Ex-Google employee tears up tech giant’s bureaucratic ‘labyrinth’
Google is a “once great company” that has “slowly ceased to function” thanks to its bureaucratic “maze”.
Those strong words come from Praveen Seshadri, a former software engineer at Google, who shared his thoughts on the tech giant in a lengthy essay on Medium this week. Seshadri joined Google after acquiring AppSheet, a startup he co-founded, in early 2020. According to his LinkedIn profile, he left the company last month.
In his essay, Seshadri criticizes Google’s bosses and employees alike for losing sight of what’s important, namely the user. “Respect the user” remains a core value of Google, writes Seshadri, but in practice “risk reduction trumps everything else.”
Understandable, he concedes, because everything at Google has been running “wonderfully” for years, thanks to a “money printing machine called ‘Ads’, which is growing unstoppably every year and hides all other sins”.
The problem, according to Seshadri, is that Google employees don’t go to work every day thinking they’re serving users or customers. Instead, they serve Google internal content, be it a process, technology, manager or other employee.
“Working extra hard or working extra smart,” he writes, “does not create fundamentally new value in such a world.”
If the focus was on value creation, it would change “the equation” at Google. Instead, the focus is on the potential risk that manifests itself in “every line of code you change” and “everything you launch,” leading to layer upon layer of processes, reviews, and approvals.
Regarding career development at Google, he writes: “Any disagreement with the management chain is a career risk, so always say yes to the VP, and the VP says yes to the senior VP, all the way up.”
For Google, Seshadri’s essay comes at a sensitive time. Last week, shares of parent company Alphabet plummeted after Google shared a video demonstrating its upcoming service Bard, an artificial intelligence chatbot similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In the video, Bard gave an inaccurate answer to a question about the James Webb Space Telescope.
Microsoft has invested heavily in OpenAI and earlier this month rolled out an updated version of its Bing search engine that offers ChatGPT-like answers in addition to traditional search results. That said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella The edge this month that while Google is still the “800-pound gorilla,” he hopes his company’s AI measures will get its rival to “come out and show they can dance.”
Google employees went to an internal forum to criticize company leaders, including CEO Sundar Pichai, for what they described as a rushed, botched job of announcing Bard, CNBC reported.
Amidst this dissatisfaction, employees were recently reminded of the company’s early days as a scrappy startup. Susan Wojcicki announced Thursday that she is stepping down from her role as CEO of Google’s YouTube. In 1998, Wojcicki rented out her garage to Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to work on their burgeoning search engine project. She then joined the company and played a key role in its rapid rise.
Few doubt that Google exceeded all expectations in those early years. But today, Seshadri argues in his essay, there is a “collective illusion” within Google that the company is still exceptional, when in reality most people are complaining about general inefficiency.
As a Google employee, “It’s not every day that you wake up and think how you should do better and how customers can do better and how you could do a better job,” he writes. “Instead, you believe that the things you already do are so perfect that they’re the only way to do it.”
If he’s right, and many believe that ChatGPT or similar tools will eventually challenge Google’s search dominance, that may not be enough anymore.
Google didn’t respond immediately Assets Request for comments.
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