For a long time—in the early days—I thought of Google as the spiritual heir of the CSRC from Bell Labs. After all, Ken Thompson, Rob Pike, Russ Cox, and probably others landed there. And Google was doing some first rate research and developing great software. They were a commercial enterprise, of course, and unlike Bell Labs didn’t have monopoly income to subsidize that research but they still produced some great results.
Now, of course, Google is just another giant corporation chasing growth and ever increasing stock prices and is even, arguably, a dying enterprise. As Paul Graham noted Google has become bureaucratized and can no longer ship anything. If you want to see how far “professional managers” have managed to drag Google from its founding principles, take a look at this post from Joe Marshall.
In it, Marshall discusses Google’s code readability program. It’s not quite what you probably imagine. It’s concerned with ensuring the readability of Google’s code base, yes, but not in the way you might think. At Google, you can’t check in your code unless you have “readability” or have it signed off by someone who does. That doesn’t sound too bad but as Marshall relates, it has devolved into a social signal that a readability holder is a member of the in group.
Take a look at Marshall’s post for the harrowing details. To me, it seems like exactly what you’d expect to see when the suits decide to concern themselves with what’s going on in engineering. It also seems like an unmistakable indicator of corporate decline.