(TheStreet) - While talks about the fall of "big tech" have been taking place since the earliest days of the internet, there are currently several factors giving argument ammo to those who would like to see it come quicker.
High-profile layoffs at companies like Amazon (AMZN) - Get Free Report, Google (GOOGL) - Get Free Report and Microsoft (MSFT) - Get Free Report have affected tens of thousands while an uncertain economic future have brought many former forces from growth to, if not survival, then stagnation.
Few can offer insight into a company's problems quite like a former employee. And in a blog post that has been rapidly gaining traction, former Google employee Praveen Seshadri said that Google has "slowly ceased to function" amid a "lack of self-awareness across both management and employees."
No Mission And No Urgency, Says Former Googler
Seshadri joined Google after the "no-code development platform " AppSheet he co-founded was acquired by the tech giant in 2020. He was at the company until January 2023, when he left what he called his "three year mandatory retention period."
"The way I see it, Google has four core cultural problems," Seshadri writes in the viral blog post. "They are all the natural consequences of having a money-printing machine called 'Ads' that has kept growing relentlessly every year, hiding all other sins. (1) no mission, (2) no urgency, (3) delusions of exceptionalism, (4) mismanagement."
As a result, workers get caught up in an endless spiral of "legal reviews, performance reviews, exec reviews, documents, meetings [and] bug reports" without actually understanding what they're building for the future.
"Having worked every day at a startup for eight years, the answer was crystal clear for me -- I serve our users," Seshadri wrote. "But very few Googlers come into work thinking they serve a customer or user. They usually serve some process ('I'm responsible for reviewing privacy design') or some technology ('I keep the CI/CD system working'). They serve their manager or their VP. They serve other employees."
Google CEO Under Fire For Round Of Layoffs
Seshadri argues that this culture of endless growth and hiring without a clear vision in part necessitated the company's Jan. decision to cut over 12,000 jobs. Google CEO Sundar Pichai blamed the economy and used the world "difficult" four times in the company blog post that announced the decision.
"The recent layoffs should perhaps have focused more on managers and directors and VPs," Seshadri wrote. "I don't want anyone to lose their jobs, but maybe they should learn to become valuable individual contributors again, get their hands dirty, and do real tangible valuable work."
Seshadri's suggestions for improving the current culture would be for Google to commit to a "mission" beyond making money or developing technology only relevant to today and instead focus on creating "ambitious causes" that unite and attract people to want to work there.
"Googlers are idealists at heart and their work needs to mean something," he writes. "They also need to believe that their executives are pursuing an authentic mission versus just parroting slogans."
By Veronika Bondarenko
February 16, 2023
