‘Morale is at an all-time low’: Ex-Googler writes scathing latter slamming layoffs and ‘eroded’ culture::An ex-Googler wrote a 1,500-word letter criticizing the firm and CEO Sundar Pichai’s lack of “visionary leadership.”
Is anyone surprised? Brilliant engineers going to work at Google expecting to work on world changing software and instead work on selling more ads.
How miserable.
The single worst decision they made was rolling back the 20% of work time being dedicated to side projects. That’s where all their good early ideas came from. It was replaced by politics instead.
Selling more ads can actually be engaging to work on even if it’s not world changing, if you’re given things you actually need to think through
Unfortunately I can’t really see Google being the type of place that lets people think for themselves, they’re far too busy trying to please the shareholders for that
Oh agreed, the scale and performances requirements to serve ads on the modern internet is a really challenging problem.
My point was simply that these brilliant minds are being wasted on this objective.
Ugh I’d feel so fucking gross is I somehow contributed to the proliferation of MORE advertising in our world. Like talk about an absolute waste of your talent and contribution to the world.
Laying there on your deathbed someday and looking back on what you did in the time you were given…and it was making more ads, like how disgusted I feel about it all.
Frankly at that pay grade in that industry you’re either going to work for a company that makes money selling ads/data, in high frequency trading or a hedge fund, and the latter two are objectively more parasitical - at least content creators and media publishers get a cut from ads, rather than all the money either staying in the company or going to their competitors, with the only instance of their business affecting normal people being when they crash the economy
“Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision,”
That’s a bar.
Google’s decisions in the time Pichai has been CEO, have been anti-consumer all the way. Not the fun conpany it used to be, now users are being forced out of adblockers and a products promise is abandoned way too often.
I am probably the perfect google customer. I used google search when it still had an exclamation point. I got my gmail account by invite in ‘04. Downloaded chrome on day one. I used nexus/pixel phones almost exclusively
Today, ddg search on Firefox. I am using an iPhone. I still have the gmail account but I am slowly migrating away from it. I am done with google. They don’t produce anything that has any value for me anymore.
Same, but opera/firefox, Zenfone, and proton Mail. Not really a fan of apple either
I’m doing all the same as you
What I’m not moving away from though is Google Maps and Photos. No good alternatives exist
For photos, I have been using Immich, and have been very impressed. It has pretty much all the features I want (automatic backup, chronological timeline, mobile/web app, face tagging, semantic search, albums, sharing, etc). It’s a server you self-host though, so setting it up might be a pain if you’ve never done something like that before.
This looks good as a self hosted option, but I want something hosted.
About Maps, same here. Even looked into paid alternatives, and… There’s not really much of value. I’m disappointed.
Ente? Just started subscribing though… seems good. 99c for base plan is pretty attractive.
Looks promising, I’ll keep my eye on it, might give it a go with some photos to test it out. I wish it weren’t e2e encrypted though, I actually like a lot of the features Google provides (tagging/grouping by feature, looking back, etc)
Same. I have my name as my gmail and get an absurd amount of missent emails.
What are you switching to for email?
I moved to proton mail personally after having Gmail since forever.
Took a year and I pay 40usd per year but worth it
How safe / stable is proton mail? Say they go under in 5 years are you just fucked? Or is your setup such that you could move easily? Also is your email just xxxx@proton.com? Or something longer?
I don’t have a crystal ball but Proton is the go-to, privacy-focused email provider. They are based in Switzerland.
They likely have a way for you to export your emails if they go under or use a desktop email client to archive them.
It’s less the backup more all the stuff linked to your account. All the sign-ups if they go down fast… You’re fucked 😕
I pay for LastPass and would never go back. I know there are other options that people will point out but I’m too invested now haha.
I highly recommend getting LastPass or something similar. It was much easier to make the transition away from google products
I have my own domain. So I’d lose my emails but I could just move the address. I’d recommend that for sure. In case you want to move to another mail provider down the line it’s super simple.
I think it’s a bit extra to have a custom domain but it’s super worth it.
Slowly working on hosting my own. Stuff like this is not fast for me since I am a hobbyist and not in tech professionally. But, I’m getting there.
I just switched to getting my own domain and hosting it as a bundle with the domain provider. The Web client sucks, but I use thunderbird anyways.
That is a better idea than me foolishly trying to get all of it running out of my basement. So many little things that lead to other little things. Right now, my “ditch gmail” project is a build my own router with openwrt project.
Fuggen rabbit holes man.
I would not recommend self hosting at all. The bigger providers usually don’t even accept mail from unknown servers/domains.
Hey twin!!
LoL no shit. You don’t even need to be an employee to figure this out. Even as a customer I feel that way. I’m looking to leave Google altogether.
I left Google 5-6 years ago. I do occasionally use YouTube, but that’s about it.
It’s surprisingly easy to get used to once you do it.
What did you do about email?
Protonmail is one of the more popular options.
This is what I’m planning to do as well.
Is the Spam Filtering equally as good?
That’s the reason I went Gmail back in the day.
I get hundreds of emails a day. All filtered out properly.
It’s been much better for me, haven’t had an unsolicited e-mail hit my inbox yet.
Protonmail
I’m not the same person but I jumped ship from Gmail to Outlook (when that big rebrand launched a decade ago) and a few years ago to Fastmail.
It doesn’t hold a candle to ProtonMail’s privacy and security but I found it handy since it’s a complete mail, contacts, calendar solution with syncing via standards and a large number of available aliases. And since I pay, I’m the customer.
Good options exist now, including proton and skiff. Recommend checking out skiff. Everyone knows proton.
Skiff gives you 10GB free. Proton only gives 500MB.
That said we should be paying for email. If you don’t, you wind up with Gmail, where they read and analyze the contents of your email to build a profile on you and serve you ads. Moment I noped out of Gmail was when I realized they were aggregating sales receipts in my inbox and tracking the products I was buying. Wow, when did I ever agree to that? Guess it was time move on.
I would disagree and say that Pichai is a visionary, in turning Google into a monopolistic dystopian megacorporation.
Yep, layoffs tend to hurt culture and trust.
Some companies seem to thrive on regular culls in the name of operational efficiencies. All that happens is talent leaves the organisation and then those left behind struggle because expertise has gone.
It erodes good will and good will is something you can’t win back.
By the time things look like they are normalising, in comes another cull!
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They become quiet quitters. Barely putting any effort in and doing the bare minimum.
Folks are not going to bail out company decisions to cull by working extra harder.
They tidy CV and look for next opportunity.
Layoffs while at the same time handing the CEO $200 million for a single year.
Yep, that will definitely help employee morale.
It’s been a long time brewing with how Google manages projects and people, and Sundar is just the dipshit who’s been helming it. Google needs a rethink, because once the ad market collapses (and it will collapse, they’re helping it along with their crusade against YouTube) they will be rudderless and moneyless.
I really wish I was motivated to finish my transition off Google because right now, storage and email are the two things left to address. And without funding, I can’t keep investing in NAS storage, or be bothered to move off Gmail for a new email vendor (which has its own problems with any non-Google email sinking into someone’s XBL).
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google owns youtube bro. you mean crusade against adblockers on youtube i suppose
I’m sure the MBA’s will starting taking the opinions of the worker bees seriously any day now. /s
No shit that moral too is all time low
On a completely unrelated matter, can Lemmy topic post titles be edited?
The randomness of this comment actually fucked me up for a good minute 🤣
Should be scolding latte slamming layoffs.
Google has completely lost its way. On my Pixel 6 recently the voice typing doesn’t even work correctly. Although it works sometimes it tends to cut me off where is it worked perfect a few weeks ago. Google is constantly introducing new bugs into Android and into their native apps. I can tell morale must be very low because shit doesn’t work.
The fuck is a Googler?
Google employee
The fuck is a scathing latter?
Who would have thought that overtly replacing your motto in such a way that everyone knows the new default is now “Be Evil” would have a negative effect on morale? Shocking
But hey, they can take the credit for the beginning of modern enshittification, so they’ve got that going for them anyways. Because their IPO was the death of the good version of the internet and everything they’ve done since has just made everything shittier and shittier. Almost like basing the entire society around greed is a mistake or something. whooda thunkit except literally everyone
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I have worked with a bunch of people from India who are great at technology and coding. The problem is that they tend to leave India and come to North America to work simply because companies don’t pay for shit in India. I’m confident that India has great coders in India, but to get that companies would have to pay for the good talent. Which completely negates the whole reason to off shore in the first place.
That has been changing in the past decade.
Yooo… What?
Downvoters don’t know just how much of tech is offloaded to IST (and what the result of that money based decision has on product quality and supportability). It would be funny if I didn’t understand just how bad it is, but >10 years in the industry opened my eyes
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