Another Grousing Xoogler: A Case Study Under Construction?
February 20, 2023
Say “Google” to me, and I think of:
[a] Philandering in the Google legal unit. See this story.
[b] A senior manager dead on a yacht with a “special” contractor and alleged concoctions not included in a bright child’s chemistry set. See this story.
[c] Solving death. See this story.
[d] An alleged suicide attempt by a high profile Alphabet professional fond of wearing Google Glass at parties and who suffered post traumatic stress when the love boat crashed. See this story.
[e] Google’s click fraud matter. See this story.
[f] Pundits “forgetting” that Google’s pay-to-play was an idea for which Google’s pre-IPO management paid about $1 billion to avoid an expensive legal hassle over alleged improper use of Yahoo, GoTo, and Overture technology. See this story.
I am not sure what you think about when you hear the word “Google.”
Image of trustworthy people generated by Craiyon.com. A dinobaby wrote this Beyond Search story and the caption for the AI generated image which I assume is now in for fee image banks with PicRights’ software protecting everyone’s rights.
“Former Googler Pulls Back the Curtain on a Bureaucratic Maze and Lambastes Bosses and Employees for Losing Sight of What’s Important” suggests that my associations are not comprehensive. A Xoogler wizard named Praveen Seshadri suggested, according to Fortune Magazine:
Google employees don’t go to work each day thinking they serve users or customers. Instead, they serve something internal to Google, be it a process, a technology, a manager, or other employees.
What about promotions, bonuses, and increasing advertising revenue? Not top of mind for Praveen it seems.
Googlers, he allegedly says, according to Fortune:
Instead, the focus is on potential risk, which is seen in “every line code you change” and “anything you launch,” resulting in layer upon layer of processes, reviews, and approvals.
Ah, ha. Parkinson’s Law applied to high school science club management methods, perhaps?
The Fortune write up states:
… today, Seshadri argues in his essay, there is a “collective delusion” within Google that the company is still exceptional, whenin fact most people quietly complain about the overall inefficiency. As a Google employee, “you don’t wake up everyday thinking about how you should be doing better and how your customers deserve better and how you could be working better,” he writes. “Instead, you believe that things you are doing already are so perfect that they are the only way to do it.”
I suppose I should add one more item to my list of associations:
[g] Googlers strugle to perceive the reality their actions have created. See this story.
What happened to Foundem, the French tax forms, and Timnit Gebru? A certain blindness?
Each week appears to bring another installment of the Sundar and Prabhakar team’s comedy act. I look forward to a few laughs from the group now laboring in Code Red mode.
Stephen E Arnold, February 20, 2023
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