Maybe? Companies of all shapes and size do poor decisions. On the other hand, the nature of some projects require some time of R&D to find out whether something is worthwhile or not.

> Ideal working environment is when there are a lot of worthwhile projects and not enough people. That's when you get a choice of what to work on, that's when the company really values the employees, etc.

I am not sure I agree with this. Ideally you have resources to pursue all projects considered worthwhile.

> That is absolutely not how it is now, at any of these companies. There are way too many people and not enough work. The less ambitious employees deal with this by hiding and doing next to nothing. The more ambitious ones fight each other for scraps of meaningful work that are not yet being done by someone they can't fight. It's not a dignified place to be either way.

That was really not my experience there, although I did not work for Google specifically (perhaps reality there was different). There was actually a lot of work to be done, although a plenty of that work was, in my opinion, overhead due to how things were structured and how decisions were made, many times from the top down.

I left because of it. I felt like it was the place I worked the hardest and I was at the same time the least productive.