Attracting talent with huge sums of money just gets you people who optimize for money, and it's usually never a good long-term decision. I think it's what led to Google's downturn.
It used to be THE mecca that all engineers wanted to go to, and they almost never laid anybody off for a long stretch of time. Things changed around COVID. It's very obvious that a lot of their services have gotten much worse- my Google home can barely even set timers anymore and it used to be nearly magical at knowing what song I wanted to listen to even if I didn't know the artist or song name.
They have made great strides recently in a lot of areas, but the massive seemingly random layoffs of senior engineers is very apparent.
