> Aren't they hiring supposedly top-tier talent and paying them top-dollar?

Yes. But you assume they work on pesky things like "bug fixing" which is generally not how you get promoted, and since these people are basically all about the money, stuff like that doesn't get fixed.

> Surely they have a test suite and surely this would fail in that test suite.

Surely, but surely it doesn't, because then the deploy would be blocked, surely. More often than not, insufficient automated testing for the not-happy/average path tends to be what lets bug like this leak into production.

> that they hire a bunch of 22 year olds from prestigious schools who have never had a job

Indeed, because these people have nothing to compare to, they don't know why they feel so depressed, distracted or out of motivation even though they have "the best job in world", and even though deep inside they know what they contribute to is slowly making the world a worse place to live.

For quite a long time the company has been oriented around product managers who are paid for shipping something new, not for any sort of maintenance (occasionally posts appear on HN from people who got a poor performance review because they weren’t building visible new features and instead spent time fixing bugs). This is also why so many products are killed that it’s become a meme: the company’s incentives drive this behavior.

the culture has been eating itself from the inside out with narcissitic bullshit for a decade+ now.

> testing these giant companies do for features

I think they all got rid of QA, and developers don't have enough time to actually care about what they're building/fixing.

GitHub/Microsoft is incredible at this. The feature for selecting and closing multiple PRs was broken for weeks even after I and others reported it. I saw duplicate "A user you've blocked has contributed to this repository" warnings (two of them, one above the other) for weeks too before that was fixed.

I've stopped reporting issues as well, as it seems to have no effect on how quick it takes, so I don't think it's an issue of not being aware of them.

Yes! As a frequent user of youtube queues, it feels like they have a dedicated team of one or two junior devs to futz around with it on a weekly basis and zero QA, because it is always breaking in new, unexpected ways.

"Everything is broken" used to mean "all software is insecure because the inherent complexity of a modern software stack ensures it's beyond the abilities of the average developer to eliminate all attack vectors" [1].

Now it just means [2].

1: https://medium.com/message/everything-is-broken-81e5f33a24e1

2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pndhO5DcSI0

Google typically has very, very thorough tests.

I don't have any insider information here, but it's likely that the creator of this menu is long gone (it looks old!) and this feature is in maintenance mode. Someone--or a bot--just trying to keep the build green may have disabled the test without understanding that it was pointing to a real issue.

Or they noticed but cannot be bothered to fix.

"and we increased test coverage by 10% on Q3" doesn't get you promoted unfortunately

They were looking for another place they could cram Nano's Banana down people's throats.