‘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.”
Is anyone surprised? Brilliant engineers going to work at Google expecting to work on world changing software and instead work on selling more ads.
How miserable.
The single worst decision they made was rolling back the 20% of work time being dedicated to side projects. That’s where all their good early ideas came from. It was replaced by politics instead.
Selling more ads can actually be engaging to work on even if it’s not world changing, if you’re given things you actually need to think through
Unfortunately I can’t really see Google being the type of place that lets people think for themselves, they’re far too busy trying to please the shareholders for that
Oh agreed, the scale and performances requirements to serve ads on the modern internet is a really challenging problem.
My point was simply that these brilliant minds are being wasted on this objective.
Ugh I’d feel so fucking gross is I somehow contributed to the proliferation of MORE advertising in our world. Like talk about an absolute waste of your talent and contribution to the world.
Laying there on your deathbed someday and looking back on what you did in the time you were given…and it was making more ads, like how disgusted I feel about it all.
Frankly at that pay grade in that industry you’re either going to work for a company that makes money selling ads/data, in high frequency trading or a hedge fund, and the latter two are objectively more parasitical - at least content creators and media publishers get a cut from ads, rather than all the money either staying in the company or going to their competitors, with the only instance of their business affecting normal people being when they crash the economy
“Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision,”
That’s a bar.
The googlers i know spend a lot more time than I’d expect on performance reviews. Not really on like… Doing shit. Just reviewing and selling what little is done to get that next pay bump.
These recent months it seems the reviewing and selling, the hype-mongering, is more about remaining employed than it is a pay bump.
It’s a sad state of affairs when the inexperienced code-olympiads you hire need to transition partially from devs-as-engineers to introverts-as-showmen. It’s like they hired apples, made them work like oranges, and now only keep the ones who can also be dolphins.
Haha good analogy. The “remaining employed” is a point i missed. Broad layoffs in my company would probably make me do the same i suppose.
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.
I am probably the perfect google customer. I used google search when it still had an exclamation point. I got my gmail account by invite in ‘04. Downloaded chrome on day one. I used nexus/pixel phones almost exclusively
Today, ddg search on Firefox. I am using an iPhone. I still have the gmail account but I am slowly migrating away from it. I am done with google. They don’t produce anything that has any value for me anymore.
Big oof on the iphone, mate. You can have an android phone with CFW that doesn’t have all of the google telemetry and bloatware.
Seems like a lot of work to have a phone that just works and is easy
What works on iPhone though? You can’t even change your ringtone to your own sound without having to draw your wallet.
Just stick with bloatware android then
That’s not true at all. GarageBand will let you make tones directly on the device if you want to.
That said, yeah, get a grapheneos device and cut google out completely, it works just fine.
This is entirely and completely false.
I haven’t remotely cared about a custom ringtone in about 14 years.
Same, but opera/firefox, Zenfone, and proton Mail. Not really a fan of apple either
What are you switching to for email?
I moved to proton mail personally after having Gmail since forever.
Took a year and I pay 40usd per year but worth it
How safe / stable is proton mail? Say they go under in 5 years are you just fucked? Or is your setup such that you could move easily? Also is your email just xxxx@proton.com? Or something longer?
I don’t have a crystal ball but Proton is the go-to, privacy-focused email provider. They are based in Switzerland.
They likely have a way for you to export your emails if they go under or use a desktop email client to archive them.
It’s less the backup more all the stuff linked to your account. All the sign-ups if they go down fast… You’re fucked 😕
I pay for LastPass and would never go back. I know there are other options that people will point out but I’m too invested now haha.
I highly recommend getting LastPass or something similar. It was much easier to make the transition away from google products
Close, it’s proton.me
Or @pm.me, even shorter
Woah, didn’t know that one. Thank you.
I have my own domain. So I’d lose my emails but I could just move the address. I’d recommend that for sure. In case you want to move to another mail provider down the line it’s super simple.
I think it’s a bit extra to have a custom domain but it’s super worth it.
Slowly working on hosting my own. Stuff like this is not fast for me since I am a hobbyist and not in tech professionally. But, I’m getting there.
I just switched to getting my own domain and hosting it as a bundle with the domain provider. The Web client sucks, but I use thunderbird anyways.
That is a better idea than me foolishly trying to get all of it running out of my basement. So many little things that lead to other little things. Right now, my “ditch gmail” project is a build my own router with openwrt project.
Fuggen rabbit holes man.
You can start one on a cloud hosting service tomorrow, and then if at some point you want to move to “on premises” hosting (as in, a Raspberry Pi in your basement) then you can migrate over easily enough. That’s the whole point of self-hosting; all of the data is yours to manipulate and move around as much as you like.
I would not recommend self hosting at all. The bigger providers usually don’t even accept mail from unknown servers/domains.
I’m doing all the same as you
What I’m not moving away from though is Google Maps and Photos. No good alternatives exist
For photos, I have been using Immich, and have been very impressed. It has pretty much all the features I want (automatic backup, chronological timeline, mobile/web app, face tagging, semantic search, albums, sharing, etc). It’s a server you self-host though, so setting it up might be a pain if you’ve never done something like that before.
This looks good as a self hosted option, but I want something hosted.
About Maps, same here. Even looked into paid alternatives, and… There’s not really much of value. I’m disappointed.
Ente? Just started subscribing though… seems good. 99c for base plan is pretty attractive.
Looks promising, I’ll keep my eye on it, might give it a go with some photos to test it out. I wish it weren’t e2e encrypted though, I actually like a lot of the features Google provides (tagging/grouping by feature, looking back, etc)
Same. I have my name as my gmail and get an absurd amount of missent emails.
Hey twin!!
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 left Google 5-6 years ago. I do occasionally use YouTube, but that’s about it.
It’s surprisingly easy to get used to once you do it.
What did you do about email?
Protonmail is one of the more popular options.
This is what I’m planning to do as well.
Is the Spam Filtering equally as good?
That’s the reason I went Gmail back in the day.
I get hundreds of emails a day. All filtered out properly.
It’s been much better for me, haven’t had an unsolicited e-mail hit my inbox yet.
Protonmail
I’m not the same person but I jumped ship from Gmail to Outlook (when that big rebrand launched a decade ago) and a few years ago to Fastmail.
It doesn’t hold a candle to ProtonMail’s privacy and security but I found it handy since it’s a complete mail, contacts, calendar solution with syncing via standards and a large number of available aliases. And since I pay, I’m the customer.
Good options exist now, including proton and skiff. Recommend checking out skiff. Everyone knows proton.
Skiff gives you 10GB free. Proton only gives 500MB.
That said we should be paying for email. If you don’t, you wind up with Gmail, where they read and analyze the contents of your email to build a profile on you and serve you ads. Moment I noped out of Gmail was when I realized they were aggregating sales receipts in my inbox and tracking the products I was buying. Wow, when did I ever agree to that? Guess it was time move on.
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.
If you have a pixel phone, there are completely de-Googled android operating systems available for them with full hardware support.
Actually, it’s easiest to escape google with a Pixel, even more than an iPhone with GrapheneOS (only if not a carrier phone though).
I would disagree and say that Pichai is a visionary, in turning Google into a monopolistic dystopian megacorporation.
Yep, layoffs tend to hurt culture and trust.
Some companies seem to thrive on regular culls in the name of operational efficiencies. All that happens is talent leaves the organisation and then those left behind struggle because expertise has gone.
It erodes good will and good will is something you can’t win back.
By the time things look like they are normalising, in comes another cull!
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They become quiet quitters. Barely putting any effort in and doing the bare minimum.
Folks are not going to bail out company decisions to cull by working extra harder.
They tidy CV and look for next opportunity.
Layoffs while at the same time handing the CEO $200 million for a single year.
Yep, that will definitely help employee morale.
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.
Frustrating part is how G+ coulda gone somewhere if they’d not been dumbasses rolling it out
Literally even the circles feature would have been so great
It’s been a long time brewing with how Google manages projects and people, and Sundar is just the dipshit who’s been helming it. Google needs a rethink, because once the ad market collapses (and it will collapse, they’re helping it along with their crusade against YouTube) they will be rudderless and moneyless.
I really wish I was motivated to finish my transition off Google because right now, storage and email are the two things left to address. And without funding, I can’t keep investing in NAS storage, or be bothered to move off Gmail for a new email vendor (which has its own problems with any non-Google email sinking into someone’s XBL).
What are you paying for Google storage that it’s cheaper than NAS storage?
Maybe they’re still on a G Suite Business / Workspace with the storage quota exceeded. Until earlier this year, Google didn’t do anything about exceeded quotas, and many had more than the included 5TB stored in their drive. I’ve seen people who had 100s of TB! I myself “only” have ~25TB, which I’m finally downloading to my local storage these days. When Google began caring about the storage quotas, they froze all accounts with exceeded quotas, blocking any new uploads – but if you keep paying the subscription (~20€), they’ll retain the frozen files for an extended time period of a year or two (don’t remember) after they gave the first notice.
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google owns youtube bro. you mean crusade against adblockers on youtube i suppose
I’m sure the MBA’s will starting taking the opinions of the worker bees seriously any day now. /s
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:
-
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.
-
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.
-
This is the best summary I could come up with:
An ex-Google employee has published a highly critical letter attacking the firm’s “eroded” culture and accusing CEO Sundar Pichai of lacking “visionary leadership.”
Posting on his blog, Hickson said he was “very lucky” to have experienced the early days of the company, where executives were candid with staff and ambitious experimentation was encouraged — but said the search giant’s culture had since “deteriorated.”
And he is far from the first employee who has criticized the company’s increasing bureaucracy since founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin stepped away.
Since then it has been making smaller, quieter cuts across the company, to the point employees are now tracking layoffs in an internal document, Business Insider reported.
BI has previously reported tension between the rank-and-file and managers at Google over, for example, practices around labelling employees as low performers.
Hickson suggests there should be efforts to move 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.”
The original article contains 580 words, the summary contains 169 words. Saved 71%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
No shit that moral too is all time low
Google has completely lost its way. On my Pixel 6 recently the voice typing doesn’t even work correctly. Although it works sometimes it tends to cut me off where is it worked perfect a few weeks ago. Google is constantly introducing new bugs into Android and into their native apps. I can tell morale must be very low because shit doesn’t work.
When there is this much money involved nothing can survive. Greed is the most pervasive evil there is.
[mispost]
On a completely unrelated matter, can Lemmy topic post titles be edited?
The randomness of this comment actually fucked me up for a good minute 🤣
Should be scolding latte slamming layoffs.
