‘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.”
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:
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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.
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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.
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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 being forced out of adblockers and a products promise is abandoned way too often.
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.
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 ;)
Rather easier I’d say, as it has an unlockable bootloader, unlike most other phones. I have a pixel 7 on Graphene, but there’s a bunch of other versions you can try.
Only the google edition, not carrier versions.
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 they’ve just been sitting there bolstering what’s already there while every once in a while adding a new product to the Google graveyard
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.
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.
- Did a hardware upgrade to bring Stadia past consoles.
- Never shut down their in house studios and invested even more into bringing other studios in.
- Really upsold the cheat free experience (with no client side anticheat spyware necessary) and the ability for the platform to make even the games with the worst netcode stable multiplayer experiences.
- Made something like steam workshop for Stadia and worked with at least one developer to prove that it works (they said they were open to mods, but they needed developers to take interest)
- Potentially resolved the “you have to buy all your games again” concern by offering to buy everything on the platform in your steam, xbox, or PlayStation library 1 time (so you couldn’t “import” multiple times or buy new games on another platform and then import them for free).
Imagine if people literally just pressed a few buttons on their old gaming computer and suddenly could play a bunch of their steam library in the cloud with better graphics for free on any device they wanted. I can’t imagine folks wouldn’t have stuck around with that kind of a deal.
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.
On a completely unrelated matter, can Lemmy topic post titles be edited?
