Well put! It's very difficult to know how you'd feel about experiences from your past if you plopped your current self into the middle of those past experiences. It makes me cringe to think about it!
It makes me cringe to think people believe any mention of the past and comparison to the present is automatically some age-induced hallucination, as if reality doesn't exist, changes never happen, and (in this case) 2024 Google isn't a much shittier version of the older Google.
“When I was a boy of 18, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 30, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in just twelve years.” *
There is real change, and having experienced its evolution first hand – the stumbling path, wrong turns, compromises and victories – does have value. Beyond merely acknowledging the distance between {start, end} states.
One of my regrets is I didn't query my grandparents more about their pre-WW2 and WW2 experience while they were still around. The way societies (and companies) breathe and evolve is hard to reconstruct from just books and official records & ex-post propaganda. Our lives are too short to internalize multi-decade patterns.
* Ages adjusted from 14 and 21 respectively, to account for maturity inflation since Mark Twain.
Both things are true: Things change and our perception of things changes.
I'm not the OP so I can't say for sure, but I consider it a near certainty from my own (similar) experience that he's both viewing his time at google through the rose colored glasses of youth and novelty and is correct about the negative changes to the company's culture.
