environment with saccharine smiles and backstabbing, and doing anything that even hints at negatively framing a manager, even just in their own minds, is sufficient reason to make it not your problem.

If you have good reasons to fix it, or if it's your problem for reasons that make management look good, you have the opportunity to fix an issue and be appreciated for it. Otherwise, it's just not worth jumping on other teams' grenades.

It'd be nice if everyone was rational and competent and secure and anti-fragile, but humans kinda suck in groups.

Not sure if I read this the same way you did. At least, this didn't read at all to me as "talking shit," but rather sharing their professional opinion on the (un)likely success of the project. Keeping thoughts to yourself isn't professional, it's avoidant. Especially when it has the chance to directly affect you.

Having worked with both kinds, I have generally preferred three-dimensional human beings to cut-outs from a compliance training manual. Being fundamentally kind and collaborative is prerequisite, of course. But so is having a modicum of spite, misanthropy, pettiness, irony, and dark humor. An appreciation for the tragic sense of life. How do you get through the day if all you get from your coworkers are patriotic slogans?

The entire post devolved into a treatise on playing politics and trading political capital in a specific corporate culture.

I’ve seen people who played the game well at Google or Amazon fall completely flat on their ass at a different company, thinking the game hasn’t changed (or that there even is a game), barely lasting a few months on the C suite before being softly moved along.

If you read his article he said he is from Google.

What shit did he talk about the team's leader? "That project is going to fail" is talking shit? Nothing could be more objective than that.

unfortunately this is the reality of politics esp in big tech companies