Google Employees, All Too Smart, Live in Bubble

[From article]
A Google employee says his company hires the absolute smartest people in the world and that it's a pretty big problem.
Avery Pennarun, an engineer for Google's broadband arm Fiber based in Canada, blew the whistle on what he calls the staff's overconfidence problem in a June 30 blog post he titled The Curse of Smart People.
'Smart people have a problem,' Pennarun writes, 'especially when you put them in large groups. That problem is an ability to convincingly rationalize nearly anything.'

How do these principles apply to schools like Harvard, Yale, MIT, etc? As a user of Google products I often wonder why they make so many "upgrades?" Often the improved version is worse than the old. Why not just leave it alone as long as it's working?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2683347/Smart-successful-people-cursed-Google-employee-blows-whistle-search-giants-problem-confident-geek-types-living-bubble.html

Google employee blows the whistle on search giant's problem with over-confident 'geek types living in a bubble'
Avery Pennarun is an engineer with Google's broadband service Fiber
His recent blog entry gushes over working with 'smartest people in the world'
Says their overconfidence and love of logic cuts them off from the real world
By JOSHUA GARDNER
Daily Mail (UK)
PUBLISHED: 08:41 EST, 7 July 2014 | UPDATED: 11:32 EST, 7 July 2014