As another commenter said, it's a reference to an internal parody video about how hard it is to do simple things at Google. It was made with some video generation software with stock animated characters and synthesized voices. I found Broccoli Man playing another role here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8d0TVpCIyLY

In the internally famous Google video, Broccoli Man was the jaded production-savvy SWE/SRE who told the earnest SWE (Panda Woman, I think?) what hoops she needs to jump through to launch her service. Among the most famous lines: her "I just want to serve 5TB of data" to his "I forgot how to count that low".

The video had a huge impact because it was funny and had more than a little bit of truth to it. Lots of Google infrastructure was oriented toward huge problems and required the same heavyweight processes for things that aren't so huge. It inspired a bunch of changes to simplify deploying small (by Google standards) services. Many small things are still difficult at Google, but a bit less so now.

I've only said and heard "I forgot how to count that low" as a reference to this video, making fun of the unexpected difficulty of doing something small rather than actually making fun of someone for wanting to do something small.

I can confirm that this is a reference to an entertaining internal video with Fox Girl and Broccoli Man. Fox Girl just wanted to serve 5TB of data and Broccoli Man was explaining the many, many steps of configuration, services, and monitoring that were required to do this at Google. I agree with scottlamb; I only heard "I don't know how to count that low" in reference to the video, not as a "sign of superiority" that the post describes.

The video was also described briefly here: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/04/06/5tb/

I wish I had taken a picture of that shirt before it had been run through the wash a few times. It used to look a whole lot better!

But yeah, that video was epic, and it was spot-on, too. A company that has no idea how to deal with people is going to suck at making tools _for_ people.

Funny how memes can sometimes shift culture that much. I love it.

I miss those internal Google culture things.

It’s a reference to an internal Google comedy video mocking these tendencies (one of the characters is an anthropomorphic broccoli)

I am also interested in this expression. Google searching turns up nothing, except maybe a reference to marijuana.

So maybe 'broccoli' is their way of saying craziness? Like being on Google drugs. But obviously that's not a perfect fit. Maybe its a misspelling of something else?

No one in Google uses this as an expression. It's close to something people actually do reference, but it's not described like this.