The problem with this is that everybody thinks they have better ideas than they do. And engineers are probably the worst offenders in that they're smart enough to make a case that deludes themselves.

The insane billion dollar companies ship straight to production because they have PMF so anything and everything gets signal.

The same happened with Facebook and Google. And it was always cautionary advice to mimic these giants. It's a bad idea for all the rest of us.

Well, if you actually build the feedback loop then you solve this by weeding out the bad ideas.

This is like going to a startup as a senior bigtech engineer - if you can’t ship it becomes clear quite quickly.

Regarding the talent dysmorphia issue - the best way I know of getting people to step up is to give them more agency and more accountability. The new world will require that IMO.

I think Google etc are more a story of how much you can get away with when you have a strong monopoly. Their orgs are not shipping fast, nor good at shipping products. (Google in particular is incredible at infra but laughably bad at consumer products.)