A Googler who just resigned after 18 years reflects on the decline of the company he loved
A Googler who just resigned after 18 years reflects on the decline of the company he loved
Honestly, this is just big tech all over. I don't think there are many people that work at FAANG companies any more that feel things are better than they were even 3-4 years ago. They are no longer idealised, and CEO's have decided to take company failures out on employees instead of their inability to target long-term success. I've friends at Amazon, Google, and Apple - all say that their "culture" is basically dead.
IMO, we've reached a point where all of the big names in tech are now out of ideas. None of them have innovated in recent years, outside of (maybe) AI, and the culture of supporting moonshot ideas (where someone can work on something new/exciting and not be personally liable if it doesn't work out) is now dead with layoffs in these divisions. The only incentive that big tech has any more is pay, and with no long-term stability and pay decreasing over time, I think we'll see a shift away from FAANG and towards the new breed of tech. FAANG will become the IBM and Oracle's of tech, and things will move on.
Notable exception which must be mentioned is Facebook/Meta: their AR/VR plan is one gigantic moonshot. Whether it will pay off remains to be seen, and if it doesn't then obviously the thousands of people employed in that division won't be able to find a home in WhatsApp or whatever.
I know they don't do bootcamp any more, but Facebook were perfectly set up to move people between divisions by not hiring for specific roles, and doing team matching over orientation. It was a system that worked well, and being able to switch teams easily meant that people could jump from WhatsApp to Instagram to Ads with minimal friction.
In terms of numbers, definitely, but a phased rollout could work if it meant keeping services in KTLO, and moving people out gradually as you slow down internal hiring. Sadly, companies find it easier to just sack everyone, and then hire again in a few months.
They aren't even out if ideas, it's management which demands safe ideas only with huge returns, so they block common sense shit because it doesn't boost the quarterly results
They are no longer idealised, and CEO’s have decided to take company failures out on employees instead of their inability to target long-term success.
It is not CEO's inability (or at least not always). You cannot think long term when the only thing that matter is the next quarter result.
I've never heard of FAANG before. What is it?
It's shorthand for Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google.
Big missing piece there: cloud.
In the first half of the 2010s, there was a study from Gartner or another such company, that forecast that the cloud service market would amount to 1 trillion USD/year by 2030 or so, and since then the big players have been racing to try and carve as much as possible of the future juicy pie from Amazon's hands.
Google completely missed the boat at first then pivoted hard. MS leveraged its deep enterprise presence as hard as it could to get existing customers into its cloud offering; that's why your MS consumer products (Office, OneDrive, etc) are tied at the hip with cloud these days. Not for consumers, for the business market.
It's business to business, however, so the generak public doesn't hear about it a lot. It's also largely non-sexy, and therefore not headline-worthy, with a few exceptions. The whole AI thing, for instance. But even there, consumers are not the target market. Cloud customers are.
In that sense Google, MS and Amazon absolutely already are the new IBM and Oracle.
Meanwhile, as far as I can tell, Meta is still trying to execute on its mission to connect people while still headed by people who have no idea how people connect. Apple is Apple, keeps just making oodles of money off the kind of people who buy Apple products.
Lost me completely at
Much of the criticism Google received around Chrome and Search, especially around supposed conflicts of interest with Ads, was way off base
Both are ad delivery services that sometimes do something slightly resembling benefiting the end user.
If not for near-monopoly market share and therefore everything being integrated with and "optimised" for both, nobody who cares enough to know would use that crap willingly.
If not for near-monopoly market share and therefore everything being integrated with and “optimised” for both, nobody who cares enough to know would use that crap willingly.
Chrome built its market share on desktop up over many many years.
I also think you're underestimating the number of people who couldn't care less if a company harvests their data for ad personalisation - by this point the majority of people understand Facebook's business strategy, but they still have over a billion users. The preferences of us terminally online folks are not the preferences of the population at large.
Chrome built its market share on desktop up over many many years.
Yes, by making the best product. Then once they'd achieved the market donination necessary to not lose everyone, they changed that product from optimised for best user experience to optimised for maximum ad revenue.
I also think you're underestimating the number of people who couldn't care less
No, I am aware that they're sadly the majority. Hence why I specifically said "anyone who cares enough to know better"
preferences of us terminally online folks are not the preferences of the population at large.
You don't have to be "terminally online" (which is a slur invented by the wilfully ignorant to denigrate people with different interests and priorities than them, no matter how much you try to reclaim it) to care about basic privacy rights, but yeah, that sentence is otherwise correct, as I said earlier.
Yeah, I wouldn't take him as a completely reliable narrator, but still an interesting inside perspective
This is exactly why I look at companies and corporations with a side-eye of doubt when they claim to have some sort of "do not be evil" motto baked into thier company culture.
It doesn't matter if a gigantic company has a hundred philanthropy focused CEOs, all ot takes is one greedy or evil one to destroy a company's dogma
After the investors, managers, and profiteers taste easy money, they will continue to demand to be fed that blood flavored stew.
Once that happens, they either need to be lobotomized or put down for the good of all lest those who are not in the know continue to put money into the frothing imitation it has become.
When I first heard Google's "don't be evil", all I could think is a not-evil person doesn't need to say this.
Google removed their "do no evil" slogan. That says a lot.
This is the behavior the maximizes short-term shareholder value, not building a long-term profitable, innovative enterprise. When some other company temporarily discovers a money spigot like Google did, there might be a brief resurgence of such an environment, but generally no one values or wants to protect innovation, as dollars are easily quantifiable and future potential is subjective. This is why 99% of the time people keep their head down and collect their paychecks.
Stock purchases should have a minimum investment period of like 5 years. Move the focus towards longer-term goals instead of quarterly profits.
Much of the criticism Google received around Chrome and Search, especially around supposed conflicts of interest with Ads, was way off base
Key word "was." The teams may not have had that intention, but they sure as fuck do now.
I don't know if I agree.
A lot of of this article is in a very familiar tone for "are we the baddies" corporate employees, and it's less a deterioration of conditions than a realization of ongoing facts.
The language is everywhere. "We made data-driven decisions" is a big red flag for me, for instance. It often translates to "we obsessed over a maximizing a single data point because we confirmation-biased it into a justification for the thing we wanted to do". Real data driven decisions are called science, and nobody in corporations has the time to do actual science, outside of hard research funding, which is not the case of building a UX toolset.
Likewise for his passing defense of tracking cookies or the lack of firewalls between search and ads. And how telling is it that he at one point defines the essence of "don't be evil" as "long term success at the cost of short term losses". That's not what that means.
It really does sound like the culture had convinced itself that it was working for "the greater good" as a strategy for long term success, but you hear the same thing from a lot of other large corporations. It mostly sounds like what actually changed for this guy to dislike Google is management style and working conditions. Which hey, sure, it's a part of it. But not what lies at the core of the issues. If you take short term losses for long term success you're just a corporation with a long term plan for growth, not a nice corporation. It's techbro speak and the attitude that has driven startups through the entirety of the VC-dominated era of business.
The degradation we see in Google is not triggered by a change of ethos, it's the chickens coming home to roost now that tech businesses are switching from a focus on growth to a focus on profit as the tech business ecosystem matures and free money goes away for a while.
It's definitely not too late to heal Google. It would require some shake-up at the top of the company, moving the centre of 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.
Why would this happen though? The change the author is describing came from the company's shareholders and their desire for profit. Shareholders who have no connection to the core domains of Google, who vote for directors on the board that further profit extraction, who then maintain executive leadership who implements that. You have to convince those shareholders that they should want Google to focus on something other than profit maximization. But they don't understand you. They can dump Google's stock at a moment's notice. Why care about some long term profit when they can make it now and dump the stock as soon as it stops making it? And then, you can't even talk to them because you're sitting behind the exec layer and the board layer, both of which are shareholder creations. So you have to tightrope your exec team into believing you, then they have to tightrope the board, and then the board has to tightrope the shareholders. The odds are stacked against reversing course. If on the other hand you're not acting alone but you are the head of the union that can shutdown Google at a moment's notice, then not only you can talk to the exec layer, you don't have to tightrope while doing it. Better yet, you can simply broadcast your message and it's gonna hit the board and the shareholders directly. That's why I don't think Google can reverse course without a strong union. I think the incentives are simply not there.
Why would a union help at all? Organized workers won’t change the financial and legal obligations at the top. It won’t drive the focus away from quarterly earnings. Unions protect the workers, they don’t drive company culture.
There is no saving Google. The only way out of the hole they’re in is to have the integrity not to fall in in the first place.
I feel like a big part of the change was also due to the US mass surveillance, which became broadly known with the Snowden revelations in 2013.
Before 2013, you could genuinely claim that collecting as much data as possible, might be done with good intentions. Afterwards, collecting more data than necessary for a given task turned into a moral failure. Their whole business model, while it should have felt sketchy beforehand, turned evil over night.
And of course, Google employees weren't forced to reflect on that. The spotlight was on the US government. Everyone expected the US government to just stop with that shit, after they got caught. And well, they didn't. Obama even doubled down on it, Trump certainly didn't drain the swamp either and Biden probably wouldn't even think about it anymore, if the EU didn't constantly get its ass sued for exchanging data with US companies.
The more it became apparent that the US government wouldn't go back on that, and as people had ever more critical data of themselves online, the more the public perception of Google fell down a hole, even if as a Google employee you could still be doing the same things you did in 2005.
Amazes how can one "love a company". It's just a job. Do it, do it well and get your paycheck. That's it. The company will never love you back anyway.
Find a job you love and you’ll never work another day in your life. I believe that was Churchill.
I enjoy the line of work I’m in. I don’t always enjoy the companies that I do it in. Some are much better than others. It’s fine to like or even love where you work as long as you realize that you’re in what could easily become an abusive relationship at any time. Do your time and do it well but don’t go out of your way to do it. That’s what I strive for.
Indeed, loving the line of work that you're in is different from loving the company that you're in. It's a very important distinction to make.
Your company doesn't love you back. Someday they may find themselves needing to balance some numbers in a spreadsheet and out you go, regardless of how many years you've spent there and how much you love doing what they're asking you to do. In the meantime, they're using you how they see fit, not necessarily in the way that's best for you. You need to watch out for yourself.
I'm not saying you shouldn't try to get a job that you love, just make very sure that you're not misdirecting the love of your job to loving your company. It'll hurt when you find out it's not mutual and you may not be properly prepared for the subsequent job search.
You nailed it at the end. Loving a company, especially these days, is exactly how you end up overworked and underpaid. Like a job/company, don't love it.
why limit yourself when you can get a paycheck and enjoy your job at the same time? consider how many hours of your life you spend at work.
When you join a company early, and there aren't many other people employed, you make much more of a difference than if you're one of thousands. You have much more influence in defining the product, steering the direction of the company, defining the workplace culture.
You're not wrong that employees are replaceable, and the company will replace you if it needs or wants to, but in the beginning, it can very much feel like you're part of a group of people who are working together to effectively build lives, support their families, interests, etc. The company isn't just a legal entity that exchanges money for labor, it's a thing you're helping build with a kind of community, that you're investing time into in exchange for the means to a better life.
They don't really mean love, they mean identity, but we don't have good ways to talk about this stuff.
Obviously you can't love an abstract entity. But you can let it come to be part of how you see yourself, which also happens when you're in a relationship. So often we talk about that feeling of love when we're talking about parts of our identity - jobs, hobbies, music interests, etc.
That's all a bit Stockholm Syndrome.
Sure, make your company your identity when it's your company - i.e. you built it and have at least a say on were it goes to - but otherwise you're just getting attached to something were you have little real power and others tell you what to do to serve their ideas and their interests, not yours.
Frankly the only type of situation were I would see it as healthy to become so entwinned with a company is when it's a tiny thing were you are indeed an irreplaceable member and have a genuine say over at least some of it, and that's not going to be the case with a behemoth as Google were "you're a valued employee" is something that comes on e-mails starting with "dear sir/madam".
Mind you, I've been involved in Tech and Startups on and off since the 90s and the whole "getting employes to bind their identity with the company so that you can make them sacrifice themselves for the company" has been a purposeful strategy used by Tech companies (Google standing out by being unusually heavy users of that HR technique), all the way since the original Internet boom.
(It's a bit like what's done in the Military all over the World, but at least in those the Greater Cause is supposedly one's nation, whilst here the Greater Cause is delivering more profits to some individuals who don't give a rats ass about you)
Having your identity entwinned with your profession itself is understandable, but having it entwinned with a specific employee for whom you're but a "human resource" is incredibly naive and not at all healthy.
I disagree. Imagine any club or group of people getting together to tackle a problem, with a common vision, a culture, and social values. It can be more than just liking the people, as the group-ideals can kept even as the people cycle in and out.
You can like club/organization for what actions it encourages, what it stands for, the benefit it provides people with, and the lines it collectively agrees not to cross.
Some good organizations have revenue, and we call them businesses.
I agree 99.9% of companies "won't love you back" but it's not 100%.
Crazy how the declination in the office culture translates to such an obvious downturn from a public perspective as well.
"There are still great people at Google"
A mind-plague of our time to call mediocrity greatness, as being exceptionally intelligent and being a tech wizard has absolutely nothing to do with being a great person. That is the same as saying the top %1 of Plumbers are great people. When faced with tough life choices, these Plumbers may show negligible character. Stop devaluing greatness.
It's a serious overvaluation of self and commodization of the term, a weakening of the term, so as to devalue it. It's a mind virus to say flippantly, "that person is great" when in reality they are average. The meaning of the word is being dilluted.
- Greatness is doing the right thing without being compensated or even recognized for it!
- Greatness is doing great things on your own (person). Group goodness is good people, action.
- Greatness is not involved in any way with Corporations. Corporations are profit above all else.
- Greatness is achieving what others could not achieve. Many awesome search engines were bought out and ruined by Big Tech, as they do with any competing technology.
- Greatness is not involved with violating the privacy of the whole world in any manner.
Silicon Valley is an immense perspective bubble that is equivalent to personality re-write. That anyone at Google can be thought of as a "great person" is a total and complete failure of perspective. Super smart, great Programmers, great Engineers, sure.
Being a great person almost always involves hardship, perserverance, and success against all odds. Read any classical book. Having a Billion dollar company pay you to turn a digital wrench has not one basis for "greatness" in any way, shape or form.
Think about all the "Great" people in the History of Earth. What did they have in commmon? How many people can be "Great"? Hundreds or even dozens at one Corporation? Gimme a break, that doesn't even fit the definition of greatness, unless your cognitive dissonance is confusing it with mediocrity and that is a societal mind virus.
So, let's be precise with our life terms like an actual programmer would be with technical terms except applied to your own life. So, you follow rules, you get along well with others, you don't hurt anyone physically, verbally or emotionally, you donate and work for causes, you create great stuff. This is expected of all people so that makes you average. You are an average person.
Making a comparative judgement against failed people does not make you great. In fact, that brings you down a notch.
Maybe along with all those other traits instead of creating great stuff you create exceptional stuff. The term applied to you is now "an exceptional 'job title' ".
so you don't like people using the word "great" to mean "very capable"? and that's a "mind-plague"?
and we're suppose to go with your definition because why?
Honestly this is a very good perspective, it's unfortunate that I mostly see this as a poignant reminder that people have only gotten dumber over time that stuff like this needs to be said.
Great, people are gatekeeping the adjective "great" now.
creators made too much money and aren't involved in the work beyond demanding more money. MBAs just do what they do. Hire and fire isn't concerned with not being evil. They were always about indexing the internet. If you are on the internet you will be indexed, categorized and sold as data.
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