Google veterans: The company has become ‘unrecognizable’
Google could solve a lot of problems by essentially firing every VP they have.<p>It actually became an internal joke where you&#x27;d get these emails every 2-3 months saying your manager&#x27;s manager&#x27;s manager&#x27;s manager now reports to a different manager, neither of which you&#x27;d ever met or even necessarily heard of.<p>To be clear, the executive team are ultimately responsible but Google has fallen prey to a lack of leadership (Eric Schmidt, we miss you) and an entrenched swarm of middle management. I honestly believe a lot of the bad ideas Google got involved in (like the DoD ML thing) sprang from over-eager VPs.<p>There&#x27;s an old Dilbert strip basically saying that managers reach a point of constant reorgs and responsibilities churn to the point that no one is around long enough to be held accountable for their actions (&quot;oh that was the last guy&quot;) and definitely not around long enough for anything to work.<p>This to me is what Google had become. The reorgs were constant and the leadership was directionless.<p>The transparency thing here is a big one. There was a culture of blameless and open post-mortems. This probably started to change in the Vic Google Plus era. Dashboards were locked down. There were some pretty (internally) famous examples of post-mortems people found that were subsequently restricted, essentially because they (rightly) made some VP look bad.<p>One of the most shocking things to me was a story from last year about how accessing such documents could retroactively lead to you being fired. As in Google docs were typically sent around such that if you had the link you could open it and these links might be forwarded to open groups. That&#x27;s how a lot of things (internally) &quot;leaked&quot;.<p>Disclaimer: Xoogler (6 years)