Google was beloved as an employer for years. Then it laid off thousands by email

This is simultaneously true and the CEO wrote a book about how he did an across the board 10 percent raise[1] because Google was underpaying relative to the competition, _for some reason_.

[1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703523604575605...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

Expecting a company to do good when it does not have to is madness.

In the 2000s and the first half of the 2010s, Google felt like the dream place to work. Yes, a lot has been said about the perks and the generous pay, but another thing that made Google appealing was its cutting edge projects. I was a huge fan of Google Inbox (sadly long discontinued). As a graduate student researching storage systems and who enjoyed reading the MapReduce, BigTable, and Spanner papers, being able to work on Spanner as an intern was a dream come true. I also loved all of the internal support I received as a developer, from the amazing internal infrastructure to the various internal tutorials. I never felt siloed off from the rest of the company, compared to other employers I've had. It was an amazing place to work and I'd rank it as my second-best work experience (my best being eight months I spent at Fujitsu Laboratories in Kawasaki, Japan where I worked in a storage lab on an SSD cache....that was a downright magical experience), though granted as an intern I was shielded from the performance review process and on-calls, so I can't comment about these things.

I would love to work for a team similar to the teams I worked on during my internships at Google, as well as the general feeling of 2013-14 Google. However, I'm under the impression that Google's culture started changing a lot during the Alphabet reorganization and the rise of Sundar Pichai as CEO. I don't know if there's a place in the Valley these days that captures the feel of pre-Alphabet Google; it seems to me that the Valley itself has changed a lot (and for the worse) since roughly 2015, but that's another discussion for another time.

I don't know anyone working at Google, nor anyone who worked at Google in the past (except a single intern). Hell, I don't even live anywhere near a Google campus!

But I always assumed that Google wants you to spend your whole day there, from morning until evening. Because big tech is usually implicitly aiming at that.

- Serve three major meals a day, + you can bring your dog to your office, which eliminates any reason to go home (especially for those who don't have a house or spouse to take care of).

- Shuttle bus, where many employees have like, idk, 40min of free time? Why not just start working on the laptop already?

- Food servings are stretched out. Breakfast is till 10AM; dinner is served at 6:30PM, so if you started at 8:30AM, you need to stay another 1.5h to make use of dinner. Why not work in the meantime?

And some classical fear stuff which makes you want to work hard and long hours:

- Aggressive deadlines

- Get the promotion in 2 years or get fired

I dunno, I probably wouldn't mind working under these conditions, but I think there are reasons why the average tenure of a Googler is 1.5 years.

The catch is that Google could have made that utopia possible, had all the funds and resources needed to do it, and actually did have that philosophy at the start and publicly so - until the bean counters took over and started minmaxing everything for the sake of absentee shareholders. The 'MBAification' eventually destroyed its mission. Various detailed comments from some long-time Googlers in different threads under TFA tell how that MBAification happened in minute detail.

Its just another case of capitalism destroying things while maximizing profits through 'MBAification'.