- To many inside, the company feels like it lacks direction. It feels like the leadership doesn't know where to take Google and this pervades pretty much everything;
- There is a lot of discontent at the the amount of money Google throws at executives. I mean Sundar got paid ~$200m LAST YEAR. Levandowski got $120m+. Back in the day, Patrick Pachette was parising the benefits of scrappiness, which saved $40m in travel costs that year. Incidentally, his was paid ~$40m extra that year;
- It feels like there are constant reorgs going on. This plays into the directionless point above but is also symptomatic of politics run amok and middle managers creating work for themselves and covering their asses. I mean a decision can never be judged good or bad if it lasts at most 6 months before another reorg.
- Some units were deliberately keep apart from Google. Most notably Youtube, Android and X. This exacerbates a cultural drift such that Google is really becoming autonomous and separate business units;
- Internal mobility is harder than it used to be and also less advisable for your career, as a general rule.
- It takes too long to do pretty much anything, particularly anything UI related. This is in part because UI work is looked down upon by the engineering leadership and the tech stacks are like 10 years behind the rest of the world.
- Sundar came up through Chrome and still seemed to me see everything through a Chrome colored lens. Chrome in particular had (has?) a bad rep for hazing and their retention numbers for women engineers in particularly aren't great.
- Google promotion culture seems to value individual technical ability above all else. I can see how this breeds the views of the likes of Damore. Worse, it seems like a lot of PAs tolerate someone being an ass if they're a high performer, which is an unfortunate reward loop.
- This all said, there are a lot of talented and great people and projects at Google. At the same time you could probably get rid of half the company because they don't really seem to have anything to do.
- Left to their own devices teams will create work for themselves. This is most apparent in Maps, which definitely went through a period of new work and features making the experience decidedly worse by, say, unifying data pipelines because consistency to some is an absolute good.
- The effects of Vic's disastrous reign can still be felt and Larry needs to take the ultimate blame for that.
- There seems to be little or no regard for the harm in burning user trust. This comes in many forms but includes announcing projects and then cancelling or abandoning them.