Why I left Google

I did have serious moral doubts when I was interviewing for some startups tho. The inner conflict is definitely there.

AI being thought of - by the Parasite Class - as an effective replacement for many employees, thereby eliminating the employment that most people depend on in order to survive, all the while it wildly hallucinates entire industries straight into the dirt.

I mean, yes, the Parasite Class will get their comeuppance for their greed and arrogance and hubris and stupidity. But not before the majority of working-class people get driven into abject poverty and destitution from job loss. It will hurt the common man _long before_ it hurts those who truly deserve the pain, and if rolled out too fast and too far, may even trigger economic or societal collapse.

And while this is quite similar to your № 1, I feel it is materially different enough to stand separately: the paranoia here being that average working-class folk cannot turn aside this diesel locomotive because they have zero control over it, and the Parasite Class that does control it being so obsessed with obscene levels of profits that they are eagerly driving everyone off of a cliff just to get to it.

A switch from a bottom up culture to a broken mix of bottom up and top down. I used to feel empowered to write up proposals for new ambitious projects and to seek funding for them, even if they didn't always get funded. Now, I barely try anything like this. VPs demand that work conforms to a vision that they cannot communicate and they can barely explain why any given project gets rejected. I'd be okay with an actually top down culture if leaders could actually lead - but instead you get the worst of both worlds. Since 2021, I don't think I have ever been in a meeting with a VP that I felt was useful.

This lack of vision goes all the way to the top. The execs cannot communicate a vision to the company.

Major process overhead and churn in these processes. Some of this stuff is indeed important (it makes sense to go through the trouble of making sure all of your systems are properly labeled for DMA compliance, for example). But a lot of it is bullshit. It feels like there is constantly some GRAD or OKR ritual that we have perform that nobody is actually looking at closely or getting value from. The old performance review process was involved, but it at least felt useful in a lot of ways.

Layoffs coupled with highest-ever profits. Google has literally never made more money than it is currently making. Layoffs are sudden, frustrating, and feel unmotivated when the company has more money than God. I get that Google needs to keep showing higher and higher profits to keep the line going up, but living in a world where "fuck, now we need to replan 2024" keeps happening while posting record numbers on earnings calls is dispiriting.

AI Mania. LLMs are clearly useful tools, but it doesn't feel (to me) like the company is seeking to apply them where they are most useful. It feels instead like the company is shouting "AI is the future" and demanding that it be shoved into everything. The effect on me is that I need to defend to my director and/or VP why my particular product isn't just going all in on Gemini.

All of the above has also caused a bunch of people who've been around for a long time and are deeply skilled, knowledgeable, and who exhibit the culture of 2016 Google to leave. They take some of that old culture with them.

Ultimately, I stay because I've got a remote position and high pay and my day to day work is pretty enjoyable and I'm planning on retiring in the not too distant future anyway.