Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'

Top brass at Google have laid off thousands of employees over the past year. As a result, according to multiple recent reports, staff morale is suffering badly, and workers are increasingly public about the slump.

Workers’ posts online and details from a company Q&A session on Friday, as reported by the Verge, paint an ugly picture of the Mountain View tech giant’s current employee-boss relations. Long known as a bastion for innovation and a cushy environment for engineers, Google and its work culture are now getting skewered as overly corporate and generally aimless.

Google employees can submit questions in advance for town halls, and their peers can vote on whether they’d like for that question to be answered. One of the top upvoted questions for the Feb. 2 meeting called out “a growing rift between leadership and employees,” the Verge reported.

“We get that execs are excited about Google’s future,” another question reportedly said. “Why should we be excited, when we might get laid off and not be around to share in that future? If we lose our jobs and equity grants, it’s cold comfort that Google is succeeding off our hard work, and we don’t get rewarded for it, but you do.”

The Verge reported that CEO Sundar Pichai defended the layoffs and claimed that workers sometimes reach out to express gratitude for the cuts. “And I just want to clarify that, through these changes, people feel it on the ground and sometimes people write back and say, ‘Thank you for simplifying.’ Sometimes we have a complicated, duplicative structure,” he said, per the Verge.

“We are going through a moment with some uncertainty in it,” he reportedly said later in the meeting. “This is how it is in most companies around the world at all times..

Yes, it’s Google. We hate them

But it’s a little bit more than that.

How Software Companies Die
By: Orson Scott Card 1995

The environment that nurtures creative programmers kills management
and marketing types — and vice versa. Programming is the Great Game.
It consumes you, body and soul. When you’re caught up in it, nothing
else matters. When you emerge into daylight, you might well discover
that you’re a hundred pounds overweight, your underwear is older than
the average first grader, and judging from the number of pizza boxes
lying around, it must be spring already. But you don’t care, because
your program runs, and the code is fast and clever and tight. You won.
You’re aware that some people think you’re a nerd. So what? They’re
not players. They’ve never jousted with Windows or gone hand to hand
with DOS. To them C++ is a decent grade, almost a B — not a language.
They barely exist. Like soldiers or artists, you don’t care about the
opinions of civilians. You’re building something intricate and fine.
They’ll never understand it.

BEEKEEPING

Here’s the secret that every successful software company is based on:
You can domesticate programmers the way beekeepers tame bees. You
can’t exactly communicate with them, but you can get them to swarm in
one place and when they’re not looking, you can carry off the honey.
You keep these bees from stinging by paying them money. More money
than they know what to do with. But that’s less than you might think.
You see, all these programmers keep hearing their fathers’ voices in
their heads saying “When are you going to join the real world?” All
you have to pay them is enough money that they can answer (also in
their heads) “Geez, Dad, I’m making more than you.” On average, this
is cheap. And you get them to stay in the hive by giving them other
coders to swarm with. The only person whose praise matters is another
programmer. Less-talented programmers will idolize them; evenly
matched ones will challenge and goad one another; and if you want to
get a good swarm, you make sure that you have at least one certified
genius coder that they can all look up to, even if he glances at other
people’s code only long enough to sneer at it. He’s a Player, thinks
the junior programmer. He looked at my code. That is enough. If a
software company provides such a hive, the coders will give up sleep,
love, health, and clean laundry, while the company keeps the bulk of
the money.

OUT OF CONTROL

Here’s the problem that ends up killing company after company. All
successful software companies had, as their dominant personality, a
leader who nurtured programmers. But no company can keep such a leader
forever. Either he cashes out, or he brings in management types who end
up driving him out, or he changes and becomes a management type himself.
One way or another, marketers get control. But…control of what?
Instead of finding assembly lines of productive workers, they quickly
discover that their product is produced by utterly unpredictable,
uncooperative, disobedient, and worst of all, unattractive people who
resist all attempts at management. Put them on a time clock, dress
them in suits, and they become sullen and start sabotaging the product.
Worst of all, you can sense that they are making fun of you with every
word they say.

SMOKED OUT

The shock is greater for the coder, though. He suddenly finds that
alien creatures control his life. Meetings, Schedules, Reports. And
now someone demands that he PLAN all his programming and then stick to
the plan, never improving, never tweaking, and never, never touching
some other team’s code. The lousy young programmer who once worshiped
him is now his tyrannical boss, a position he got because he played
golf with some sphincter in a suit. The hive has been ruined. The best
coders leave. And the marketers, comfortable now because they’re
surrounded by power neckties and they have things under control, are
baffled that each new iteration of their software loses market share
as the code bloats and the bugs proliferate. Got to get some better
packaging. Yeah, that’s it.

One could argue that Google employees should just shut up, and leave if they don’t like it.

But there’s another side to that coin. I don’t know exactly what’s going on with Google, but employee morale matters.

I taught for decades at a public school. My early principals understood the importance of morale. They were quick to praise when praise was warranted. They motivated the staff. More carrot, less stick. Many of these principals were military veterans. That might explain their outlook.

But then around the year 2000, things changed. The newer principals were wiz kids only a few years out of college (not kidding). Now more stick, less carrot. And no support.

They were terrible people to work for. One of my colleagues (a great teacher) quit the day she realized that her hand was trembling every morning while she had her coffee. She’s doing something else now. No more hand trembling.

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