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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'

#291

Post by ncr100 »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #156
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 d…

It's gross, and true.

The average worker, adhering to Company Culture, trading their mental space and shaving off their own quality of life in favor of the company's growth, are not the point of the business.

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

#292

Post by ryloric »

jjjjoe wrote: post #281
MichaelZuo wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making it an even percentage across the company is pretty common, it prevents middle management infighting and horse trading over who has to cut more and who gets to cut less. The actual decisions about which specific individuals, after the percentage is arrived at, however seems questionable if what you say is true.

This thinking is taught in MBA programs but does not map onto real businesses. If you're in the ice cube business and you made the profoundly unwise decision to set up vending machines in Inuit communities, you don't recover by laying off x% of both your Alaskan retail and Caribbean Cruise wholesale businesses.

Lmao, most creative example ever.

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

#293

Post by ryloric »

jjjjoe wrote: post #204

The reason the word "inept" keeps coming up is just how opaque and senseless to the rank and file the January 2023 layoffs were. High performers, low performers, newest hires, most tenure: we saw all kinds of heads roll. I saw a team lose its sole TL with a decade+ of tenure on the team, then turn around and hire 4-6 people to try and catch up. A growing deployment team was actively hiring before and after it got a 6…

If you have some ambition and desire to work hard, large parts of Google were already wrong places to be in 2010-11.

I went in bright eyed, excited about the challenging work I would get to do, but instead found inept co-workers happy to do minimal amount of work while enjoying the perks and chilling most of the time. Couple that with the undeserved air of smugness many co-workers carried and the cult-like social environment... it was already not a great place to be, at the very least the team I was part of.

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

#294

Post by shostack »

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…

Are there any good examples of this?

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

#295

Post by foofie »

willio58 wrote: post #228
jjjjoe wrote: post #204

The reason the word "inept" keeps coming up is just how opaque and senseless to the rank and file the January 2023 layoffs were. High performers, low performers, newest hires, most tenure: we saw all kinds of heads roll. I saw a team lose its sole TL with a decade+ of tenure on the team, then turn around and hire 4-6 people to try and catch up. A growing deployment team was actively hiring before and after it got a 6…

> I saw a team lose its sole TL with a decade+ of tenure on the team, then turn around and hire 4-6 people to try and catch up. My god.. That's pure ineptitude and I'm sorry for anyone at that company right now. This basically sends the message "doesn't matter how good you are, we're going to spin the wheel every so often and if it lands on you you're out"

> This basically sends the message "doesn't matter how good you are, we're going to spin the wheel every so often and if it lands on you you're out"

The conspiracy theory that's making the rounds is that these rounds of layoffs from tech firms have zero to do with financial reports or economy downturns, and are instead a coordinated effort, along with RTO policies, to wrestle negotiation power from tech workers and put downward pressure on tech salaries. Hence the apparent lack of criteria and indiscriminate layoffs complemented with hiring rounds.

I recall that a FANG ordered managers to decimate their teams while ramping up hiring on teams located in the same building, and HR openly rejected the idea of even having employees in the chopping block interview for those positions.

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

#296

Post by sitkack »

refulgentis wrote: post #271
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm sorry for anyone at that company right now The average total compensation for an engineer is $250k-$350k/yr+ https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Software-Engineer-Sa... https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google,Citrix,UKG,American%2...

It's hard to describe the pure absolute hell that can be working there, you'd be surprised how quickly the money becomes not worth it.

I work at Google, fuck em. The whole place is toxic. I hope it is at peak larping lord of the flies. But if anything about modern history has taught me anything is that there is always lower.

Those 12k people they fucked over for zero real benefit, represented due to how Google hires, 240K interviews (5% accept rate). Let’s say they only did the screen. Still minimum 2 hrs, interview plus write up. 500k hours. 250 years of FTE time just in interviews flushed down the fucking toilet. And they are blowing the doors off the place hiring in LATAM.

And the bs just keeps coming by the dump truck full.

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

#297

Post by ryloric »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #156
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 d…

Come on, you say it as if every board member is an android focused only on short term results. They've had a board when Eric was CEO and Google was doing it's best work as well.

It's not really about the board, Google has become a mature company that's not going to grow 20% YoY anymore and this is what happens to such businesses. Unless they're lead by an exceptionally strong person who can stand up to economic forces, they will turn them into IBM.

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

#298

Post by beacon294 »

scarmig wrote: post #287
refulgentis wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, honestly I shouldn't have posted the 2 sentence version, and we'd need to have a beer and an hour to even begin understanding now that I started from there. But, what I'd say in another flippant sentence, since I'm tempted again: exactly, and that's the problem. I had a great time, will be forever proud and grateful, and there's more to life than work. But, it left me with a permanently jaundiced view of a lot…

I went through a progression, where I was first accepted to Google (genuinely one of the most exciting moments of my life), and I gradually fell into a deeper and deeper cynicism as I saw all my fantasies about how the world should work evaporate. Maybe it was just growing up. Even the "best company in the world that does no evil" is really just a bunch of profit-mongering assholes. That said, so is the rest of the w…

> You should never identify with it or sympathize with it, but if you approach it as a parasite hoping to extract as much value from you as it can, it offers a pretty great personal opportunity.

I like you. This is my general perspective, however I try to be a greedy symbiote.

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

#299

Post by zyncronet »

andrewstuart wrote: post #14

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

Lol all that matters is how much money is being made, they don't really give a shit about wrecking developer trust as long as google remains the money printing behemoth it is.

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

#300

Post by SllX »

bdd8f1df777b wrote: post #175
SllX wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll believe that when they stop destroying search. Google Cache’s death has been widely reported but the custom date filter just plain stopped rendering on my iPhone and iPad last week. There are some kinds of queries which really only function on Google with that in working order.

WoW, I thought my VPN failed (to properly traverse the GFW) when the date filter just didn’t show up on iOS.

Nope, just broke for no apparent reason after working perfectly fine for years and continues to work on the desktop. By this point in time, I've been cynical of Google for longer than I was a fan, but every nail that strikes at the heart of the Google that was cool still hurts to see.
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