Googleversary

Google Bikes Blocking Access

Google, Mountain View

February, 2018

It's 20 years today since I started working at Google. That was when the company was still golden in the public eye, with positive stories in newspapers on an almost weekly basis. In November, 2006, the company had about 10,000 employees and was somehow still seen as a plucky little startup, despite billions in annual income.

At the time, it was a great place to work.

• Employees had enormous latitude about their work.
• 20% projects were for real: you could spend up to 20% of your time on something other than your assigned job.
• You could seriously discuss just about anything on internal mailing lists.
• The company wasn't siloed.
• Apparently very little information was secret.
• The food was great.
• Management listened to the employees and made changes in response to employee feedback.
• The internal employee survey was run by a volunteer group, not by People Operations.
• Internal transfers were easy.
• It was normal to email upper management.
• The company had a very cool speakers program, which largely brought authors, experts, and intellectuals of various kind to speak at the company.
• Don't Be Evil.

By the time I left in 2024, all of the above had changed, to a greater or lesser degree. 

• The food is still good, but the company no longer hires great chefs to run the cafés. Instead, it's subcontracted to catering companies.
• The speakers program was taken out of the hands of the volunteer employees and turned into a parade of positive thinkers, healthy-living people, personal development types, and business gurus.
• It became extremely difficult to transfer internally.
• Secrecy is the order of the day.
• Management doesn't even pretend to listen.
• The employee survey is run by People Ops.
• And so on.

I attribute a lot of the change to the founders (Sergey Brin and Larry Page) and trusted early management either leaving or getting much less involved in the company. Although Sundar Pichai has been at Google for a long time, he clearly doesn't understand what "Googley" once meant. (Don't ask me to define it: If You Know, You Know.) I would also attribute some of it to the gigantic hiring sprees that made it harder to preserve the old corporate culture and to the hiring of too many people from Oracle, whose corporate culture is and was very different from Google's.

One example: over the years, TGIF became more and more scripted and less and less open to spontaneous questions and getting answers out of management. Video of the TGIF following the November, 2016 elections somehow made it to the Internet, so I don't feel I'm violating corporate policy by saying that everyone, EVERYONE, on the podium looked shell shocked and horrified by the election results, and everything they said reflected that.

By the 2024 election, Pichai appeared to be a good buddy of the current president. Sergey just threw hundreds of millions into defeating the California ballot proposition that would have taxed billionaires just once at a reasonable rate.

It was sad to see this happening when I still worked there. I have to note that even in 2006, I told people I was going to work for "the future evil empire," because it was always clear that Google could become a very bad actor. That was before it really sank in to me that online advertising was killed much of the independent press, with the kind of consequences we've seen. 

The latest outrage is the kind of thing that should be forbidden by law: Google has sold huge numbers of Chromebooks, loaded with Google software, to American public schools. Many of those schools want to disable AI in school and student accounts, and...Google is threatening to take away search on those Chromebooks if AI is disabled.

A private company absolutely shouldn't have this kind of control over what goes on in public schools. It is really too bad that the recent antitrust case didn't result in heavy penalties and Google's breakup. It's not too late for heavy regulation of monopolies.