I seriously doubt that that a Google engineer publicly acting arrogant has even a remote possibility of getting fired.

There was a joke that Google had interviewed everyone in “The Valley”. I interviewed at Google twice. They hire some tiny proportion of people who interview. I did notice that they try to treat people better the second time I interviewed (I got a Google mug).

Google’s hiring process is guaranteed to produce a certain amount of resentment and arrogance. My guess is that this would not be a surprise to them.

One problem that I suspect Google has is that every company has a bunch of mundane tasks that need to be performed. After making it through Google’s difficult hiring process my guess is that there is a certain amount of discontent when the majority of people discover that they are working on something pretty pedestrian.

Google is not a company that is focused on human customers. When I was looking for a cloud provider to host nderground, I looked at Google. What I discovered is that they don’t really do customer support.

One account really stuck in my mind (sorry, I don’t have the link). There was a start-up that hosted their web application on Google. They ran into some configuration limit that had to be expanded. Their application was down and they could not get anyone at Google to help them. They were only able to solve the problem because one of the founders had worked at Google and knew some people to call.

In contrast, Amazon has had a customer service focus from day one. Bezos is pretty vocal about this. If you need help, you can find it, although you may have to pay for support.

Even Microsoft is more customer oriented than Google.

The history of Google means that they are institutionally incapable of competing with Amazon Web Services. To do so would require a vision and a focus on customers that has never existed at Google.

Google’s lack of customer focus also means that they are less vulnerable to bad PR. Unless there was a Talia Jane scale storm of bad PR, I don’t think that Google would notice.