Google is a sham but let's not pretend like they give a shit. They don't have to innovate. They print ad money. Do you think morale at Meta was good when Zuckerberg was trying to hawk metaverse for years like a shitty tamale vendor? When FB became a global laughingstock? Sure it was!
Do you think the board cares! NO. Because they PRINT MONEY.
Sundar needs to go, period. All these articles undersell how bad the morale is at Google right now. It has been unpopular change after unpopular change, and Googlers have zero trust in the leadership. There's zero psychological safety anymore, and the environment is basically like this[1], but actually worse because even the "sister" teams in the same org are being very territorial.
I don't think the next person is going to be better (because they'll be appointed by the very same board), but Google needs a change at the top.
Why would he go? Based on the stock price (which is what the board looks at when finding a new CEO), he's doing amazingly. It sucks for employees but unfortunately they have no say in how their CEO is chosen.
He is not doing amazingly based on the stock price. We can't compare Google to General Motors or Procter & Gamble, we have to compare it with Microsoft, Meta, NVIDIA, Apple, Amazon, etc which are companies in businesses adjacent to Google. When looking at its peers, Google is mediocre at best.
The stock doing well doesn't seem to actually suck for employees paid largely with stock grants. At least I suppose many on the outside will be thinking that as they question why the employees are complaining so much.
The share price isn't doing well though. Their peer companies have been growing in value faster on both short and long timescales. Their P/E is also quite low compared not only to other big tech companies, but even large companies in general.
And that's at a time when Google should have been doing a victory lap, as a decade of bleeding edge research into AI pays off.
> All these articles undersell how bad the morale is at Google right now... Googlers have zero trust in the leadership.
Not being combative but how would you know?
The articles that have come out have been as opinionated. Many like to see a company they dislike, fail in some way. Many others who view Google pushing an agenda can also being pushing their own agenda. It's hard to say what motivates people to make unfounded statements.
Are you in a position within Google to quantify the statements you've made?
> "Organizationally at this place, it's impossible to navigate and understand who's in rooms and who owns things,” one member of Google’s Trust and Safety team told me. “Maybe that's by design so that nobody can ever get in trouble for failure.”
It's a safe bet that they will win. I see a lot of handwringing about bad responses from Gemini or the slowness to roll out ChatGPT competitor but with Gemini 1.5 they're caught up and in a much better position than others going forward because they have the infra (I think probably by far the lowest costs on this side compared to Microsoft, OpenAI, etc.), the data, and the researchers (just in terms of #s)
I think Pichai was a terrible CEO, but IMHO, changing the CEO is not going to fix anything. Google has serious culture issues and structural management problems.
To turn the ship around they should restructure hard and get rid of the cancer. Re-focus on merit and clear goals.
I seriously doubt they have the guts to do a restructuring. On one hand, Page and Brin probably don't want to risk rocking the boat and they have the lions share of voting shares. On the other hand, advertisers and government agencies have a lot of leverage over Google to force it to stay as woke as it is.
A small side note: actually there was very few blacks in the nazi army. So aside to the polemics it's worth to know this "error" was not so erroneous. Nazis have had black in their armies and have also had a Hebrew SS brigade.
Having recently experienced an interview at Google, I feel scadenfreude.
Their interviewers stood me up twice. And then, when I didn't pass the coding round, the HR reps I initially spoke with completely ignored me and passed me off to some other HR rep who said basically, "Sorry, they're busy. Thanks, goodbye."
Not the level of professionalism I expected.
scha·den·freu·de
pleasure derived by someone from another person's misfortune.
How humiliating, for a company that doesn't want to do anything that doesn't scale.