I was there for three years and you're totally right that everything's been automated, but also there are a large number of product level decisions that just don't make sense. They make financial sense, sure, but then that means the engineer has drank the MBA cool aid (or not enough of it), things get killed off, and they are no longer to be trusted around things that need proper love and care put into them. Promo packets though, sure.
It's hard to read that as a human, though, and not want to build a system that lets people update bad map data? Which there used to be, but then yeah.
So yeah, the inmmates (engineers) used to run the asylum (Google), but then a group of fucking psychopaths (DoubleClick) got added to the asylum, got given meth (ad money) and shits fucking unhinged.
This is the difference with FAANGs. Software engineering is king. The inmates are running the asylum.
Google is at least 4x as efficient as other large companies I've worked for. Nearly every internal process that can possibly be automated is.