People who want to destroy you at work (which I imagine is rampant at Google) will sometimes prevent you from doing something, but they might also encourage you to do it in such a way that you fail spectacularly.

Some of my favorites from my career:

1. PM enticing me to "volunteer" to build a PoC over the weekend, to have it ready by Monday morning – come Monday, PoC is shipped live to all international customers. It was nowhere near prod ready, it was just to demo 1 thing.

Naturally, endless tickets open asking about missing functionality, and changes to the dashboard, "Nothing works!".

I'm in Slack talking to customer support like "Sorry I don't know why they launched it, it's not even close to being done". I've had nightmares about this kinda thing before, and then it happened lol. Anyway it was easy to paint the image that I'm just trash, biting off more than I can chew, can't let me near anything, and I got fired for it. They want back to maintenance mode.

It was a simple dashboard that looked great (for investors) and solved problems for customers, but there was no way the other guys on the team were going to let me launch that thing. Rather than stop it, they just "helped" get it out early. Project dead, they never built that.

2. And on the other end where I was stopped from launching something, I've had 2 devs go in league to say that code I was writing was a huge security risk (front-end React) and kept saying in meetings "Yeah I saw some things" without pointing out exactly what.

At some point one of them just irreversibly deletes all the branches related to it, live in standup, and puffs his chest "Yeah sorry guys we're not releasing this stuff, I'm worried about code quality" basically got him promoted to CTO.

So yeah I imagine politics and mind games happen all the time at Google, and it's probably very confusing what is or is not a good idea, what will work and will not work, because of the massive distraction of everyone backstabbing and preparing to backstab.

The reverse of this is also bad. Numerous arduous processes that exist mostly because the people who ship nothing far outnumber those who do. I imagine striking a perfect balance is difficult.

The issue here is probably because you need to show how your work relates to AI to get promoted

Steve Job's mantra was that what you say No to is even more important than what you say Yes to.

Arguably dragging their heels on Apple Intelligence was an inadvertent form of this. Or years of working on a car but never releasing it. Or the other various rumored long-running prototypes/projects that never see the light of day.

There is someone with taste with authority to say no before slop is pushed onto the market, at least more often than their competitors. It's gotten worse over the years, but that reflex is still there on a relative basis.

Exercising zero political awareness or foresight or understanding of people. The problem isn't that this was a mistake. The problem is that this mistake was obvious from a mile away to anyone who pays any attention to the world.

Also, the given justification for the feature was absolutely silly.

Maybe I missed the reference like with Claude for Claude Shannon, but Bard always sounded like "Bart (Simpson)" to me.

Proper engineering requires observing and working with real-world constraints. Ignoring constraints is a form of magical thinking.

One real-world constraint is that end-users won't always do what you intend for them to with the thing you engineered.

“Communism is a good political theory, it’s just hard to prevent people from abusing it.”

“Letting everyone out of prison is a good social strategy, it’s just hard to prevent people from abusing it.”

“Making all shops operate on the honor system is a good business strategy, it’s just hard to prevent people from abusing it.”

It's not very goord.

I imagine because Bards never let the truth get in the way of a good story?

I preferred it to Gemini