It's actually quite interesting how many of the early Googlers came from PL research backgrounds, and how it impacted Google's culture. Jeff Dean's thesis on whole-program optimization of Cecil/Vortex [1] was a classic even before Google got big, and eventually he got his boss Craig Chambers hired to write Flume [2]. Urs Hoezle (Google's first employee #9) was the founder of the Self project, which pioneered many of the dynamic optimization techniques that made it into HotSpot. Much of the HotSpot team itself was hired by Google, notably former Search SVP Ben Gomes and several less famous employees. The Plan 9 team (notably Ken Thompson and Rob Pike) went on to create Sawzall and then Go within Google; Ken Thompson was himself famous for creating C before then. Guido van Rossum (Python's creator) wrote Mondrian, the first code-review tool in Google. Lars Bak worked on BETA, then joined Urs to work on Self and Strongtalk before implementing the first version of V8 at Google. Dan Sugalski of Parrot & Perl 6 fame has held a bunch of infrastructure rules within Google.
It's like nearly everyone in a who's-who of the language design & compiler implementation community circa 2002 ended up working for Google, and the few that didn't (notably Chris Lattner of LLVM and Slava Pestov of Factor) ended up at Apple.
IMHO most of Google's woes stem from the promotion system. The incentive is to launch, promote, replace so you can get other people promoted. There's basically zero incentive to build anything durable because if you do, it means your people won't get promoted, they'll leave, your headcount will disappear, and eventually you'll find yourself marginalized and forced out.
I think it's happening at every tech company. They are now being led by tech-illiterate company hopping businesspeople rather than passionate engineers.
It's like nearly everyone in a who's-who of the language design & compiler implementation community circa 2002 ended up working for Google, and the few that didn't (notably Chris Lattner of LLVM and Slava Pestov of Factor) ended up at Apple.
[1] https://projectsweb.cs.washington.edu/research/projects/ceci...
[2] https://research.google/pubs/flumejava-easy-efficient-data-p...