Firms at Google’s scale face a hiring trade-off: they sacrifice idea-generation for “fungibility”.
At that scale, HR departments become more prone to confirmation bias, begin over-fitting, and fall prey to Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
Ultimately, firms end up in situations like today, where there are lots of working engineers who can bang out identical Leetcode solutions all day long, but too often struggle to effectively synergize their work with other developers, or generate novel ideas.
There isn’t a great solution around this problem for firms at scale though, because they’re right to operate this way from a short-term profit-seeking and survival perspective, but they’re still missing out on ideas and other opportunities that will ultimately cost them their survival in the long-run.
So, what’s a firm to do in order to cast a wider net and diversify its idea-generation process?
Run a competition.
Genkit is the most developer-friendly AI toolkit available, was released contemporaneously with the Gemini competition, and entrants were encouraged to use it, which was a smart move on Google’s part in order to cast a wider net and bring in more diverse ideas.
That you, I, or anyone else were able to participate and submit our projects on time is beside the point, because we probably aren’t the real maverick idea-generators who would benefit the most from higher-level tools like Genkit, and then pass those ideas on to Google for the competition.
Good for us, but not great for users, the world, or even Google.
There are smarter people than anyone here who are struggling to work and compete for a limited number of hours a day from a library computer or a homeless shelter, and those people will benefit the most from tools like Genkit, and the novelty of their ideas will benefit Google the most in a competition like this.
Any engineer who doesn’t realize there are smarter people than themselves going to waste in society needs to check both their Ego and the statistics.
Ultimately, whether it’s this year or next decade, the presently mild stagnation of ideas in corporate tech firms will escalate into a full-blown crisis, which we know will happen because we’ve seen it happen time and time again as the natural result of creative destruction.
Despite the ubiquity of its user-facing apps, Google knows its real future lay in providing developer-facing solutions like databases and AI/ML platforms, which makes tools like Genkit more critical to Google’s competitiveness, and even its long-run survival, than Gmail, Maps, or YouTube.
Google’s long-run competitiveness likely depends on how many developers it can get to use tools like Genkit, and how fresh it can keep its well of ideas, whether those ideas spring internally, through acquisitions, or through competitions like this.
Google knows it needs diverse ideas for its own evolutionary survival, not to meet DEI metrics, which is largely why it hosts these kinds of competitions, and it knows that it needs diverse developers to adopt its solutions as the foundation of the future.
It’s in Google’s own best interest in the long-run to schedule a competition like this at a pace that optimizes the novelty of ideas generated, not merely at a pace to compete with the release schedule of a competitor’s products, for example.
I’m sure that Google has received lots of competitive entries, but waiting until Genkit was better documented and tested, and I think giving the contest a sixth month schedule, would have generated even more competitive and novel entries, which would have been in everyone’s best interest.
The Genkit team is phenomenally generous with their time, and I’m very grateful to the organizers of the competition because it was really fun and well-orchestrated, but I can’t help but wonder if its schedule wasn’t chosen to maintain mindshare more than optimize for novelty.
Personally, I’m competing for everyone who hasn’t otherwise been given the opportunity.
Good luck to everyone.