this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2023
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'Morale is at an all-time low': Ex-Googler writes scathing latter slamming layoffs and 'eroded' culture::An ex-Googler wrote a 1,500-word letter criticizing the firm and CEO Sundar Pichai's lack of "visionary leadership."

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[–] hightrix@lemmy.world 216 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Is anyone surprised? Brilliant engineers going to work at Google expecting to work on world changing software and instead work on selling more ads.

How miserable.

[–] 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Selling more ads can actually be engaging to work on even if it's not world changing, if you're given things you actually need to think through

Unfortunately I can't really see Google being the type of place that lets people think for themselves, they're far too busy trying to please the shareholders for that

[–] hightrix@lemmy.world 32 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Oh agreed, the scale and performances requirements to serve ads on the modern internet is a really challenging problem.

My point was simply that these brilliant minds are being wasted on this objective.

[–] TheDarkKnight@lemmy.world 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ugh I’d feel so fucking gross is I somehow contributed to the proliferation of MORE advertising in our world. Like talk about an absolute waste of your talent and contribution to the world.

Laying there on your deathbed someday and looking back on what you did in the time you were given…and it was making more ads, like how disgusted I feel about it all.

[–] 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 1 year ago

Frankly at that pay grade in that industry you're either going to work for a company that makes money selling ads/data, in high frequency trading or a hedge fund, and the latter two are objectively more parasitical - at least content creators and media publishers get a cut from ads, rather than all the money either staying in the company or going to their competitors, with the only instance of their business affecting normal people being when they crash the economy

[–] stolid_agnostic@lemmy.ml 13 points 1 year ago

The single worst decision they made was rolling back the 20% of work time being dedicated to side projects. That’s where all their good early ideas came from. It was replaced by politics instead.