It’s internal culture that devalues maintenance and product improvement. Launch gets you promo, maintaining gets you laid off.
I saw a lot of humble and dedicated engineers get laid off in the first round and it was a lot of people who put systems stability over their own promo. There used to be a place for those people, which is part of what made Google a decent place. That’s gone now, things will continue to break as long as fixers take the brunt of lay offs.
I think the point was that it used to be different at Google in the past(I saw it first hand). People ensuring services functioned correctly after launch were valued and rewarded appropriately.
Over time, the value given to maintenance and smooth operations decreased in reviews, esp for 'non core' services, which inevitably led to engineers doing the rational thing and prioritizing launching features, getting credit and moving on before they got saddled with pesky things like maintenance.
This also had the unintended consequence of politicizing work assignments quite a bit with more savvy political operators getting the most opportunities to launch featu ... er 'deliver impact'.
I saw a lot of humble and dedicated engineers get laid off in the first round and it was a lot of people who put systems stability over their own promo. There used to be a place for those people, which is part of what made Google a decent place. That’s gone now, things will continue to break as long as fixers take the brunt of lay offs.