Tech Blogger Reveals Serious Bias in Google's Internal Promotion System, Only New Product Development Leads to Promotions and Rewards
Tech blogger Gergely Orosz has revealed serious biases in Google's internal promotion system, stating that only the development of new products leads to promotions and rewards, while maintaining existing systems or user migrations is seen as having zero value.
This incentive structure has led Google to repeatedly launch similar new products each year, resulting in resource waste and internal inefficiency.
Developer Nathan Clark pointed out the extreme fragmentation of Google's AI ecosystem: models are split into Pro, Ultra, and Flash versions, Gemini and AI Studio are disconnected, developer tools have conflicts between Spark, Jules, and old and new Antigravity IDEs, Gemini CLI has been abandoned, and the relationships between video and image tools are chaotic.
Source: Public Information
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Gergely Orosz has long observed the engineering culture of major tech companies, and this disclosure continues his criticism of Google's "new product worship" mechanism, which he has previously pointed out leads to code decay and the accumulation of technical debt.
Since 2023, Google has accelerated the parallel development of multiple versions of Gemini and rapid iterations of new tools, heavily skewing resources towards new projects like Spark, Jules, and Antigravity. The motivation is to use "new products" as promotion signals to stimulate internal competition, but this has resulted in fragmentation issues such as the disconnection between Workspace and personal versions, and the abandonment of CLI, requiring developers to maintain multiple parallel systems simultaneously.
Similar to how Meta faced multiple restructurings of Messenger due to similar mechanisms, and Microsoft's coordination costs between Teams and Copilot, Google's AI product line is currently under pressure to transition from rapid expansion to internal governance, with its first-mover advantage being severely eroded by fragmentation.
Essentially, this reflects capital concentration: promoting only new products shifts pricing power from long-term system maintenance and user experience to short-term new project showcases. The mechanism ties performance assessments to "visible innovation," leading engineers to prioritize greenfield development over optimizing existing systems, ultimately creating a negative feedback loop of product matrix expansion and declining developer experience.
ABAB News · Law of Cognition
Only rewarding the creation of new things leads to the perpetual recreation of similar things. Internally, promotions focus on the "new," while external users see "chaos"; fragmentation is an inevitable result of misaligned incentives. Maintainers go unrewarded, innovators face internal competition, and ultimately, developers and users bear the cost.