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Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'

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Re: Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'

#131

Post by AndrewKemendo »

This is just so totally absurd that I’m surprised nobody has pushed back hard on this claim:

“The Verge reported that CEO Sundar Pichai defended the layoffs and claimed that workers sometimes reach out to express gratitude for the cuts. “And I just want to clarify that, through these changes, people feel it on the ground and sometimes people write back and say, ‘Thank you for simplifying.’ Sometimes we have a complicated, duplicative structure,”

That sounds like a massive hyperbolic exaggeration at best and pure fabrication at worst.

If true though it’s a massive indictment on the leadership that shows how inept they are at even having a semblance of knowing what their people do and taking care of them.

Re: Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'

#132

Post by leptons »

asah wrote: post #93

(repost after every Google-bashing...) Alternate perspective as a longtime googler, ex-googler, mostly-happy user and shareholder. Please hear me out. As user, I'm pretty ok with Google. Websearch is sputtering sure but that's normal after a challenge like chatgpt. I tried Bing again and came back after a day. Google seems ok on privacy: in 2024, you don't see hackers exfiltrate Google data, employees abuse privilege…

>Google Cloud remains the easiest to use among the big 3 by a wide margin

After trying all of them, I found that Google is last in the "easiest to use" category. Just not a good experience for me, and I have 30yoe. YMMV. AWS has been extremely easy, everything just makes sense, is well documented, and there's an API for everything. It's miles ahead of Google as a cloud platform to build on.

Re: Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'

#133

Post by wolverine876 »

blindriver wrote: post #89
andrewstuart wrote: post #14

Its amazing that the CEO of Google is still there after wholesale wrecking of developer trust over many many years.

The stock is near all time highs and revenues keep growing. That's the only thing anyone outside of the employees care about. The only thing.

That's the theory used as intellectual cover by people pursuing money at all costs, but it wasn't the theory until the 1980s afaik. Lots of people have other interests, including consumers, employees (as you mentioned), and actually almost all human beings have other motives.

Re: Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'

#134

Post by ghaff »

lxgr wrote: post #112
asah wrote: post #93

(repost after every Google-bashing...) Alternate perspective as a longtime googler, ex-googler, mostly-happy user and shareholder. Please hear me out. As user, I'm pretty ok with Google. Websearch is sputtering sure but that's normal after a challenge like chatgpt. I tried Bing again and came back after a day. Google seems ok on privacy: in 2024, you don't see hackers exfiltrate Google data, employees abuse privilege…

> Websearch is sputtering sure but that's normal after a challenge like chatgpt. How would the existence of LLMs make "classic" web search worse ? SEO spam and content farms cluttering the first results page has been going on for longer too. > Services like Gmail/gsuite are awesome for productivity and while they lag in shiny features, the teams are adding features quickly enough. Google Docs has some of the most cur…

>Google Docs has some of the most cursed UI that I've used in the past 20 years (and I work with Jira). I'm forced to use it at work so I stick with it.

>FWIW, 90% of my gripes would go away if it just supported a "markdown mode" instead of WYSIWYG, and I don't understand what's so hard about that for somebody of Google's caliber.

I guess that's a philosophical point. I have pretty much zero interest in markdown. And, as someone who has used word processors since the 1980s, I really like Google Docs (and Google Slides) they pretty much do all of the things I want and rarely lack a feature I need. (Might feel different as a lawyer for revision tracking and my use of Sheets is far lighterweight than my use of Lotus and then Excel was back in the day.)

And I think I'd just give up were I to go make to emailing copies of documents around.

It's not perfect for everything and everyone but the Google Suite works really well for me.

Re: Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'

#135

Post by karaterobot »

> Hirsh Theriault complained that executives are “trying to point in a vague direction” toward AI while waiting for lower-level staff to propose concrete, actionable ideas.

I'm not here to defend Google leadership at all, but this matches my mental model of what an executive should do: Define a vision and goals, then support proposals made by people under you. I think the opposite—when executives say not only what but how—is way worse.

Re: Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'

#136

Post by paxys »

Is there a single tech company where morale has been high since 2022? Microsoft had multiple layoffs and froze promos, bonuses and stock grants for all employees, and now they are the most valuable company in the world and have a great reputation in the industry. Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta and the rest aren't much different.

If you are looking for groundbreaking innovation, competent management, no politics, freedom from shareholder demands etc. then it's best to steer clear of any multi-trillion dollar corporation.

Re: Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'

#137

Post by utopcell »

blindriver wrote: post #89
andrewstuart wrote: post #14

Its amazing that the CEO of Google is still there after wholesale wrecking of developer trust over many many years.

The stock is near all time highs and revenues keep growing. That's the only thing anyone outside of the employees care about. The only thing.

Is it though ? Even Meta's 5y return is higher than Google's, and that includes the enormous pivot-to-VR blunder drop.

Re: Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'

#138

Post by protocolture »

exabrial wrote: post #120
protocolture wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's cute to think you have any real privacy while carrying a cellphone. Trivializing privacy isn't the same thing as identifying good privacy.

We would, but Google. What a hell of a justification.

We have a multi billion dollar machine built by developers with the goal of doing good things and profiting by them.

>Cell phone privacy

Sure we make a cell phone and we make a cell phone OS but its best to look the other way and never trust your privacy to a device that society has decided should follow you 24/7.

Re: Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'

#139

Post by utopcell »

paxys wrote: post #100
TillE wrote: post #20

Google does plenty of stuff well, but what's their last big exciting new product or even new feature? Bard is good but they're chasing OpenAI. Same story with the Pixel phones and Samsung. Or YouTube Shorts and Tiktok. It all seems directionless or stagnant, like the bad old days of Microsoft.

Every large tech company does one or two things extremely well and prints money from them and then has a hundred other efforts that range from terrible to middling. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon...they are all the same in this regard. When was the last time any of them truly innovated?

Waymo.

Re: Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'

#140

Post by ghaff »

23B1 wrote: post #110
curt15 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it actually take 150k employees to produce Google's output? They grew by like 30k employees since 2021 but I'm not seeing correspondingly more or better products.

Think of google as a gigantic 3D matrix, and you are a node. There's four people surrounding you, and one below, all angling for your budget or job, respectively, and one above you that thinks you're either a threat or chattel. Your job then becomes CYA in every direction. Ideally you can get a few of your subordinate nodes to work on your project and maybe even do a little CYA for you; the higher you rank, the more…

There are a lot of things that large organizations can do that smaller ones can not. However, as organizations scale up for good reasons (it takes a lot of people to do some things) and bad (empire building), it takes a lot of people to corral most of those people in productive ways and to support them with all kinds of systems.
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