There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

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

‘Morale is at an all-time low’: Ex-Googler writes scathing latter slamming layoffs and ‘eroded’ culture::An ex-Googler wrote a 1,500-word letter criticizing the firm and CEO Sundar Pichai’s lack of “visionary leadership.”

macattack ,

“Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision,”

That’s a bar.

UFODivebomb ,

The googlers i know spend a lot more time than I’d expect on performance reviews. Not really on like… Doing shit. Just reviewing and selling what little is done to get that next pay bump.

corsicanguppy ,

These recent months it seems the reviewing and selling, the hype-mongering, is more about remaining employed than it is a pay bump.

It’s a sad state of affairs when the inexperienced code-olympiads you hire need to transition partially from devs-as-engineers to introverts-as-showmen. It’s like they hired apples, made them work like oranges, and now only keep the ones who can also be dolphins.

UFODivebomb ,

Haha good analogy. The “remaining employed” is a point i missed. Broad layoffs in my company would probably make me do the same i suppose.

hiyidef646 ,

Indians…

Fades ,

Downvoters don’t know just how much of tech is offloaded to IST (and what the result of that money based decision has on product quality and supportability). It would be funny if I didn’t understand just how bad it is, but >10 years in the industry opened my eyes

hiyidef646 ,

It wouldn’t be surprising if the downvoters are indians. They get hyper offensive if anyone criticises them.

MarvinKMooney ,

I have worked with a bunch of people from India who are great at technology and coding. The problem is that they tend to leave India and come to North America to work simply because companies don’t pay for shit in India. I’m confident that India has great coders in India, but to get that companies would have to pay for the good talent. Which completely negates the whole reason to off shore in the first place.

SchizoDenji ,

That has been changing in the past decade.

victorz ,

Yooo… What?

lolcatnip ,

Racist much?

hiyidef646 ,

Not really

hiyidef646 , (edited )

It’s all because of those indian hires and the indian CEO

hightrix ,

Is anyone surprised? Brilliant engineers going to work at Google expecting to work on world changing software and instead work on selling more ads.

How miserable.

1rre ,

Selling more ads can actually be engaging to work on even if it’s not world changing, if you’re given things you actually need to think through

Unfortunately I can’t really see Google being the type of place that lets people think for themselves, they’re far too busy trying to please the shareholders for that

hightrix ,

Oh agreed, the scale and performances requirements to serve ads on the modern internet is a really challenging problem.

My point was simply that these brilliant minds are being wasted on this objective.

TheDarkKnight ,

Ugh I’d feel so fucking gross is I somehow contributed to the proliferation of MORE advertising in our world. Like talk about an absolute waste of your talent and contribution to the world.

Laying there on your deathbed someday and looking back on what you did in the time you were given…and it was making more ads, like how disgusted I feel about it all.

1rre ,

Frankly at that pay grade in that industry you’re either going to work for a company that makes money selling ads/data, in high frequency trading or a hedge fund, and the latter two are objectively more parasitical - at least content creators and media publishers get a cut from ads, rather than all the money either staying in the company or going to their competitors, with the only instance of their business affecting normal people being when they crash the economy

stolid_agnostic ,

The single worst decision they made was rolling back the 20% of work time being dedicated to side projects. That’s where all their good early ideas came from. It was replaced by politics instead.

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

That will happen when the market is in the shitter

Millwiller ,

Employer can still make good decisions with the market in the shitter.

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

But that would cost them.

stolid_agnostic ,

Oh no, those poor poor billionaires. Whatever shall they do?

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

What?

ezchili ,

Monopolies don’t need to create value for the user to keep their leadership

If the market wasn’t fucked they wouldn’t need to have good leadership, they’d do it or die

SCB ,

The market is not fucked though. Google is massively profitable and had 11% growth this quarter, which tracks with their 11% increase in revenue YOY

Gabu ,

Imagine thinking the issue is some imaginary concept like “the market”, rather than 20 years of poor leadership.

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

Imagine thinking “the market” is an imaginary concept that doesn’t influence your business 🤦

Gabu ,

Considering my higher education on the subject, I’ll take my chances with that.

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

OMG dude, you’re embarrassing yourself…just put down the shovel.

shartedchocolate ,

He’s embarassing himself? 😂

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

Is there an echo in here?

DeepGradientAscent ,
@DeepGradientAscent@programming.dev avatar

Eat your lunch, Helen.

stolid_agnostic ,

Time to take you pills and go to sleep.

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

What is that even supposed to mean?

Fades ,

So the employees can’t be negatively affected by the state of their workplace unless the goddamn market is fucked?

How dumb can you possibly be?

helenslunch , (edited )
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

Not dumb enough to get mad about things no one said.

stolid_agnostic ,

You see the problem here is that lives are not disposable. Taking all the risks and making the people suffer the consequences is really shitty. I if they instead focused on steady growth rather than giant leaps, nobody would get laid off. Layoffs are a sign of incompetence from leadership

cyborganism ,

LoL no shit. You don’t even need to be an employee to figure this out. Even as a customer I feel that way. I’m looking to leave Google altogether.

bloopernova ,
@bloopernova@programming.dev avatar

I’ve switched to Kagi for search, and Fastmail for email. Though a bit more difficult to escape Google when you’ve got a pixel 8 pro ;)

badmemes ,

Let me introduce you to graphene os :)

andrew ,
@andrew@lemmy.stuart.fun avatar

Whaaaat, it’s supported now? It wasn’t for a bit. (Or maybe I’m thinking of Lineage) Man, I may have to make the jump soon, or at least just test it out. It’s been a while since I’ve played with a custom ROM though, since the pixels are a great vanilla experience.

steal_your_face ,
@steal_your_face@lemmy.ml avatar

It’s super easy to install graphene. They even have a web installer.

iturnedintoanewt ,
@iturnedintoanewt@lemm.ee avatar

Rather easier I’d say, as it has an unlockable bootloader, unlike most other phones. I have a pixel 7 on Graphene, but there’s a bunch of other versions you can try.

kzhe ,

Only the google edition, not carrier versions.

cyborganism ,

If you have a pixel phone, there are completely de-Googled android operating systems available for them with full hardware support.

kzhe ,

Actually, it’s easiest to escape google with a Pixel, even more than an iPhone with GrapheneOS (only if not a carrier phone though).

phoneymouse ,

I left Google 5-6 years ago. I do occasionally use YouTube, but that’s about it.

It’s surprisingly easy to get used to once you do it.

nephs ,

What did you do about email?

SuckMyWang ,

Protonmail

BombOmOm ,
@BombOmOm@lemmy.world avatar

Protonmail is one of the more popular options.

cyborganism ,

This is what I’m planning to do as well.

Patches ,

Is the Spam Filtering equally as good?

That’s the reason I went Gmail back in the day.

I get hundreds of emails a day. All filtered out properly.

No1 ,
@No1@aussie.zone avatar

I get hundreds of emails a day.

Dad? I told you, don’t type your email address in every popup and click every email link 🤣

Patches ,

When you’ve been on the Internet for 20 years it is inevitable that your address ends up on an email list, or two. They all share information with each other

tinkeringidiot ,

It’s been much better for me, haven’t had an unsolicited e-mail hit my inbox yet.

rikonium ,

I’m not the same person but I jumped ship from Gmail to Outlook (when that big rebrand launched a decade ago) and a few years ago to Fastmail.

It doesn’t hold a candle to ProtonMail’s privacy and security but I found it handy since it’s a complete mail, contacts, calendar solution with syncing via standards and a large number of available aliases. And since I pay, I’m the customer.

phoneymouse , (edited )

Good options exist now, including proton and skiff. Recommend checking out skiff. Everyone knows proton.

Skiff gives you 10GB free. Proton only gives 500MB.

That said we should be paying for email. If you don’t, you wind up with Gmail, where they read and analyze the contents of your email to build a profile on you and serve you ads. Moment I noped out of Gmail was when I realized they were aggregating sales receipts in my inbox and tracking the products I was buying. Wow, when did I ever agree to that? Guess it was time move on.

silkroadtraveler ,

I went to modify my 2018 Google Wi-Fi router to add a simple port forwarding rule, and the functionality is completely GONE from their already shitty Google Home app. It used to be so easy and simple on the old Wi-Fi app. I’m never buying another Google device.

This company has reached enshittification nirvana.

madcaesar ,

Google home has become an absolute shit show. It has awful UI and UX. Truly an amazing feat.

stolid_agnostic ,

Worse is that they can’t even do things like set timers anymore.

silkroadtraveler ,

Yeah how tf do you become feature poorer (even with the basics) as your product matures and you spend billions acquiring your competition? Oh yeah…let me click on the original news article on this post for the answer.

iawia ,

It’s still there for me in “Advanced networking”->“Port Management”.

silkroadtraveler ,

If you click into mine, all you see are two options both of which only serve to allow Google to Hoover more of your data.

Looking into this more a couple days ago, it seemed that without IP reservations, you can’t get the port forwarding option to appear. Which I haven’t messed with. On principal I refuse to deal with a router that has regressed in functionality and am instead dedicating my time to de-Google my life haha. I bought an openwrt compatible router this weekend. https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/900cfd9b-ad9c-4a1c-8a41-5ce580c9b353.pnghttps://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/655586bb-2e04-42a6-97f5-75df79fb1915.png

iawia ,

I do have a bunch of IP reservations. I don’t really know how you’d do port forwarding without subs static IP address to forward to. I have not seen any of the data sharing options, but it could be that I gave those permissions years ago and forgot…

silkroadtraveler ,

IIRC the Google Wi-Fi app had some extremely simple selection process in the port forwarding that allowed you to review the device list with IPs and select for port forwarding. The app would then carry the pf rule regardless of DHCP. Seems very simple functionality that now requires multiple steps to achieve. I’m sure in the product management meetings they assumed the new Nest users were too dumb to handle such logic or just overlooked the functionality in general to speed the migration from Google Wi-Fi to Google Home. Seems like a great mini case study for poor product management.

iawia ,

Ah, you’re right. It does work with dynamic addresses.

It works like this for me, currently:

First step, port management, click plus

Then select the device

And setup the ports

silkroadtraveler ,

Gotcha, maybe it’s the fact I’m running iOS, I can’t get any type of rule or DHCP assignment options to show up. Just the same two options for telemetry and Nest. Oh well, thanks for the help. I’m getting my new router Tuesday and should be off to the races!

autotldr Bot ,

This is the best summary I could come up with:

An ex-Google employee has published a highly critical letter attacking the firm’s “eroded” culture and accusing CEO Sundar Pichai of lacking “visionary leadership.”

Posting on his blog, Hickson said he was “very lucky” to have experienced the early days of the company, where executives were candid with staff and ambitious experimentation was encouraged — but said the search giant’s culture had since “deteriorated.”

And he is far from the first employee who has criticized the company’s increasing bureaucracy since founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin stepped away.

Since then it has been making smaller, quieter cuts across the company, to the point employees are now tracking layoffs in an internal document, Business Insider reported.

BI has previously reported tension between the rank-and-file and managers at Google over, for example, practices around labelling employees as low performers.

Hickson suggests there should be efforts to move power “from the CFO’s office back to someone with a clear long-term vision for how to use Google’s extensive resources to deliver value to users.”

The original article contains 580 words, the summary contains 169 words. Saved 71%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • [email protected]
  • random
  • lifeLocal
  • goranko
  • All magazines
    •