Oh god, the GDE program. That title used to mean something, i.e. this person is a real expert in the topic.

Now it's just thrown to anyone who's willing enough to spam linkedin/twitter with Google bullshit and suck-up to the GDE community. Think everyone in the extended Google community got quite annoyed with the sudden rise in number of GDE's for blatantly stupid things.

This pops up especially if you're organising a conference in a Google-adjacent space, as you will get dozens of GDE's applying with talks that are pretty much a Google Codelab for a topic, without any real insights or knowledge shared, just a "lets go through tutorial together to show you this obscure google feature". And while there are a lot of good GDE's, in the last 5-6 years there has been such an influx of shitty ones that the program lost it's meaning and is being actively avoided.