A Googler who just resigned after 18 years reflects on the decline of the company he loved

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Honestly, this is just big tech all over. I don't think there are many people that work at FAANG companies any more that feel things are better than they were even 3-4 years ago. They are no longer idealised, and CEO's have decided to take company failures out on employees instead of their inability to target long-term success. I've friends at Amazon, Google, and Apple - all say that their "culture" is basically dead.

IMO, we've reached a point where all of the big names in tech are now out of ideas. None of them have innovated in recent years, outside of (maybe) AI, and the culture of supporting moonshot ideas (where someone can work on something new/exciting and not be personally liable if it doesn't work out) is now dead with layoffs in these divisions. The only incentive that big tech has any more is pay, and with no long-term stability and pay decreasing over time, I think we'll see a shift away from FAANG and towards the new breed of tech. FAANG will become the IBM and Oracle's of tech, and things will move on.

I've been in a similar situation. It's heartbreaking when a great company and a unique job that you feel almost defines you deteriorates under a bunch of leeches.

The worst part is knowing that they come only to suck as much profit as possible short term, maybe a while longer, while the company's actual core tries to fight to keep it up against ridiculous decision making processes.

It doesn't even seem that what they do is malicious. What I've felt in my case was that they are not even aware what beauty they trample, as they have seemingly never have been a part of anything similar to what they destroy. It's maddening that you can't simply convey that to them.

It's very hard and painful to let go of a good place, people and cause, but when the odds of survival are impossible and the situation drives you bitter, it's time to leave. The sooner you'll start helping another worthy cause, the better it's going to be for everyone.

The hardest part is to acknowledge that there is nothing else you can do.

Lost me completely at

Much of the criticism Google received around Chrome and Search, especially around supposed conflicts of interest with Ads, was way off base

Both are ad delivery services that sometimes do something slightly resembling benefiting the end user.

If not for near-monopoly market share and therefore everything being integrated with and "optimised" for both, nobody who cares enough to know would use that crap willingly.

This is exactly why I look at companies and corporations with a side-eye of doubt when they claim to have some sort of "do not be evil" motto baked into thier company culture.

It doesn't matter if a gigantic company has a hundred philanthropy focused CEOs, all ot takes is one greedy or evil one to destroy a company's dogma

After the investors, managers, and profiteers taste easy money, they will continue to demand to be fed that blood flavored stew.

Once that happens, they either need to be lobotomized or put down for the good of all lest those who are not in the know continue to put money into the frothing imitation it has become.

Google removed their "do no evil" slogan. That says a lot.

This is the behavior the maximizes short-term shareholder value, not building a long-term profitable, innovative enterprise. When some other company temporarily discovers a money spigot like Google did, there might be a brief resurgence of such an environment, but generally no one values or wants to protect innovation, as dollars are easily quantifiable and future potential is subjective. This is why 99% of the time people keep their head down and collect their paychecks.

Much of the criticism Google received around Chrome and Search, especially around supposed conflicts of interest with Ads, was way off base

Key word "was." The teams may not have had that intention, but they sure as fuck do now.

It's definitely not too late to heal Google. It would require some shake-up at the top of the company, moving the centre of 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.

Why would this happen though? The change the author is describing came from the company's shareholders and their desire for profit. Shareholders who have no connection to the core domains of Google, who vote for directors on the board that further profit extraction, who then maintain executive leadership who implements that. You have to convince those shareholders that they should want Google to focus on something other than profit maximization. But they don't understand you. They can dump Google's stock at a moment's notice. Why care about some long term profit when they can make it now and dump the stock as soon as it stops making it? And then, you can't even talk to them because you're sitting behind the exec layer and the board layer, both of which are shareholder creations. So you have to tightrope your exec team into believing you, then they have to tightrope the board, and then the board has to tightrope the shareholders. The odds are stacked against reversing course. If on the other hand you're not acting alone but you are the head of the union that can shutdown Google at a moment's notice, then not only you can talk to the exec layer, you don't have to tightrope while doing it. Better yet, you can simply broadcast your message and it's gonna hit the board and the shareholders directly. That's why I don't think Google can reverse course without a strong union. I think the incentives are simply not there.

I feel like a big part of the change was also due to the US mass surveillance, which became broadly known with the Snowden revelations in 2013.

Before 2013, you could genuinely claim that collecting as much data as possible, might be done with good intentions. Afterwards, collecting more data than necessary for a given task turned into a moral failure. Their whole business model, while it should have felt sketchy beforehand, turned evil over night.

And of course, Google employees weren't forced to reflect on that. The spotlight was on the US government. Everyone expected the US government to just stop with that shit, after they got caught. And well, they didn't. Obama even doubled down on it, Trump certainly didn't drain the swamp either and Biden probably wouldn't even think about it anymore, if the EU didn't constantly get its ass sued for exchanging data with US companies.

The more it became apparent that the US government wouldn't go back on that, and as people had ever more critical data of themselves online, the more the public perception of Google fell down a hole, even if as a Google employee you could still be doing the same things you did in 2005.

Crazy how the declination in the office culture translates to such an obvious downturn from a public perspective as well.

creators made too much money and aren't involved in the work beyond demanding more money. MBAs just do what they do. Hire and fire isn't concerned with not being evil. They were always about indexing the internet. If you are on the internet you will be indexed, categorized and sold as data.

Thank you so much for sharing. I found the rest of this persons web content equally interesting, e.g. their CV. https://hixie.ch/

Fire sundar pechai. Flush the poo down the loo and Google will be redeemed

"There are still great people at Google"

A mind-plague of our time to call mediocrity greatness, as being exceptionally intelligent and being a tech wizard has absolutely nothing to do with being a great person. That is the same as saying the top %1 of Plumbers are great people. When faced with tough life choices, these Plumbers may show negligible character. Stop devaluing greatness.

It's a serious overvaluation of self and commodization of the term, a weakening of the term, so as to devalue it. It's a mind virus to say flippantly, "that person is great" when in reality they are average. The meaning of the word is being dilluted.

• Greatness is doing the right thing without being compensated or even recognized for it!
• Greatness is doing great things on your own (person). Group goodness is good people, action.
• Greatness is not involved in any way with Corporations. Corporations are profit above all else.
• Greatness is achieving what others could not achieve. Many awesome search engines were bought out and ruined by Big Tech, as they do with any competing technology.
• Greatness is not involved with violating the privacy of the whole world in any manner.

Silicon Valley is an immense perspective bubble that is equivalent to personality re-write. That anyone at Google can be thought of as a "great person" is a total and complete failure of perspective. Super smart, great Programmers, great Engineers, sure.

Being a great person almost always involves hardship, perserverance, and success against all odds. Read any classical book. Having a Billion dollar company pay you to turn a digital wrench has not one basis for "greatness" in any way, shape or form.

Think about all the "Great" people in the History of Earth. What did they have in commmon? How many people can be "Great"? Hundreds or even dozens at one Corporation? Gimme a break, that doesn't even fit the definition of greatness, unless your cognitive dissonance is confusing it with mediocrity and that is a societal mind virus.

So, let's be precise with our life terms like an actual programmer would be with technical terms except applied to your own life. So, you follow rules, you get along well with others, you don't hurt anyone physically, verbally or emotionally, you donate and work for causes, you create great stuff. This is expected of all people so that makes you average. You are an average person.

Making a comparative judgement against failed people does not make you great. In fact, that brings you down a notch.

Maybe along with all those other traits instead of creating great stuff you create exceptional stuff. The term applied to you is now "an exceptional 'job title' ".

Amazes how can one "love a company". It's just a job. Do it, do it well and get your paycheck. That's it. The company will never love you back anyway.