It's a quarter million people (including temps/vendors/contractors) over almost 28 years. There's no "just" here.

It's extremely inconsistent internally as well.

Look up the slime mold analogy for Google.

Bottomless buckets of money produced by their web monopoly so they can continue on at pace, virtually regardless of how inefficiently they do it.

It’s like the USA. How do they keep people on track? They don’t. You delegate and hope things work. When they have Google Ads and Search they can experiment a lot and “waste” a lot in search.

They haven't solved management and definitely don't keep things "on track" globally. However, they definitely don't have the problem that nobody does anything and nobody has any expertise.

It's also worth noting, Gemini 3.5 Pro never came out.

Having worked there (but only in a small part of it that eventually got absorbed into Gemini), it's some combination of:

* The eye of Sauron (management) can make specific spots (e.g. Gemini) push harder (and attract the motivated people at the company and be selective)

* They hire a lot better than average (Generally from the top 10%, hotter places in Google are more selective)

* They have a promo process that gives career motivated people a way to prove themselves (not always aligned with things being on the right track ofc, and not always non-political, but they definitely do something)

* Redundancy in teams causes them to compete (not necessarily productively)

Of course, there are other downsides not listed here (insane bureaucracy for launches, GDPR/BCID compliance, etc, etc), but a lot of what makes Google possible is the insane amounts of cash Search throws off.

I think the google graveyard is a partial answer to that question.

> How on earth do they keep an engineering org on the 'right track'?

What if the answer is "they don't"?