Ian Hickson badge post for Google is making news currently. He talks about how bad Pichai leadership is, about layoffs, and diversity hiring. From the blog - "Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google. A symptom of this is the spreading contingent of inept middle management. Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it. Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently makes requests that are completely incoherent and inapplicable. She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set. She is completely unable to receive constructive feedback (as in, she literally doesn't even acknowledge it). I hear other teams (who have leaders more politically savvy than I) have learned how to "handle" her to keep her off their backs, feeding her just the right information at the right time. Having seen Google at its best, I find this new reality depressing. " https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1
Just classic “it was better back in the day” drivel. But it’s funny to see you slip diversity hiring in there when the post doesn’t mention anything about it. Did you slip that in there because he mentioned Jeanine Banks? It’s actually more plausible to say Google failed because it hires ex-Amazon into its leadership, since that’s a clearer connection than calling Jeanine a diversity hire.
This guy is so pathetic with how he drinks the corporate Kool aid. He actually thought back in the day Google was such a morally good company always doing what's best for humanity. Google and any corporation anywhere has never been and will never be objectively good. The very nature of a corporation demands they act in their best interests to survive. Yes, early Google acted in their best interests that happened to be aligned with the public good, so did Facebook. To survive, a corporation must prioritize profit. This guy enjoyed making top TC from Google but can't realize they can only pay him that much because they're making bank from doing what makes money, not what's always "good". He sounds like a fool who has wrapped his personal identity up into his corporate employer. I pity him. He really thought Google was some sort of altruistic organization using tech to do good. There is no such corporation. Once money is involved, money is everything. What you hope is that what makes money also benefits the public. But if it doesn't? Your corporate employer will follow the money anyways. Stop identifying yourself with your employer.
The corporate Kool aid was pretty easy to drink pre 2016 because the company largely walked the walk. Launches did get blocked for being abusive to users even if they were profitable for the company. Employee benefits were pretty amazing so it's hard to argue management was prioritizing share holders over employees. All the pie in the sky nonsense in the prospectus about not being a conventional company was relatively true. It was obvious Google's stock was undervalued at the time as eventually a corporate shill like Ruth was going to make it an awful place to work (relative to what it was) and an awful place for users (relative to what it was) while selling everyone's soul for profits. This happened and while the stock has gone up, the smugness of the remaining Googlers has fallen through the floor. Ironically, auto selling your stock was practiced by nearly everyone there (not me!) so when the it shifted from employees first to fuck employees people only profited on their unvested shares.
Diversity hiring has nothing to do with anything. OP you're just a bigot.
What a douchebag! Becomes a Multi-Millionaire from 18 years at Google and now writes all shit after leaving. Why didn’t he try to make any change while he was there?
Jeanine Banks, lmao
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Using his f u money