In recent years, we’ve been hearing rumblings about things not going well at Google. Some experts speculated that the tech firm has somehow lost its creativity and visionary leadership. Now, an insider voice, who happens to be a top Google engineer, is confirming those speculations, saying, “Google does not have one single visionary leader. Not a one.”
Diane Hirsh Theriault, a staff software engineer at Google, posted on her LinkedIn page last week to criticize the company for not having a visionary leader. The post soon went viral and raised many questions about Google’s current leaders and the firm’s future.
In her post, Theriault stated, “From the C-suite to the SVPs to the VPs, they are all profoundly boring and glassy-eyed,” and the company hasn’t launched “one successful executive-driven thing in years.”
Google is suffering from lack of a visionary leadership, the company’s engineer says
The Google engineer also highlighted the company’s tedious software development process. She said the company’s executives ask engineers to prepare a new chat app or AI-first demo for I/O, and if it doesn’t get 100 million users in six months, they’ll shut it down. The result of such preparation is “half-baked and roundly derided,” according to Theriault.
Theriault then referred to some Google executives as “competent referees” who are operating on a wing and prayer. “They point in a direction, their subordinates swarm the area, try a bunch of stuff, and sometimes something sticks and is cool.” She also said the current direction for executives is AI.
Additionally, Theriault alluded to the recent layoffs at Google that have impacted employees in engineering, sales, support, UX, product, data science, and SRE departments. The Google engineer complains the company’s executives are just randomly firing employees and destroying the perfectly functional teams.
Google employees have reportedly lost their passion
She also says Google’s leadership can’t identify the company’s priorities and is waiting for the staff to come up with an idea in their favorite direction. “Meanwhile, all of the mid-level leaders are scrambling to protect their teams (and themselves) by guessing what their VPs might find appealing. If you are a leader and you guess wrong, you and your team get cut.” Theriault added.
Finally, Theriault mentions the nihilism spreading among the company’s executives. She says the employees don’t want to lose their jobs, but no one is working extra hours anymore.
In September 2022, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said Google needs to be at least 20% more efficient and hire fewer people. In May last year, Google employees raised their voice against Pichai’s pay raise to over $226 million, which coincided with the company’s mass layoffs.
2024-01-26 15:08:10