I was part of the Flutter team for a few years. If you've used Flutter, you probably have read things by me (on Medium or Hackernoon). Not sure what your comments about Flutter have to do with this article, but I couldn't resist responding anyway. Don't expect this response to have anything to do with hiring at Google!

Even though I was a senior programmer at Google, I knew some of the people who were working on Flutter in the early days. They had a big problem when they put out the beta version of Flutter for developers to use, because NOBODY WOULD USE IT. I had started several companies in the past and had marketing and developer advocate skills, so they talked me into taking a job as the first, and for over a year, their only developer advocate. I loved it. One of the most fun jobs I ever had.

Google's weakness is that they started as (and in some ways still are) a search engine business. When they came out with their (amazing) search engine, they didn't need to do any marketing at all, and they have never completely gotten over that. Likewise, they never needed to talk to their customers (people using their search engine) to find out what they wanted. And I agree that there was no reason to do that.

The same thing was happening to Flutter. Even in the beginning, Flutter was absolutely amazing. But they had no idea how to market it, and didn't talk to many developers (the potential customers) to find out what they wanted. As usual, Google thought that "you could build it, and they would come".

So I talked to developers, most of whom had never even heard of Flutter. I started giving talks on Flutter to developers. At these talks, the developers had lots of questions and showed interest. I learned a lot.

The first article I wrote about Flutter was "What's Revolutionary about Flutter". Ironically, management didn't want me to publish it. They said "Google doesn't compare our products to other products".

It wasn't that I said anything negative about other products (I didn't!), they just never would do a product comparison, which is essential for developers, who don't want to change systems unless they know exactly what benefits they will get.

Eventually, I talked them into letting me publish it, and it was a wild success. Soon, Flutter took off, and became very popular. I can't take all the credit, because Flutter was (and is) a great product. They just needed to let people know about.

You say that Flutter "is going down in flames" because they don't have an "iron fist" guiding it. I strongly disagree. Google hired a bunch of iron fists, and they know exactly what they want and are implementing it. Once again, they just aren't talking to developers. They don't know what the important things are to implement, and instead are trying to turn Flutter into something that can do everything for everyone. You know, like what Microsoft did to Word.

Don't get me wrong, I think that Flutter could be very widely popular for a bunch of things. But this brings up another problem with Google. They reward their employees richly for making new things, less so for making existing products better. So they sometimes avoid fixing or upgrading existing products. This is why they do things like come out with a half dozen chat apps, and then let them die.

Also, once Flutter became popular, more people wanted a part of it. Suddenly Flutter was getting lots of attention, and there were often conflicts about what to do with it. These people were more concerned about gaining power than they were about building a useful product for our customers. I suppose that is inevitable, but it is still sad.

So they spend less time working on Flutter for mobile, and instead work on making it run on the web, on Mac and Windows platforms, on Google Home devices, and on and on. Not that these things aren't good things to do, but you can't just forsake your original customers, without developers noticing.

I also disagree that it is "the blind leading the blind". They are not blind. They are doing exactly what Google wants them to do and what they will get them rewarded.

I've seen this happen on other products at Google. The first project I worked on at Google, nobody was writing any documentation for it, even though it was getting ready to be released. I took it on myself to write some documentation, but my boss (who was one of the earliest employees at Google) told me that Google doesn't value documentation and I should stop. A few months later, the project was cancelled.

Also, they are not leading "the blind" because many of the people who created Flutter left the project. Some I suppose because it stopped being fun, but others likely because they weren't creating a new product anymore, and Google rewards engineers for building new products. I left because I had done what I set out to do (make Flutter popular) and it stopped being a challenge.

I hope this helps. I don't dislike Google or think they are laughable. Like all companies they have their own culture. Sometimes that culture works very well, and I'm glad I worked there. Other times, it doesn't. This is why if you look at the history of computing, it is littered with companies that once were on top, but then died (DEC, Silicon Graphics, Sun, and many more.)