'Morale is at an all-time low': Ex-Googler writes scathing latter slamming layoffs and 'eroded' culture

CosmicCleric , 7 months ago

On a completely unrelated matter, can Lemmy topic post titles be edited?

Arthur_Leywin , 7 months ago

The randomness of this comment actually fucked me up for a good minute 🤣

blind3rdeye , 7 months ago

Should be scolding latte slamming layoffs.

jjjalljs , 7 months ago

Yeah Google kind of sucks now and everyone paying attention knows. They kill a lot of products and don’t really make anything new and good.

Their search returns too many ads and SEO garbage sites.

They can’t unify on messaging. Talk, hangouts, allo, duo, meet… Just pick one. But I guess that doesn’t look as good on someone’s resume.

PhlubbaDubba , 7 months ago

Frustrating part is how G+ coulda gone somewhere if they’d not been dumbasses rolling it out

Literally even the circles feature would have been so great

kandoh , 7 months ago

When there is this much money involved nothing can survive. Greed is the most pervasive evil there is.

unreasonabro , 7 months ago

Who would have thought that overtly replacing your motto in such a way that everyone knows the new default is now “Be Evil” would have a negative effect on morale? Shocking

But hey, they can take the credit for the beginning of modern enshittification, so they’ve got that going for them anyways. Because their IPO was the death of the good version of the internet and everything they’ve done since has just made everything shittier and shittier. Almost like basing the entire society around greed is a mistake or something. whooda thunkit except literally everyone

lolcatnip , 7 months ago

It was never the official motto.

onlinepersona , 7 months ago

the clock is ticking

Down to what? In order for Google to fail in the short term, it would take some really big event. It would have to be something at the level of “Google banned from EU after…” to make Google unprofitable. I’m sure Google can afford losing 500M customers in a short timespan, but not if they reside in an economic region that has great influence over others.

For Google to fail in the long term, its ad business would have to fail. I imagine a few more antitrust cases to make google lose its search dominance would be a big domino.

markon , 7 months ago

Google has completely lost its way. On my Pixel 6 recently the voice typing doesn’t even work correctly. Although it works sometimes it tends to cut me off where is it worked perfect a few weeks ago. Google is constantly introducing new bugs into Android and into their native apps. I can tell morale must be very low because shit doesn’t work.

varsock , 7 months ago

The letter is a post on his own blog . Hard to distill into a summary so I recommend reading it get more context. But it seems to have boiled down to:

• How It Was:

  • Strong adherence to the “don’t be evil” ethos, focusing on societal good over profits.
  • Open, transparent communication and decision-making processes.
  • High morale, with a culture of learning from successes and failures.
  • Work focused on benefitting the web and users, rather than Google’s immediate interests.
  • Collaboration and lack of internal silos, encouraging innovation and autonomy.

• How It Is Now:

  • Shift from user-centric to Google-centric, and then to individual-centric decision making.
  • Eroded transparency and increase in organizational silos.
  • Decline in morale and a culture of distrust between employees and management.
  • Focus on short-term financial gains leading to layoffs and defensive employee behavior.
  • Lack of clear vision and leadership, resulting in confused and ineffective management.
  • Overall deterioration of Google’s unique, innovative culture and values.