I quit in 2015 because the place was becoming like any other big company and I’d already been there for a decade. Larry becoming CEO in 2011 again probably started it…once he took the helm, Google soon got really concerned about expenses, likely because his net worth was tied to pleasing Wall Street. CFO Pichette left and bean-counting CFO Porat got hired who came from Morgan Stanley with a mandate to cut expenses.
And the culture changed at the same time. Lots of seemingly needless rules to protect rising fiefdoms that started the sclerosis that only got worse over time. Gamergate internally felt like a Civil War waged over Google+.
Google+ itself was the height of Google’s hubris, thinking they could kill a beloved product (Google Reader) to kill a different company’s beloved (at the time) product, Facebook. I remember being deeply disappointed with the release of Google+ like I was when the Segway was released. All this hype and promise for a secret product built with an enormous group of highly-talented people, kept away from the teeming masses of similarly talented people that could’ve told them that it was a dumb idea and here are the reasons why.
Really, if I had to blame one thing, it would be Google+ because of the corrosive effects of social media. Before Google+, my colleagues were just my colleagues who brought their whole selves to the office but we still mostly talked about work. Folks had mailing lists I wasn’t subscribed to where they would talk about their abhorrent political beliefs so I wouldn’t find out about them.
And then, all of a sudden, after Google+ came out, some guy I thought was cool revealed that he didn’t want women to be able have abortions. And some other guy was a randroid, hellbent on not understanding that taxes pay for roads. And on and on…seemingly everyone just spent a lot of time being mad at each other.
Obviously it’s hard for me to point to a specific thing or time period, but the writing was on the wall in the early 2010s (to me, anyways) and I bounced by the middle of the decade.