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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'

#151

Post by unethical_ban »

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…

As someone who worked in cloud security for a year, GCP's security mechanisms were a joke next to AWS IAM and Organizations. But some of their products like Bigtable were better.

Also, AWS answered the proverbial phone.

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

#153

Post by PessimalDecimal »

gonzo41 wrote: post #50
pcloadletter_ wrote: post #24

I think you're just in for a rude awakening if you expect the Google from 20 years ago. It's no longer a scrappy startup, it's closer to Microsoft at this point.

Nah, it's closer to IBM.

Came here to say exactly this.

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

#154

Post by gretch »

nharada wrote: post #39

"Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision." This is definitely a small-to-large company pattern I've observed

People always talk about these things as if they are mutually exclusive.

In reality, there’s lot of opportunities that benefit all 3 of user, Google, and decision maker.

it’s kind of the fundamental principle of trade/business - that both sides can proper in a deal.

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

#155

Post by SllX »

dekhn wrote: post #128
SllX wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn’t sound right. Do you mean the Google Street View cars? Those weren’t self-driving and Google didn’t start work on that front until Sebastian Thrun joined Google X in 2009.

Google X starting 2010. I saw self-driving cars (large spinning cameras) in the lot of Crittenden within a year of joining. So maybe it was 2009, but it was definitely before X existed.

No, you’re right about X. My recollection was off by a year too.

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

#156

Post by AndrewKemendo »

treprinum wrote: post #12

"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.’" Is there any mandatory training for CEOs to first understand when somebody is kissing up, second evaluate how devastating is cherry picking rare positive feedback to the company's morale? I can't believe top people can be so inept.

The CEOs job is to make the board happy. That’s it.

There’s no other requirement.

You make the board mad you’re fired. You make the board happy, then you’re golden and can do whatever.

The easiest way to make a board happy is to reduce headcount, increase revenues (ideally wherever you have strongest margins) and prevent collective bargaining.

CEO at this level isn’t a people leader like you’d expect because boards don’t care about people (unless they are unionizing). So anything they say about people issues, you can guarantee is a statement made for the board’s consumption.

This fits that perfectly because what he’s communicating is “we got rid of what we consider dead weight loss because those people worked in what we arbitrarily have deemed cost centers instead of what we used to call [important buzzword like “metaverse”]

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

#157

Post by klyrs »

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…

>> 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.

To add my latest peeve, google search is suddenly terrible at units. When I look for "24 inches in cm" it gives me an answer in meters. And duh, I know that conversion, but until quite recently my browser search bar was a handy little calculator and now that's gone.

Surely we aren't blaming GPT for this.

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

#158

Post by Rebelgecko »

wolverine876 wrote: post #126
bazil376 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least from my perspective it’s just the relentless pursuit of driving stock prices up

Why would that shift it from 'for the benefit of Google' to 'for the benefit of whoever makes the decision'?

If you're cashing out all of your RSUs over the next 5 years, you don't necessarily care about the long term ramifications of your decision. Just that it pumps the stock price in the short term

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

#159

Post by joe_the_user »

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.

Search had become awful well before ChatGPT appeared - the final really visible decline was in 2019 I recall. Recent 1st result for "Likely": "LIKELY - Women's Dresses, Tops & More". They've been happy to put anything commercial first for any term.

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

#160

Post by dzdt »

michaelt wrote: post #149
quatrefoil wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it scales linearly anywhere. A significant part of the workforce is just there to provide services to the workforce itself. You have full-time engineers just maintaining tools for performance management, or for booking conference rooms, or requesting new laptops, you have legal teams for basically every country you operate in, etc. And then once these bureaucracies grow large enough, you hire people who…

> A significant part of the workforce is just there to provide services to the workforce itself. The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.

Is there a rocket equation for bureaucracy? Something to model the exponentially growing efforts of a company that are spent self-support and bureaucracy as the amount of productive work scales up?
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