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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
Same, but opera/firefox, Zenfone, and proton Mail. Not really a fan of apple either
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
Google is one of the most engineer driven companies out there. Their engineers are simply massively overrated. A ton of leetcoder kiddies got into FAANG companies over the years and a lot of them are just plain shit as professional developers.
Edit: also the way they evaluate engineers drives them to create half-baked products that get abandoned. It's incredible how they still haven't figured out that people want stable, maintained products, not "innovation" that doesn't actually help anyone and never turns into a finished product.
Their hiring process is the reason why leetcoder kiddies get in there in the first place. 3 seperate coding rounds with questions not even related to the domain that you need to solve in a timer of 45 mins.
Yep. And they also used to do the stupid brain teaser stuff back in the day. That's what happens when you hire out of touch PhDs to design your hiring process instead of people with real world experience.
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:
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.
As a counter-point, what new services or products have any of the FAANG companies released that the average person uses, over the last few years?
Big tech was built on a handful of runaway successes, and building on moonshot ideas, allowing engineers to work on "the next big thing" without fear of liability.
Now, if it doesn't work, you get laid off. At least if you worked for a startup, you'd get enough equity to make a ton of money if it works out...
Pichal is shit, but so are Zuck, Tim Cook, Andy Jassy, and the two at the helm at Netflix.
Yup, he's the absolute worst. I can't think of a single product that Google has even improved during his tenure as CEO... let alone a product that he successfully launched on his own. All he can do is make existing products more expensive.
Look at how he completely lost his shit when chatgpt was released - probably a huge part of the reason he lost it is cause he realized he'd have to actually do something useful instead of just squeezing more blood from the collective stone of all Google's existing products. His claim to fame is creating Chrome. What fucking good is that? Web browsers have existed since the time he was born. There's nothing to innovate there, and there never has been. It's clear: he's not an innovator.
Whoever takes over after he's gone is going to be in for a hell of a time. The only thing he's created for Google is a shit-ton of anti-trust lawsuits. The company is an empty husk at this point. There's nothing left for them to become.
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.
Sure, in the short term. I've switched to DDG and I'm not getting another Pixel when I need a new phone, and hoards of tech savvy people are feeling the same way. Dissatisfaction is causing them to lose customers and talent.
Eventually, they'll start feeling it in their bottom line. And by then it might be too late to change course.
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 went to modify my 2018 Google Wi-Fi router to add a simple port forwarding rule, and the functionality is completely GONE from their already shitty Google Home app. It used to be so easy and simple on the old Wi-Fi app. I’m never buying another Google device.
This company has reached enshittification nirvana.
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.
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 ;)
Let me introduce you to graphene os :)
Whaaaat, it's supported now? It wasn't for a bit. (Or maybe I'm thinking of Lineage) Man, I may have to make the jump soon, or at least just test it out. It's been a while since I've played with a custom ROM though, since the pixels are a great vanilla experience.
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.
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!
Layoffs while at the same time handing the CEO $200 million for a single year.
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.
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).
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:
How It Is Now:
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!
I’m sure the MBA’s will starting taking the opinions of the worker bees seriously any day now. /s
No shit that moral too is all time low
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
