Google was “the first big company” to “slowly grind to a halt” due to a “labyrinth” of bureaucracy.
Those powerful words came from Praveen Seshadri, a former Google software engineer who shared his thoughts on the tech giant this week in a long essay on Medium. Seshadri joined Google after acquiring AppSheet, a startup he founded, in early 2020. He left the company last month, according to his LinkedIn profile.
In the essay, Seshadri criticized Google’s bosses and employees for not understanding what is important – the users. While “respecting the user” remains a core Google value, Seshadri wrote, in practice “risk mitigation trumps everything else.”
It’s understandable, he admits, because everything at Google has been “very good” over the years because of “the money printing machine called ‘Ads’ that grows every year, hiding all the other sins.”
The problem, according to Seshadri, is that Google employees don’t go to work every day thinking they’re serving users or customers. Instead, they serve Google’s internal affairs, be it processes, technology, managers, or other employees.
“Working extra hard or extra smart,” he wrote, “doesn’t create fundamentally new value in the world.”
Focusing on creating value, he said, would “change the equation” at Google. Instead, the focus is on potential risks, which are visible in “every line of code that changes” and “anything that’s released,” resulting in layers of processes, reviews, and approvals.
In terms of career development at Google, he wrote, “any disagreement with the management chain is a career risk, so always say yes to the VP, and the VP says yes to the senior VP, all the way up.”
For Google, Seshadri’s essay comes at a sensitive time. Last week, shares of parent company Alphabet fell after Google shared a video showing its upcoming service Bard, an artificial intelligence chatbot similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In the video, Bard posted an inaccurate response to a question about the James Webb Space Telescope.
Microsoft has invested heavily in OpenAI, and earlier this month launched an updated version of its Bing search engine that offers ChatGPT-like responses in addition to traditional search results. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said The Verge this month while Google is still the “800-pound gorilla,” he hopes the company’s AI moves will make its rivals “come out and show they can dance.”
Google employees took to an internal forum to criticize company leaders, including CEO Sundar Pichai, over what they described as a hasty job announcing Bard, CNBC reported.
Amidst the discontent, employees recently received a reminder of the company’s early days as a bad start. Susan Wojcicki announced Thursday that she is retiring from her position as CEO of Google’s YouTube. In 1998, Wojcicki rented a garage to Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin as a place where they could work on their search engine project. He later joined the company and played a key role in its rapid rise.
Some doubt that Google in its early years exceeded all expectations. But today, Seshadri argues in an essay, there is a “collective delusion” at Google that the company is still exceptional, when in fact most people quietly complain about its overall inefficiency.
As a Google employee, “you don’t wake up every day thinking about how you should do better and how your customers deserve better and how you can do better,” he writes. “However, you’re convinced that what you’re doing is so perfect that it’s the only way to do it.”
If he’s right, with many believing ChatGPT or similar tools will finally challenge Google’s search dominance, it may no longer be enough.
Google did not immediately respond Fortune’s ask for comments.
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