> this feels like the angry ranty version of the story that [a certain set of] Googlers deserve.

If people fail to work a healthy amount on a day-to-day basis at a company, that speaks more to the company than it does those workers. People like to work on things they find interesting. Google is failing by not putting workers on interesting things, or things they want to work on.

It's not this. It's that a large number of Google engineers are risk-averse, and a lot of the rest of them love to do empire-building. All of this means that there are a lot of people saying "no" in between any individual engineer and a project. When you can't do anything like this, a lot of people just check out.

It's not even about interesting work, it's about the fact that for each person trying to do X, there are >10 trying to make sure that X doesn't get done without their approval.

It’s impossible to get anything done. Googlegeist is pretty damn clear across the company.

I’ve been getting nothing but pushback for a very critical project. Driving me nuts.

Two weeks ago I just decided I was done with meetings, doc reviews, pretty much anything that was holding me back. Time do it my way.

In that time I built what started as a proof of concept and is shaping up to be a beta. (Tool is internal facing.). Solves a hugely critical, long standing issue. Boom.

Now I’ll spend the next three months begging to get it kept alive.

But apparently I’m just lazy.

Reminds me of when I worked at AT&T, on a team that was running a very small file transfer service internal to the corporate firewall. Literally a couple week project that you'd find in a tutorial.

We were asked to check in with the accessibility folks to make sure everything was good with our emails that we were sending. It was a completely plain-text email, so just about the most accessible you can get, so I didn't expect any issues. We had a QA person who was blind look it over informally and said it was great.

The accessibility people said we had to undergo a formal review, and they could do it in six to ten, nbd.

I asked what unit of six, like six weeks? No, six to ten months. And we would have to stop sending email in the interim, for sure, definitely not permitted.

After all, our emails didn't even have all the graphics and corporate branding (and features to make the graphics and corporate branding "accessible") that were required. No, there's no guidelines, the committee has to review it.

I informed them that the CTO of the company was using the file transfer service for sending out his weekly meeting slides. No more complaints were received, and I left the company well before their timeline rolled around for review.

Would be interesting to know if the service was still operating and sending plain text emails.

Sorry, but work is work, and not every task at work is a fun problem. Sometimes you need to buckle down and grind through hard problems that aren't the most fulfilling.

But in reality, it seems that working on something that interests you, is a privilege.

Right. Most people work because they get paid to work and figure out how to think of it as interesting as a sort-of post hoc defense mechanism, if at all.