When they say unambiguous they mean chaotic

I think I already mentioned that a Director once told me that I was looking for structure as if it were a bad thing. Building things to scale, which is what Google does, implies creating more structure in the form of a repeatable and scalable process, does it not? What the issue was is that you reach a ceiling. You may want to achieve and do better, but the top down Google culture dictates that you serve at their pleasure and have to play this guessing game with moving targets and leaders who contradict themselves.

Google is not known for having exceptional leadership - Google it, lol. All of big tech has been lacking in quality leadership since the beginning and there is a huge and growing black hole of self-awareness and emotional intelligence to acknowledge this deficit.

Google is a very chaotic place. Very challenging for introverts and often impossible for the differently-abled or neurodivergent. Those groups have much less visibility and there was never a claim to build products or experiences for them like at Apple. Google is not the utopia it claims to be, but just another company trying to maintain or grow its sphere of influence and control. Think about Gemini - with all its failures from the beginning, has it actually surpassed that or does Google just enough users in its ecosystem to show high numbers using a product that isn't top quality? Google isn't even the first to market here or with any other product nowadays. (Note: I almost interview for a Gemini analysis team.)

Any structure at Google is confined to the management hierarchy and the internal Google docs, but even those often lack critical oversight and accountability. The freedom within Google docs can allow for individuals to take the initiative, but you can be overly criticized or reprimanded if you guess wrong - so they're not really into moving fast and breaking things, more like moving fast and breaking people.

Maybe as a start-up this "ambiguity" was meant to encourage creativity and growth, but now that Google is well into its monopoly phase, it has weaponized "ambiguity" to instill fear and anxiety and cause burnout and depression, especially for high achievers, who do still exist at Google despite often being out voiced by those with hubris as their most (only?) useful skillset.