If a big investor disguised himself and spent a few weeks as a Google engineer, they would quickly become an activist investor demanding Sundar's head. The magnitude of wasted human potential due to Google's design doc culture is almost incomprehensible.
I think people are really over estimating how much effort goes into most design docs. Most development just happens and occasionally you slam out a doc to make it easier to justify CLs.
Maybe one out of ten do I see someone who went way overboard but it is really not a time sink for the average SWE.
Quite amusing reading that article, then glancing over at the Social media links where of course Twitter is now replaced by that X (which, let's be honest is one of the quickest and most effective rebrands I can think of. Hats off to the X (formerly known as Twitter) team for doing that so slickly).
