‘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.”
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.
The single worst decision they made was rolling back the 20% of work time being dedicated to side projects. That’s where all their good early ideas came from. It was replaced by politics instead.
“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.
I would disagree and say that Pichai is a visionary, in turning Google into a monopolistic dystopian megacorporation.
It’s been a long time brewing with how Google manages projects and people, and Sundar is just the dipshit who’s been helming it. Google needs a rethink, because once the ad market collapses (and it will collapse, they’re helping it along with their crusade against YouTube) they will be rudderless and moneyless.
I really wish I was motivated to finish my transition off Google because right now, storage and email are the two things left to address. And without funding, I can’t keep investing in NAS storage, or be bothered to move off Gmail for a new email vendor (which has its own problems with any non-Google email sinking into someone’s XBL).
deleted by creator
google owns youtube bro. you mean crusade against adblockers on youtube i suppose
Yep, layoffs tend to hurt culture and trust.
Some companies seem to thrive on regular culls in the name of operational efficiencies. All that happens is talent leaves the organisation and then those left behind struggle because expertise has gone.
It erodes good will and good will is something you can’t win back.
By the time things look like they are normalising, in comes another cull!
deleted by creator
They become quiet quitters. Barely putting any effort in and doing the bare minimum.
Folks are not going to bail out company decisions to cull by working extra harder.
They tidy CV and look for next opportunity.
Layoffs while at the same time handing the CEO $200 million for a single year.
Yep, that will definitely help employee morale.
The letter is a post on his own blog . Hard to distill into a summary so I recommend reading it get more context. But it seems to have boiled down to:
-
How It Was:
- Strong adherence to the “don’t be evil” ethos, focusing on societal good over profits.
- Open, transparent communication and decision-making processes.
- High morale, with a culture of learning from successes and failures.
- Work focused on benefitting the web and users, rather than Google’s immediate interests.
- Collaboration and lack of internal silos, encouraging innovation and autonomy.
-
How It Is Now:
- Shift from user-centric to Google-centric, and then to individual-centric decision making.
- Eroded transparency and increase in organizational silos.
- Decline in morale and a culture of distrust between employees and management.
- Focus on short-term financial gains leading to layoffs and defensive employee behavior.
- Lack of clear vision and leadership, resulting in confused and ineffective management.
- Overall deterioration of Google’s unique, innovative culture and values.
-
I’m sure the MBA’s will starting taking the opinions of the worker bees seriously any day now. /s
No shit that moral too is all time low
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 🤣
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.
deleted by creator
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. Because their IPO was the death of the good version of the internet and everything they’ve done since has just made everything shittier and shittier. Almost like basing the entire society around greed is a mistake or something. whooda thunkit except literally everyone
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.
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’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 ;)
