Submitted 11 months ago by L4s@lemmy.world [bot] to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.businessinsider.com/former-googler-letter-culture-eroded-layoffs-sundar-pichai-2023-11
‘Morale is at an all-time low’: Ex-Googler writes scathing latter slamming layoffs and ‘eroded’ culture::An ex-Googler wrote a 1,500-word letter criticizing the firm and CEO Sundar Pichai’s lack of “visionary leadership.”
“Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision,”
That’s a bar.
The googlers i know spend a lot more time than I’d expect on performance reviews. Not really on like… Doing shit. Just reviewing and selling what little is done to get that next pay bump.
These recent months it seems the reviewing and selling, the hype-mongering, is more about remaining employed than it is a pay bump.
It’s a sad state of affairs when the inexperienced code-olympiads you hire need to transition partially from devs-as-engineers to introverts-as-showmen. It’s like they hired apples, made them work like oranges, and now only keep the ones who can also be dolphins.
Sundar Pichai has got to be the worst CEO in the silicon valley period
Google has managed to produce next to nothing of value with a dreamteam of engineers the likes of which no one else had access to
From one uninspired leadership decision to the next thry’ve just been sitting there making GCP more like aws and bolstering what’s already there while every once in a while adding a new product to the Google graveyard
Google is one of the most engineer driven companies out there. Their engineers are simply massively overrated. A ton of leetcoder kiddies got into FAANG companies over the years and a lot of them are just plain shit as professional developers.
Their hiring process is the reason why leetcoder kiddies get in there in the first place. 3 seperate coding rounds with questions not even related to the domain that you need to solve in a timer of 45 mins.
They did produce something of value, Stadia, but instead of investing in it further with some exclusive games to show off its capabilities and lure more people and developers in … or just outright signing a deal to paying for the development cost to port some hits or Call of Duty to Stadia, they wrote it off, refunded everything, and shut it down.
It’s a major fail, they tried next to nothing to fix their messaging issues, failed to invest in areas that would’ve made a difference, and didn’t stick with it to challenge people’s beliefs that Stadia was going to be shut down.
They should’ve:
Made a guarantee that if they shut down within the next 10 years, every game you play will be refunded in full.
This would have given people confidence, but really doesn’t reflect on Google as a whole, and just reinforces that they as a company will kill things at a moment’s notice.
I think in addition to all your points, they could have distanced Stadia from Google, and announced a new gaming company under the Alphabet umbrella. The hardware bundles they were selling with Chromecasts probably wouldn’t have been a thing, but I’m not sure if that would have been a bad thing. Having stadia as a completely separate entity from Google may have given it the breathing room it needed to get a good user base, without the stigma of google killing products.
with some exclusive games
Sweetie, you don’t just get heavy-hitting exclusives right out the gate.
In what world does Google shell out enough cash for a game that’s so good it pulls people to Stadia when the developers can just sell their good game on already-proven platforms?
They’d have to make their own studio or contract it out. I never saw Google shelling out $50m for a AAA game, and small-time shit is stuff people can just get on their phones.
Yup, he’s the absolute worst. I can’t think of a single product that Google has even improved during his tenure as CEO… let alone a product that he successfully launched on his own. All he can do is make existing products more expensive.
Look at how he completely lost his shit when chatgpt was released - probably a huge part of the reason he lost it is cause he realized he’d have to actually do something useful instead of just squeezing more blood from the collective stone of all Google’s existing products. His claim to fame is creating Chrome. What fucking good is that? Web browsers have existed since the time he was born. There’s nothing to innovate there, and there never has been. It’s clear: he’s not an innovator.
Whoever takes over after he’s gone is going to be in for a hell of a time. The only thing he’s created for Google is a shit-ton of anti-trust lawsuits. The company is an empty husk at this point. There’s nothing left for them to become.
As a counter-point, what new services or products have any of the FAANG companies released that the average person uses, over the last few years?
Big tech was built on a handful of runaway successes, and building on moonshot ideas, allowing engineers to work on “the next big thing” without fear of liability.
Now, if it doesn’t work, you get laid off. At least if you worked for a startup, you’d get enough equity to make a ton of money if it works out…
Pichal is shit, but so are Zuck, Tim Cook, Andy Jassy, and the two at the helm at Netflix.
Facebook: messenger for kids, which is messenger but with good parental controls. Believe me as a parent I want more products to look at this.
Also Threads. Jury’s still out if it wins but it’s a good product.
Netflix buying the long tail of excellent old Android Indie Games to offer as a platform benefit is a fun idea, jury’s still out on that one too.
But imho the one that’s winning at product development isn’t faang, it’s Microsoft.
You mean MAANA? I genuinely don’t know why Netflix is included, it should just be MAAA…
From a shareholder’s perspective, which is the only perspective C suite executives care about, he’s been the best CEO of all time for Google.
Sure, in the short term. I’ve switched to DDG and I’m not getting another Pixel when I need a new phone, and hoards of tech savvy people are feeling the same way. Dissatisfaction is causing them to lose customers and talent.
Eventually, they’ll start feeling it in their bottom line. And by then it might be too late to change course.
Google became Apple
Has he increased short term profitability?
Was GO made during Pichai’s tenure? I don’t use GO but apparently they got the guy who wrote C on it so…?
No, Go dates back to when Page and Brin were running things.
Google’s decisions in the time Pichai has been CEO, have been anti-consumer all the way. Not the fun conpany it used to be, now users are beind forced out of adblockers and a products promise is abandoned way too often.
I am probably the perfect google customer. I used google search when it still had an exclamation point. I got my gmail account by invite in ‘04. Downloaded chrome on day one. I used nexus/pixel phones almost exclusively
Today, ddg search on Firefox. I am using an iPhone. I still have the gmail account but I am slowly migrating away from it. I am done with google. They don’t produce anything that has any value for me anymore.
Big oof on the iphone, mate. You can have an android phone with CFW that doesn’t have all of the google telemetry and bloatware.
Same, but opera/firefox, Zenfone, and proton Mail. Not really a fan of apple either
I’m doing all the same as you
What I’m not moving away from though is Google Maps and Photos. No good alternatives exist
Same. I have my name as my gmail and get an absurd amount of missent emails.
LoL no shit. You don’t even need to be an employee to figure this out. Even as a customer I feel that way. I’m looking to leave Google altogether.
I went to modify my 2018 Google Wi-Fi router to add a simple port forwarding rule, and the functionality is completely GONE from their already shitty Google Home app. It used to be so easy and simple on the old Wi-Fi app. I’m never buying another Google device.
This company has reached enshittification nirvana.
Google home has become an absolute shit show. It has awful UI and UX. Truly an amazing feat.
It’s still there for me in “Advanced networking”->“Port Management”.
I’ve switched to Kagi for search, and Fastmail for email. Though a bit more difficult to escape Google when you’ve got a pixel 8 pro ;)
Let me introduce you to graphene os :)
Rather easier I’d say, as it has an unlockable bootloader, unlike most other phones.
If you have a pixel phone, there are completely de-Googled android operating systems available for them with full hardware support.
Actually, it’s easiest to escape google with a Pixel, even more than an iPhone with GrapheneOS (only if not a carrier phone though).
I left Google 5-6 years ago. I do occasionally use YouTube, but that’s about it.
It’s surprisingly easy to get used to once you do it.
Yeah Google kind of sucks now and everyone paying attention knows. They kill a lot of products and don’t really make anything new and good.
Their search returns too many ads and SEO garbage sites.
They can’t unify on messaging. Talk, hangouts, allo, duo, meet… Just pick one. But I guess that doesn’t look as good on someone’s resume.
Frustrating part is how G+ coulda gone somewhere if they’d not been dumbasses rolling it out
Literally even the circles feature would have been so great
The letter is a post on his own blog . Hard to dilute into a summary so I recommend reading it get more context. But it seems to have boiled down to:
How It Was:
How It Is Now:
This is the best summary I could come up with:
An ex-Google employee has published a highly critical letter attacking the firm’s “eroded” culture and accusing CEO Sundar Pichai of lacking “visionary leadership.”
Posting on his blog, Hickson said he was “very lucky” to have experienced the early days of the company, where executives were candid with staff and ambitious experimentation was encouraged — but said the search giant’s culture had since “deteriorated.”
And he is far from the first employee who has criticized the company’s increasing bureaucracy since founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin stepped away.
Since then it has been making smaller, quieter cuts across the company, to the point employees are now tracking layoffs in an internal document, Business Insider reported.
BI has previously reported tension between the rank-and-file and managers at Google over, for example, practices around labelling employees as low performers.
Hickson suggests there should be efforts to move power “from the CFO’s office back to someone with a clear long-term vision for how to use Google’s extensive resources to deliver value to users.”
The original article contains 580 words, the summary contains 169 words. Saved 71%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I’m sure the MBA’s will starting taking the opinions of the worker bees seriously any day now.
The fuck is a Googler?
It’s a grown up Noogler.
Google employee
The fuck is a scathing latter?
It’s a cult where members think they are special because they know algorithms.
That will happen when the market is in the shitter
Imagine thinking the issue is some imaginary concept like “the market”, rather than 20 years of poor leadership.
Imagine thinking “the market” is an imaginary concept that doesn’t influence your business 🤦
Employer can still make good decisions with the market in the shitter.
But that would cost them.
Monopolies don’t need to create value for the user to keep their leadership
If the market wasn’t fucked they wouldn’t need to have good leadership, they’d do it or die
So the employees can’t be negatively affected by the state of their workplace unless the goddamn market is fucked?
How dumb can you possibly be?
Dumb enough to get mad about things no one said.
Google has completely lost its way. On my Pixel 6 recently the voice typing doesn’t even work correctly. Although it works sometimes it tends to cut me off where is it worked perfect a few weeks ago. Google is constantly introducing new bugs into Android and into their native apps. I can tell morale must be very low because shit doesn’t work.
When there is this much money involved nothing can survive. Greed is the most pervasive evil there is.
On a completely unrelated matter, can Lemmy topic post titles be edited?
The randomness of this comment actually fucked me up for a good minute 🤣
Should be scolding latte slamming layoffs.
Indians…
I have worked with a bunch of people from India who are great at technology and coding. The problem is that they tend to leave India and come to North America to work simply because companies don’t pay for shit in India. I’m confident that India has great coders in India, but to get that companies would have to pay for the good talent. Which completely negates the whole reason to off shore in the first place.
That has been changing in the past decade.
Racist much?
Not really
Downvoters don’t know just how much of tech is offloaded to IST. It would be funny if I didn’t understand just how bad it is through > who years in the industry
It wouldn’t be surprising if the downvoters are indians. They get hyper offensive if anyone criticises them.
Yooo…
It’s all because of those indian hires
Who would have thought that overtly replacing your motto in such a way that everyone knows the new default is now “Be Evil” would have a negative effect on morale? Shocking
But hey, they can take the credit for the beginning of modern enshittification, so they’ve got that going for them anyways.
It was never the official motto.
the clock is ticking
Down to what? In order for Google to fail in the short term, it would take some really big event. It would have to be something at the level of “Google banned from EU after…” to make Google unprofitable. I’m sure Google can afford losing 500M customers in a short timespan, but not if they reside in an economic region that has great influence over others.
For Google to fail in the long term, its ad business would have to fail. I imagine a few more antitrust cases to make google lose its search dominance would be a big domino.
hightrix@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Is anyone surprised? Brilliant engineers going to work at Google expecting to work on world changing software and instead work on selling more ads.
How miserable.
1rre@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months ago
Selling more ads can actually be engaging to work on even if it’s not world changing, if you’re given things you actually need to think through
Unfortunately I can’t really see Google being the type of place that lets people think for themselves, they’re far too busy trying to please the shareholders for that
hightrix@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Oh agreed, the scale and performances requirements to serve ads and n the modern internet is a really challenging problem.
My point was simply that these brilliant minds are being wasted on this objective.
TheDarkKnight@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Ugh I’d feel so fucking gross is I somehow contributed to the proliferation of MORE advertising in our world. Like talk about an absolute waste of your talent and contribution to the world.
Laying there on your deathbed someday and looking back on what you did in the time you were given…and it was making more ads, like how disgusted I feel about it all.