This is very much how Google is on the inside. And that’s not surprising. People respond to the incentives presented. If you spend years fixing hard problems that actually affect users, and don’t get promoted, you’ll almost certainly become jaded, and start doing things that are pointless but do get you promoted. Because that’s how you make more money. And that’s the actual reason to be working.
And yeah, it shows via ye olde Google graveyard. Honestly I do think it's just a hard problem not to have, because the world tends to work on visibility combined with innovation. You can't solve hard problems and make money if nobody uses your solution because they don't know it exists. But I struggle with the balance because yeah, I'm a bit jaded.
