Some current and former employees publicly blast Google, criticizing its lack of “visionary” leaders, choice not to deliver layoff news face-to-face, and more

Ariel Zilber / New York Post :

New York Post 2024-01-23 Ariel Zilber

Context & Ripple Effects

The complaints extend a long-running account of deteriorating employee trust at Google: workers previously described a decline in communication between staff and management, while later accounts characterized the company as beset by delayed decisions and culture conflicts.

Leadership criticism also surfaced around product execution, including employees’ reaction to the Bard announcement, making the reported objections about vision and layoff communication part of a broader management-credibility issue rather than an isolated personnel dispute.

First-order effects

Google’s leadership and HR teams face renewed public scrutiny over how they communicate workforce decisions and articulate strategic direction to employees.
Current employees who share these concerns may have less confidence in internal channels, while former employees gain another public venue to shape Google’s employer narrative.

Second-order effects

Recruiting and retention become harder at the margin if candidates and employees treat repeated accounts of opaque communication as a signal about management culture.
Public criticism of leadership can raise pressure on executives to make strategy and organizational changes more legible internally, particularly after product-rollout criticism such as the internal backlash to Bard’s unveiling.

Third-order effects

If such complaints continue across major technology employers, workforce reductions may increasingly be judged not only on scale but on the credibility and humanity of the communication process.
The pattern points to a structural tension in very large technology companies: centralized decision-making can make speed and consistency easier, but can also deepen distance between executives and rank-and-file employees when transparency is weak.

The trend: This is one data point in the broader trend of employees using public channels to challenge big-tech leadership, strategy, and workplace governance.

Discussion

@crankyelephant Rajat Soni on threads
Sundar Pichai is the worst tech CEO who is considered a genius tech CEO. He has functionally stripped Google of its core value in order to turn it into spon con spam. Its sole useful product remaining is maps- and even that is being ever more corrupted with spammy business list…
@cspenn Christopher Penn on threads
Quite the indictment, but definitely visible. On the LLM front, Bard, PaLM/PaLM 2, and now Gemini have all been profoundly underwhelming despite Google having the single largest content catalog on the planet to train from.
@datadrivenmd Jorge Caballero on threads
Ouch: “They are waiting for their subordinates to propose concrete stuff in the direction they are waving their arms.”
@grrrlmonday @grrrlmonday on threads
This is a pity. I really enjoy most of Google's products (exclusively use their search engine, have their phone), but I have noticed that they are lagging in the AI sphere and that's disappointing. But I'd no idea it was so institutionally dismal.
@hoby_brenner Hoby Brenner on threads
The best part is these “execs” are rediculously overpaid, and even if you get rid of them (usually a golden parachute as well), they will pop up somewhere else with all sorts of shitty ideas to screw the next company.
@ajbourg AJ Bourg on threads
Pichai is Google's Steve Ballmer. Driving it into the ground.
@uptonic S Upton on threads
For almost 2 decades, Google's competition came at them symmetrically. Bing, yahoo, et al. tried to beat Google at Googling. They all failed. Alas, AI poses a new, asymmetrical threat. And they're (rightly) freaking the f&ck out.
@thecliffbar Cliff Bargar on threads
I'm no expert but it seems like the company structure and decision process here would be a poor one even if every executive was a visionary
@jdeamattson Jordan Dea-Mattson on threads
Years ago, I interviewed at Google and got the the final round before being cut from the process. I was asked to write a paper on what I thought was the biggest risk Google faced. My theme was “Google Grown Up” I talked about the potential anti-trust, alienation of developers, …
@jjackyliang Jacky on threads
Some troll said I am a sad little unaccomplished loser because I pointed that Google is an un-innovative company and is on a downward spiral for years now. Even their biggest money maker Search isn't even good anymore. Seems even senior and high level Google employees themselve…
@cdylanparks DylanParks on threads
I'm sure it's more complicated than this but search still spins off so much $, I would think doubling down on improving it for users vs trashing the experience to juice ad revenue would still have big upside...
@carmelyne Carmelyne Thompson on threads
Last I checked, Google's C-suite is filled with former Wall Street executives. A notable Google developer has pushed a culture of quickly abandoning products that don't meet user targets, undermining the trust of users who committed to their apps. …
@zuriberry Zuri Berry on threads
From my little corner of the world I've been underwhelmed and frustrated with Google for some time. Search is not good. Google Analytics has gotten worse. (I actually pay Plausible now!) And Google Domains went from being a huge disappointment to something I had to scramble t…
@austin6warren Austin Warren on threads
I don't have any insight on Google, but as someone who's been with my current org for over 10 years - an org that has undergone numerous layoffs since COVID - this thread struck a chord.
@paul_rietschka Paul Rietschka on threads
Further confirmation of the discussion we had the other day. Google's problem is Pichai and leadership: there is none. Where is the hardware strategy? Where are the viable iPhone, iPad, and MacBook competitors? Why is search turning sh*t? Why is Bard not a standalone to comp…
@carnage4life Dare Obasanjo on threads
Researchers at Google produced a lot of interesting research. So have researchers at HP, Xerox and IBM while the actual companies were moribund.
@heypollack Brett Pollack on threads
Remembering that each team at Google has operated relatively independently, adding voice was a logical path for a smart home. I think where things went off the rails was trying to add more & more functionality to the Assistant, which distracted from why people bought into Nest i…
@gergelyorosz_ Gergely Orosz on threads
When I became a Google Domains customer many years ago, I did it because I trusted Google. Google has now made me - and 10 million other domain holders - Squarespace customers. No consent asked, no reasoning given. Google prints money (made $59B in profits in 2022) yet sold Do…
@randderuiter Rand Fishkin on threads
For folks who pay attention to Google, I don't think any of this is a surprise. It is, however, exceptionally rare to see in public, from a technical lead who's been with the company for nearly a decade.
@carnage4life Dare Obasanjo on x
Even at the height of Microsoft's lost decade where there was a critical blog from an insider called MiniMicrosoft, there wasn't this outpouring of negative feedback from employees signing their names to the criticism. This is a big vote of no confidence. https://nypost.com/...
@ranjan3118 Ayush Ranjan on x
this post by a staff engineer at google is the answer to the question when someone asks a young startup “why can't google build this thing?” this is why👇 [image]
@yacinemtb Kache on x
I'm 26 and I'm an L4 engineer at google all my friends are staff engineers at open AI and i am wasting away writing kube configs at as an L4 wasting all my potential
@svpino @svpino on x
Shocking and damning. Google seems to be a shell of what it once was. After 8+ years as a Staff Software Engineer, here is what Diane has to say about the company. As a consumer, I lost my trust on Google a long time ago. I don't buy from them. I stopped using their “free”... [im…
@deliprao @deliprao on x
Scathing review from a Staff Software Engineer at Google. People will disagree with individual claims in the post, but even as an outsider observing pace and dimension of product innovations at Google, these accusations feel directionally correct. https://www.linkedin.com/... [im…
@andrebriggs Andre Briggs on x
Google employees must be down really bad to be saying stuff like this publicly. Not only is it a bad reflection on Google leadership but on the employees who don't step up in fear of rocking the boat. They would rather have a staff engineer title and diddle their thumbs
@hide0usk0jima @hide0usk0jima on x
Kinda half-agree , while I hate it when google cans new products that dont meet some google search level userbase benchmark. You dont have to release a revolutionary product every decade to stay relevant , you can be IBM and still be relevang
@ephemeralavatar @ephemeralavatar on x
Google has historically always been the disruptor and not the inventor, except for maybe Google Maps. Whenever it comes to actually creating a brand new market, they're never able to sustain it. The disorganized leadership really shows in all the half-baked products they killed.
@hkarthik Karthik Hariharan on x
One of the core issues at larger, mature tech companies is that the top brass at the VP level are made up of org builders and org executors. That is their core skillset and usually the kind of person that got promoted into those jobs is someone who has mastered it. The truly vi…
@wincent Greg Hurrell on x
I get the impression that incompetent leadership is basically the norm across the industry and the exceptions are rare. If you're lucky enough to work at one of these places while the going is good, you're lucky.
@wadhwa Vivek Wadhwa on x
It seems that Google has become what Microsoft used to be. It needs a @satyanadella to transform it.
@lockzanger Kenny on x
You're probably not wrong, but if you look at the facts of it, Alphabet stocks are at a near all time high with revenues growing year on year. Maybe ‘visionary leadership’ is overrated. [image]
@protosphinx @protosphinx on x
Bringing an end to a nice experiment that if you let people do whatever the heck they want and give them everything they need and more then over time they...just don't want to do anything. They become incompetent. Many similar themes historically.
@brian_a_burns Brian Burns on x
@debarghya_das Next-level boggling to me to log on LinkedIn and see Google engineers publicly writing negatively and in long form about their employer. (Saw another one of these yesterday!)
@debarghya_das Deedy on x
Staff engineer at Google likens their management strategy to bogosort. Personally, 4/4 industry people I know who left to Google recently did it for only one reason: money. Not the Google it used to be. [image]
@techmorningstar Lucifer on x
when sundar pichai had become the ceo of google in 2015, our school had made us celebrate the announcement because he was an indian (american). in hindsight, it always seems kinda funny to me because most people today attribute google's downfall to him.
@davethechiller Dáv on x
google's 20% personal project time was genius and can't believe they got rid of it, explains the lack of innovation recently across all tech how many companies still encourage their employees to spend time on personal projects?
@joelgrus Joel Grus on x
when I worked at Google (~10 years ago) it seemed like everyone spent half of their mental cycles thinking about perf and promo my manager was a good guy but he had years of experience playing the perf/promo game and it absolutely colored every decision he made
@ricburton Ric Burton on x
“Working for Sundar's Google feels like working for a company whose only product is quarterly earnings reports. I have no idea what the company's mission is anymore besides Number Go Up.” Absolutely brutal.
@stbrunthaler Stefan Brunthaler on x
I guess this doesn't come as a surprise to anyone. Must be a great time for business school professors to write books about how not to do it. Examples abound...
@drbarnard David Barnard on x
“Working for Sundar's Google feels like working for a company whose only product is quarterly earnings reports. I have no idea what the company's mission is anymore besides Number Go Up.”
@mosquitobatman Sriram R. on x
The core idea conveyed in this post about CEOs applies to any mid to top level manager. Just the degree or the extent of those ideas in direct proportion to their designation.
@charles_seo Charles Floate on x
Not the best of looks for Google, from its own engineers...
@johnlashlee John on x
They gotta write a book about this singular drive to turn money into commodities into more money
@danluu Dan Luu on x
Current and former Google engineers discuss how Google has changed: [image]
@partyarbeiter Iulus Mayfair on x
Giant companies rotting from the inside is good. Let them linger and die. Google search should see a replacement.
@kdeep Deepa on x
“Do not anthropomorphize the lawnmower” is a pretty good way of thinking about large systems
@tunguz Bojan Tunguz on x
Pichai is Ballmer but without all the suaveness.
@unk_data Vijay on x
This is sad. Google could've done so many things with AI but no, they're chasing artificial targets. Mistral team is doing wonders with just a handful of engineers, but Google couldn't ship shit. It's funny that it's Google who invented Transformers architecture.
@collieyimby @collieyimby on x
Google might be the only company that needs more MBAs.
@dangrover Dan Grover on x
The lawnmower analogy is gold. I'm gonna have to use that.
@levelsio @levelsio on x
The only way to save Google is to fire Sundar Pichai immediately [Stock chart: AAPL vs GOOG performance since 2019]

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