Peeking behind the curtain at Google.

A recently-departed Google engineer gives us the lowdown of what’s actually been happening at his former company.

Steve Yegge, a former engineer at Google who has recently joined Grab, a fast-growing ride-hailing and logistics services firm serving customers in Southeast Asia, has just gone public with an explanation of why he decided to part ways with Google after having been with the company for more than a dozen years.

His reasons are a near-indictment of the company for losing the innovative spark that Yegge thinks was the key to Google’s success — and which now appears to be slipping away.

In a recently published blog post, Yegge lays out what he considers to be Google’s fundamental flaws today:

Google has gone deep into protection-and-preservation mode. “Gatekeeping and risk aversion at Google are the norm rather than the exception,” Yegge writes.
Google has gotten way more political than it should be as an organization. “Politics is a cumbersome process, and it slows you down and leads to execution problems,” Yegge contends.
Google is arrogant. “It has taken me years to understand that a company full of humble individuals can still be an arrogant company. Google has the arrogance of “we”, not the “I”.
Google has become competitor-focused rather than customer-focused. “Their new internal slogan — ‘Focus on the user and all else will follow’ – unfortunately, it’s just lip service,” Yegge maintains. “A slogan isn’t good enough. It takes real effort to set aside time regularly for every employee to interact with your customers. Instead, [Google] play[s] the dangerous but easier game of using competitor activity as a proxy for what customers really need.”

Yegge goes on to note that nearly all of Google’s portfolio of product launches over the past 10 years can be traced to “me-too copying” of competitor moves. He cites Google Home (Amazon Echo), Google+ (Facebook) and Google Cloud (AWS) as just three examples — none of them particularly impressive introductions on Google’s part.

Yegge sums it all up with this rather damning conclusion:

“In short, Google just isn’t a very inspiring place to work anymore. I love being fired up by my work, but Google had gradually beaten it out of me.”

It isn’t as if the company’s considerable positive attributes aren’t acknowledged – Yegge still views Google as “one of the very best places to work on Earth.”

It’s just that for creative engineers like him, the spark is no longer there.

Where have we seen these dynamics at play before? Microsoft and Yahoo come to mind.

These days, Facebook might be trending in that direction too, a bit.

It seems as though issues of “invincibility” have a tendency to creep in and color how companies view their place in the world, which can eventually lead to complacency and a loss of touch with customers. Ineffective company strategies follow.

That’s a progression every company should try mightily to avoid.

What are your thoughts on Steve Yegge’s characterization of Google? Is he on point? Or way wide of the mark? Please share your perspectives with other readers here.

One thought on “Peeking behind the curtain at Google.”

What strikes me most is the “we” and its implication for the corporate impunity. You see, corporate power like that is based on a fundamental lie: Institutions are designed to exert power with the implicit claim or assumption that they themselves originated that power, which is, of course, a lie. Institutions appropriate power; they do not originate it. And they appropriate it always, with or without consent, at the expense of others, who are or then become the lower, subservient layers of the institutional pyramid.

Once an individual shifts from “I” to “we”, it claims that power but distances herself or himself from the accountability and responsibility.

Since “institutions” like Google wield excessive, almost government-like power, the origin of their power must become an issue because it relates to accountability, which does not exist toward the people whose creativity and work contributes to the company, nor to the public who entrusts them their data, but only to stockholders. Ethics painted entirely “green”. And people become collateral damage in the war for more of it.

Wolfgang Nebmaier says:

January 29, 2018 at 5:37 am

What strikes me most is the “we” and its implication for the corporate impunity. You see, corporate power like that is based on a fundamental lie: Institutions are designed to exert power with the implicit claim or assumption that they themselves originated that power, which is, of course, a lie. Institutions appropriate power; they do not originate it. And they appropriate it always, with or without consent, at the expense of others, who are or then become the lower, subservient layers of the institutional pyramid.

Once an individual shifts from “I” to “we”, it claims that power but distances herself or himself from the accountability and responsibility.

Since “institutions” like Google wield excessive, almost government-like power, the origin of their power must become an issue because it relates to accountability, which does not exist toward the people whose creativity and work contributes to the company, nor to the public who entrusts them their data, but only to stockholders. Ethics painted entirely “green”. And people become collateral damage in the war for more of it.