Design docs are great, but Google's writing culture is highly fragmented and quite disjointed. I much prefer Amazon's writing culture (despite hating absolutely everything else about Amazon's culture.)
Amazon uses writing to bias for action in meetings. Their culture has DRIs (or dictators) who have authority to make the call, with such authority coming with some level of accountability to the decision made. At Amazon the doc is read, parties discuss, and decision made. At Google the doc is rarely entirely read, mostly commented on, and no decision made until all stakeholders align on a commonly agreed direction.
The amazon way is much less toxic, but does come with a need for writer to invest heavily on a high quality doc. Personally, the Amazon way is better but only works due to their peculiar culture.
That wasn't my experience at Google. We would consistently start work in parallel to getting our design docs reviewed, maybe waiting a day or two for the first batch of comments.
You could usually tell which parts are not going to be controversial and start with those.
Those are usually called STOs for people who make the final call, not DRIs, from what I saw in my tenure there. The Amazon doc is a great concept when there are single threaded owners, however Amazon also has had culture and growth issues where “alignment” (like Google) became more important as team and orgs grew with multiple doc “owners” in direct contradiction of what Bezos used to preach so it just becomes design by committee for new features and products. Org dependent of course but I think that was the Day 2 culture seeping in as Bezos moved on and the company grew.
This highly depends on team and project. The more ambiguous your project is the more likely no decision will be made and you will instead need to commit to a follow-up meeting with more docs and more people.
Amazon has famously high turnover, doesn't it? I wonder how much their investment in docs is downright critical to keeping the ship afloat—otherwise people leave and take all their knowledge with them. But if it's written down you can pass the torch.
After working there for 6 years, I haven't seen a single up to date design doc. At best a high level diagram.
They are outdated as soon as implementation start, by different degrees depending on the project.
Side note but I think this average tenure number hasn't been updated in a very long time. In London for example, a third of employees have been here for more than 5 years.
US (where bulk of employees are) is still pretty close to 2 years unless that changed a lot in just a few years (I was a sr. dev manager there and worked there for around 6.5 yrs). This is pretty similar to the rest of big tech though except for Microsoft. England and Europe in general is a bad comparison since they have fewer options and very different working expectations.
