My hot take: Google does not have one single visionary leader. Not a one. From the C-suite to the SVPs to the VPs, they are all profoundly boring and glassy-eyed. Google has not launched one single successful executive-driven thing in years. Sometimes, VPs try to decree "we need a new chat app or AI-first demo for I/O!" There's a huge death march, and in the end, the thing is half-baked and roundly derided. If it doesn't get 100 million users in six months, they give up and shut it down. It's like that joke algorithm I learned about in college -- BogoSort. In each iteration of the algorithm, you reorder everything randomly and if the elements happen to land in order, you are done. Some of Google's executives are competent referees. I couldn't name which, but I feel like I've seen it done in my 8+ years. They point in a direction, their subordinates swarm the area, try a bunch of stuff, and sometimes something sticks and is cool. Right now, all of these boring, glassy-eyed leaders are trying to point in a vague direction (AI) while at the same time killing their golden goose. Given that they have no real vision of their own, they really need their subordinates to come up with cool stuff for them. And at the same time, there have been rolling layoffs for the past 6-12 months throughout the company, including engineering, sales, support, UX, product, data science, SRE, everything. Just randomly firing people, torching institutional knowledge, and blowing up perfectly functional teams. Maybe it's not random. But they refuse to describe their reasons except as "we are excited to focus our resources on our highest priorities," so it might as well be random. I think they don't know what the priorities are. Not durably. They are waiting for their subordinates to propose concrete stuff in the direction they are waving their arms. Meanwhile, all of the mid-level leaders are scrambling to protect their teams (and themselves) by guessing what their VPs might find appealing. If you are a leader and you guess wrong, you and your team get cut. There is a pervasive sense of nihilism that has taken hold. "Well, I guess I will just do the job until they fire me." A lot of people have golden handcuffs situations and aren't going to walk away from the salary, but nobody works late anymore. The buildings are half empty at 4:30. I know a lot of people, myself included, who used to happily do extra work evenings and weekends to get the demo done or just out of boredom. That's gone. Google really was a magical place, not very long ago. And for some reason, executives are cashing out their human capital at the very moment it seems to me like they really need it. Who can be dawn-of-a-new-era-of-humanity creative in this environment of fear? It's really sad. I have no way to align myself with any unspoken VP strategy or do good enough work to save myself if my whole team is cut. So I guess I will just hang around and do my job until Google no longer wants me.
Beautifully put. I hope the board is able to read this or gets published in wider media. Sometimes I wonder how is it possible that they are consistently masking the worst choices back to back
Sundar is very shortsighted! his only strategy is to save cost by growing the presence in India. https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/info-tech/google-to-double-workforce-in-india-in-two-years-sanjay-gupta/article37573867.ece
He is not… I think that you don’t understand how it works… the board tells him what do. The board is interested to cut in US, leave the best and hire average folks in India. Do you know how many SWEs you could hire in India for the salary of L4 or L5? Google just became another corporation like IBM or Intel.
PWC, you understand that American employees do not like being undercut? This is primarily my issue. I am all for working with US Citizens no matter the color, and Diversity is a good thing. But when I am on a team filled with overseas contractors, something is wrong. The WITCH companies need to help India, not help itself to American jobs.
Is the poster (Oracle) a former Google engineer? Or is the Oracle poster quoting an anonymous Google engineer or some clickbait appeal to authority (Google staff engineer) by some random
This is actual post I read on LinkedIn
They still work at google. I too read the post.
Link?
You’re either the same person from LinkedIn or an imposter copying their content
Google is trash, ads sweetshop
stuff engineer
Yes, the title is kind of obvious that it’s a copy paste.
Totally agree. Larry&Sergie must come back and be more active if they want Google back. Sundar and all his directs are very un-talented.
It's not about talent it's all about googliness
What? They knew what was happening. They never spoke out in 2022. Why do you expect them to change? 😂 they would have cut just like Sundar