A culture of design docs tends to push everyone into a justification layer for their work. Justification culture, even when it’s peer reinforced as culture, is a fairly repressive pattern to innovators.
This system tends to prevent visionary efforts and aspirational projects because non-consensus focused efforts are quashed and thinking “outside of the accepted norm” means you’re going to be punished by the collective.
This type of system breeds groupthink, and the tradition focused nature of “the way we do things” intrinsically enforces that doing anything else frequently becomes dangerous to your career.
The valley has all manner of company cultures that rely on tropes wrapped in ‘agile’ and ‘design thinking’ verbiage that are primarily enshrined institutionalization masquerading as ‘the right way’ and usually comes with a healthy side dish of social enforcement of whatever ‘engineering cult culture’ variation that campus has arrived at.
I can’t tell you the number of people I’ve met who left Google because it was limiting their career, even when they were deeply comfortable working there. It’s not a few.
"I can’t tell you the number of people I’ve met who left Google because it was limiting their career, even when they were deeply comfortable working there."
This is why they pay so high. It's a trap. That, and the apparent "status" of working there (which has mostly worn off now)
You've expressed my frustration with what I experienced there exactly. But I do wish I could have that pay back...
Also re: "agile" I came into "agile" 20ish years ago in the form of eXtreme Programming, and it looked nothing like the cargo cult that is SCRUM or its imitations today. It was, in the end, a set of precepts to put creative power into the hands of developers and let them just get things done without management getting in the way of how -- but in exchange the customer is given the ability to say what things get done and (to some degree) when. Developers do their own estimates. "You ain't gonna need it". No big "upfront design". Refactoring and testing, architecture and design built in as a constant overhead as just standard best practices, not stories or tasks in themselves. Planning meetings are coworkers hashing things out in a room, and "stories" are sticky notes on a whiteboard expressed in minimal, non-technical terms. Standups are literally people in a circle giving a very brief update, in case anybody else is interested, not a ritual to prove you're attending work today, or to show off.
In this system, design is an emergent property of a creative group of experts working together. It doesn't preclude design documents, and it still involves architecture discussions. But it doesn't require an explicit PRD/design-doc process.
How I'd like to work in a shop like that again. I can tell you Google was the polar opposite. Everything took forever.
Yes, I left just before (1 year) the bloodletting began. There was already a whiff that GSU refreshes weren't going to be as generous and perf was going to be tougher.
And that is why Google cannot build products at all. I just had a new pixel 7 fail on me yesterday. All of this pretend "we are very smart" behaviours are also a form of a bullshit job. Companies should focus and rate themselves on actual working products.
Here's the thing though. Google builds the actually important products very well. Ads and Search. Particularly the former. The ad serving infrastructure at Google is huge and stable and makes insane money. Everything else is a sideshow.
The real quality work being done at Google is by SREs -- not SWEs -- in Ads / Search & Core. The infrastructure they build and maintain is amazing and hard to explain to people outside. I say this as a former SWE there.
This system tends to prevent visionary efforts and aspirational projects because non-consensus focused efforts are quashed and thinking “outside of the accepted norm” means you’re going to be punished by the collective.
This type of system breeds groupthink, and the tradition focused nature of “the way we do things” intrinsically enforces that doing anything else frequently becomes dangerous to your career.
The valley has all manner of company cultures that rely on tropes wrapped in ‘agile’ and ‘design thinking’ verbiage that are primarily enshrined institutionalization masquerading as ‘the right way’ and usually comes with a healthy side dish of social enforcement of whatever ‘engineering cult culture’ variation that campus has arrived at.
I can’t tell you the number of people I’ve met who left Google because it was limiting their career, even when they were deeply comfortable working there. It’s not a few.