Reply to post: Why I left Google

Google can't innovate anymore, exiting programmer laments

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Why I left Google

My team, in Location X, was responsible for a very successful product in a particular niche use case. Good mainstream publicity, a success. That's how Mountain View got involved. First of all we were given a Product Manager over there. As per the job title, a complete waste of oxygen as far as his contributions inward were concerned, but important for sending to various other meetings to secure funding and whatever.

Google decided it was going to make a play in the wider technological area and our team was subsumed into a greater whole, 95% of it in Mountain View. We visited a few times. We received speeches about being on a new frontier, being the people who were going to dictate norms for the next thirty years, etc. And everybody we spoke to said they were excited to be on the team because they'd always wanted to be responsible for dictating norms for the next thirty years. None of them really knew what the norms, or even the products, should be, but were grateful to be recipients of the funding surge. Many presentations were given, all of which I can sum up like this: the iPhone had a new user interface metaphor and was wildly profitable. Therefore if we produce a new user interface metaphor, we will be wildly profitable.

Our particular product became mature. Our PM realised that this would not do in terms of maintaining his stature as the PM of an internal darling. He decided the next version would be heavily tied to one of the well-funded team's products — essentially that ours would become a very different product with superficial similarities and the same branding. He had fun expending the PR capital accrued through the earlier success on self-serving announcements of this. He also acquired some Mountain View workers from the well-funded team, for integration-type duties. For the next many, many months of this they worked, tirelessly performing very slight resource substitutions in their team's existing tech demo.

Then came the night of the long knives. While the local management were all safely on an aeroplane back from Mountain View, the PM struck. They're out. Mountain View is in. Ongoing development of the successful product effectively cancelled.

With no other interesting teams in Location X looking to hire, that was it for me.

The only thing that makes me smile about the whole experience is that in less than six months after I left, the well-funded team was itself defunded and their product cancelled. They'd spent years using every PR resource, pulling every journalist string to get their product known and generally described favourably. Yet nobody had ever wanted it. Kudos go to Ruth Porat, the imported CFO and the only C-level executive in Google with any business ability, for that. She's one of the few with a history outside the Silicon Valley hype bubble.

The other highlight of my tenure? After that year's annual corporate feedback endeavour, overall satisfaction amongst Google employees had declined. Larry's response when asked about this at one of the streamed town halls? It must be due to a slowdown in hiring elsewhere: usually Google doesn't have to deal with these malcontents because they can just go and make problems elsewhere. Poor old Google would have to endure having these people stick around a while longer for now.

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