Their worry is that competition will be started by the people they've not hired and kept on the bench. I'd imagine a large amount of their top-level hiring is driven by taking minds off of the market, more than optimising their output.
I don't work at a FAANG company, nor have I ever been to SV, nor do I know anyone who works at one of the many enormous tech companies around SV.
In the TV show Silicon Valley they have characters who sit around unassigned doing nothing at the Google-like company in the show. Does this actually happen? Are there people hired at these companies who just don't have a project? Its entirely feasible that Google could afford to do this just to create a dearth of engineers in the area.
Here it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14943146
The show is (by design) over the top. But there is a piece of truth in it. That’s why it’s funny for everyone who has been at these companies because everyone can see real-life resemblances.
Before someone downvotes me: I am implying that SOME people are like this. By no means the majority or god-forbid everyone. Resting till vesting is a real thing though.
Salaries are also deductible, so they get the talent in their pool, off the market, adding a small % of value, whilst also being able to offset taxes on record profits.
It's a pretty nice win-win for them.
Eg. Fuchsia OS might have been started because Google saw a bussines oppurtunity in writing an open source capabilities OS. Or, it might have been started to keep smart OS engineers from leaving the company.
Organizational/planning/managerial waste of expensive developer time is real and huge. I'd be surprised if companies the size of Google didn't do similar things some of the time, and if their management's a little more clueful than average they might even make such light-weight or non-assignments official and highly visible to make them easier to account for.
Replace Java with Go (not much of a change, all things considered!) and that's exactly what Google seems to be doing. It's a big problem for them in the long run because it does mean accruing a mass of technical debt that will not necessarily be easy to get rid of. You'd expect "smart" folks in a tech-oriented enterprise to do better than that, especially if they're unutilized otherwise, but it can't be easy to do that sort of management at Google scale.
How would person X discover this?
Android has a bit of a better claim, as more of the userspace stack was written for it. It also wasn't started by Google (although they bought Android Inc. years before it was released publicly).
The idea it's just a Linux flavor is sort of like saying iOS is "just a build of OSX". I.e., gross simplification.
Yes. There are entire teams full of such people.
go out there, talk to people, find if it's really bullshit, and if it is, change it. there are so many interesting problems to fix that nobody should have time to do bullshit jobs