Another "leader" who complains about employees wanting work life balance and they are extremely entitled. These are the type of managers you want to avoid. I'm sure many Googlers are happy you left.
For me it was the opposite, i was thinking, wow, this is the guy i would like to be working with. But i'm not the one who fits this description: You need to be able to answer the "what have you done for our users lately" question with "not much but I got promoted" and be happy with that answer to be successful in Corp-Tech.
The degree of behemoth incrementalism is so extreme that outside the immediate blast radius of your work, there is no serious, intellectually honest way to connect the dots between your effort and the user. It’s like shipping a rover to Mars. You do a shitload of work and hope several time units later when it actually lands, that your work has some barely perceptible positive contribution to the sum total outcome.
And all this is even worse in companies where it’s not clear to anyone whether the user is the product or the customer. Just imagine that. “How did you help the user today?” should make you freeze like a deer in headlights. Do you mean the ad company who can target Starbucks-drinking soccer moms in Texas better now because of our cool new image filter for posting kid sports pictures? Or do you mean the soccer moms themselves? Or do you mean the NSA we are allowing access to all this data on both the advertiser and the soccer moms? Or do you mean the VCs?
Leaders who say platitudes like “what did you do for the customer” are just extremely arrogant know-nothings. They can use the stick of “the customer always comes first” to indiscriminately beat, shame or fire anyone that they conveniently need to attack, no matter how unrealistic it is to demand this kind of direct customer impact accounting.
Employees aren’t braindead morons who subscribe to your company like a religion. But that is exactly what this type of thinking is meant to induce.