A former Google employee says the company has lost its way. In a recent blog post, he wrote that Google today is inefficient, poorly managed, and stuck because of a fear of risk.
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Google’s cloud service Cloud joined Google in early 2020 when it acquired AppSheet, which Praveen Seshadri had co-founded. In a blog post-Monday, he said that while he was welcomed and treated well by the company, he left Google with the understanding that “a once-great company has slowly stopped working. Seshadri’s profile on the job site LinkedIn shows that he left the company in January of this year.
According to Seshadri, it was a “fragile time” for Google as the company recently competed with Microsoft’s artificial intelligence initiative. He said Google’s fundamental problem is not its technology, but its culture.
In my view, Google has four core cultural issues,” Seshadri said. “These are the natural result of the money-printing machine that is ‘advertising,’ a piece of the business that grows relentlessly every year, masking all the other problems. One is the lack of a mission, two is the lack of a sense of urgency, three is the illusion of uniqueness, and four is mismanagement.”
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
According to Seshadri, most Google employees today end up serving not customers, but other Google employees. He described the company as a “closed world” where employees are not always rewarded for their hard work. Feedback is largely “based on what your colleagues and managers think of your work,” Sachadly said.
Seshadri said Google is highly focused on risk. “Risk reduction trumps everything else.” Every line of code, every product release, unclear decisions, protocol changes and disagreements are now risks that Google employees must be careful about, he wrote.
He added that employees are also “trapped” in lengthy approvals, legal reviews, performance evaluation processes and meetings that leave little room for creativity or true innovation.
In Google’s last all-employee survey, employees gave Google a low score for its ability to execute, which they said led to bureaucracy and hindered the company’s ability to innovate, according to reports.
“Overall, it’s a mild peacetime culture where there’s nothing worth fighting for,” Seshadri wrote, “and those who tend to fight hard for customers, new ideas or creativity quickly realize there’s really nothing to be gained by doing so.”
Seshadri said Google has been hiring quickly, which makes developing internal talent difficult and hiring ineffective. He said many employees also believe the company is “really different,” meaning instead that many outdated internal processes remain in place because “that’s how Google has always done it.
Sachadly said Google still has a chance to turn things around, but he doesn’t think it can continue to succeed simply by avoiding risk. He believes Google needs to be “mission-driven,” rewarding employees who work for “ambitious causes” and streamlining middle management.
He writes, “There is hope for Google and the people who work there, but it requires intervention.”
