Apparently, Google has lost its way, according to a former employee who left the company. The writer of this blog post wrote that Google today is inefficient, poorly managed, and stuck because there is a fear of the unknown that prevents it from taking risks.
Google’s cloud service, Google Cloud, was acquired by Google in early 2020 when Praveen Seshadri co-founded the company AppSheet, which became a part of Google Cloud. According to his blog post published on Monday, he said that even though he was welcomed and well taken care of by Google, he left the company with the understanding that “an organization that was once great has slowly stopped working.” In the profile on LinkedIn that Seshadri has on the job site, it is stated that he left the company in January.
According to Seshadri, Google was experiencing a “fragile time” right now as the company was recently competing with Microsoft’s artificial intelligence initiative in a bid to gain an edge. It is not Google’s technology that poses a fundamental problem, but its culture that poses a problem.
As far as I am concerned, there are four core cultural issues at Google,” Seshadri said. It is not surprising that these problems are the result of the money-printing machine that is ‘advertising,’ a part of the business that is growing relentlessly every year while masking all the other issues that exist within. One of the causes of the failure of the organization is the absence of a mission, the second is the lack of urgency, the third is the illusion of uniqueness, and the fourth is mismanagement.”
In response to a request for comment, Google did not immediately respond.
The majority of employees at Google today end up serving other Google employees, rather than customers, according to Seshadri. According to him, the company is a “closed world,” in which employees are not always rewarded as a result of their hard work. In Sachadly’s opinion, the majority of feedback comes from what your colleagues and managers think of your work, he said.
In his interview with Seshadri, Seshadri said the company has a high focus on risk management. “Risk reduction trumps everything else.” Every line of code, every product release, unclear decisions, protocol changes and disagreements are now risks that Google employees must be careful about, he wrote.
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He added that employees are also “trapped” in lengthy approvals, legal reviews, performance evaluation processes and meetings that leave little room for creativity or true innovation.
In Google’s last all-employee survey, employees gave Google a low score for its ability to execute, which they said led to bureaucracy and hindered the company’s ability to innovate, according to reports.
“Overall, it’s a mild peacetime culture where there’s nothing worth fighting for,” Seshadri wrote, “and those who tend to fight hard for customers, new ideas or creativity quickly realize there’s really nothing to be gained by doing so.”
Seshadri said Google has been hiring quickly, which makes developing internal talent difficult and hiring ineffective. He said many employees also believe the company is “really different,” meaning instead that many outdated internal processes remain in place because “that’s how Google has always done it.
Sachadly said Google still has a chance to turn things around, but he doesn’t think it can continue to succeed simply by avoiding risk. He believes Google needs to be “mission-driven,” rewarding employees who work for “ambitious causes” and streamlining middle management.
He writes, “There is hope for Google and the people who work there, but it requires intervention.”
