Ian Hickson, a former Google employee, recently issued a fiercely worded letter criticizing the company's "corroded" culture and accusing CEO Sandal Pichai of lacking "visionary leadership".
Hickson worked at Google for 18 years. He stated that he spent his last nine years working at Google developing the application development platform Flutter. He also stated that he resigned from Google this month.
A culture that is' corroded '
Hickson posted a blog article stating that he was "very lucky" to have gone through the early stages of the company, where executives were honest with employees and encouraged bold attempts, and now Google's culture has "deteriorated".
Transparency has disappeared, "he wrote. Previously, I would eagerly attend every company wide meeting to understand the situation, but now I find myself able to predict the answers that executives would give word for word. Now, I don't know who at Google can explain what the company's vision is. Morale is unprecedentedly low
He also stated that all Google employees who go to the San Francisco Bay Area to see psychologists are "dissatisfied" with the company.
Hickson's letter was privately or publicly shared by Google employees or former employees on social media, with some of them agreeing with his views. Since Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin left, Hickson is no longer the first employee to criticize the company's increasingly bureaucratic nature.
Pichai lacks leadership
Hickson also bluntly criticized Google CEO Sandal Pichai.
Google's problems today largely stem from Sandal Pichai's lack of visionary leadership, and he clearly lacks interest in maintaining Google's early culture, "he said. This is causing the incompetent middle management team to expand
Decisions have gone from being made for the benefit of users, to being made for the benefit of Google, and then to being made for the benefit of the decision-makers, "he wrote.
Layoffs are a short-sighted move
Hickson also criticized Google's layoffs as a "short-sighted" move. He stated that these layoffs have a "potential" impact on the company culture, potentially leading to a "significant reduction in any risk-taking behavior" among employees.
Higginson pointed out that the current situation is that Google employees lack trust in management, and management also does not trust employees, which is manifested as empty company policies.
According to previous media reports, some of the actions taken by Google's management personnel have strained the relationship between them and ordinary employees, such as tightening performance evaluation standards and assigning low performance ratings to some employees.
At the time of Hickson's criticism, more and more people believe that Google is lagging behind in cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI).
Google competitor Microsoft has long invested billions or even tens of billions of dollars in OpenAI, the developer of the popular AI chat robot ChatGPT, and is increasingly integrating ChatGPT and other technologies into its products. In contrast, although Google has also launched the AI chat robot "Budd" to compete with ChatGPT and integrate AI technology into its products, these are not as eye-catching.