Here’s some insight into Google’s recent troubles from a former employee. Praveen Seshadri, the founder whose company was acquired by Google, recently quit and left a scathing Medium post as he walked out the door detailing the challenges he faced while working for the company. Seshadri says Google is “stuck in a maze of approvals, launch processes, legal reviews, performance reviews, executive reviews”and other bureaucratic processes, and while employees are capable, they “do very little quarter after quarter, year after year.. “
Seshadri is the founder of AppSheet, a “code-free development platform”that he launched in 2014. After years of development, Seshadri was acquired by Google Cloud in 2020 and Seshadri spent the next three years building the app into Google AppSheet. Seshadri left Google seconds after his “three-year mandatory retention period”expired, stating, “I left Google realizing how the once-great company had gradually ceased to function.”
Seshadri describes his big problems with the company:
In my opinion, Google has four main cultural problems. All this is a natural consequence of having a money-printing machine called “Advertising”, which grows steadily every year, hiding all other sins.
(1) lack of mission, (2) lack of urgency, (3) delusions of exclusivity, (4) mismanagement.
Seshadri worked at Microsoft from 1999 to 2011, so, he says, “this is not the first time I’ve watched the gradual collapse of a dominant empire.”Today, Seshadri says that “very few Googlers come to work thinking they are serving customers or users,” focusing instead on “a closed world where almost everyone works only for other Googlers.” The post said “risk reduction is more important than anything else”at Google, echoing a 2021 New York Times article that said CEO Sundar Pichai created a “crippling bureaucracy”while running the company.
Seshadri’s complaints explain much of what we see outside the company, where the needs and desires of consumers are not always considered a priority. This is not the first time we have heard such complaints from employees. Former Waze CEO Noam Bardeen stepped down from Google in 2021 and said in a blog post that employees aren’t really interested in building Google products. “A product is a tool for moving employees up the career ladder,” Bardeen wrote, “not a passion, a mission, or the economic rules of the game. Promotions have a greater impact on people’s economic success than product growth. work is about chances of getting promoted, and so we started to take on board people with the wrong mindset—seeing Waze as a stepping stone, not a calling.Recently shared Seshadri’s post on LinkedIn, adding, “The problem is, no one cares as long as stocks go up.”
There’s also former Google (and Twitter) engineer Manu Cornet, whose Goomics series humorously describes what life has been like inside Google over the past few years. Several comics point out that Google’s flawed employee appraisal process does not link product success or “user happiness “to personal promotions, so naturally some products are sacrificed or ignored while employees focus on promotions.
It’s worth noting that not all Google works like Google. In particular, other employees referred to the Android division as a completely different company. Steve Yegge, another well-respected writer in the ex-Google yell at company genre, described the culture shock of switching to Android from another part of Google. “Android is not Google,”Yegge wrote. “They have almost nothing to do with each other,”adding that the “notorious irascible organization”operates “more or less autonomously”within Google. Perhaps that is why Android seems to be the most productive, stable and reliable part of the company, regularly releasing a new version of the OS, at least every year. There is also little leadership turnover, and the division is very strict about the stability and backward compatibility of its software. Perhaps the more traditionally managed parts of Google should take note.