Ex-Googler and AppSheet founder says Google has “ceased to function”

Facepalm: Praveen Seshadri, founding father of the “no-code growth platform” AppSheet, has left Google on the finish of a three-year necessary retention interval after his firm was acquired by Mountain View. The rationale, Seshadri now explains, is that Google does not appear to serve any motive or goal past revenue in any respect.

In a post revealed on Medium, Seshadri mentioned that he joined Google simply earlier than the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, when the web big bought his AppSheet firm to construct the Google AppSheet service. The AppSheet crew joined Google “with nice enthusiasm,” Seshadri mentioned, however now that enthusiasm is not any extra as a result of the corporate has “slowly ceased to perform.”

In his damning opinion piece, Seshadri revealed how Google is basically paying some fairly pennies to greater than 175,000 “succesful” staff, which in flip are getting little or no executed “quarter over quarter, 12 months over 12 months.” They’re trapped like mice in a maze, the entrepreneur said, and the maze is made up of approvals, launch processes, authorized opinions, efficiency opinions, exec opinions, paperwork, conferences, reorgs, (H1) plans and much more (H2) plans.

Google has become a monolithic system, Seshadri mentioned, a bureaucratic moloch designed to coach staff in order that they’d quell their “inappropriate” wishes to innovate, get private ({and professional}) satisfaction or really feel like their work is making some influence. Google’s bureaucratic machine makes staff really feel what being “Googley” means, i.e., “do not rock the boat” and simply work for promotion or cash compensation. The mouse is not within the maze anymore, Seshadri said, however the maze is in the mouse.

Seshadri mentioned that Google now has 4 core cultural issues, as an organization with “no mission, no urgency, delusions of exceptionalism, mismanagement.” The botched launch of the Bard AI chatbot is simply the final straw in a protracted line of failures and haphazard selections, as Google continues to be basically a “money-printing” machine due to its historic promoting enterprise that has stored rising yearly, “hiding all different sins” on the firm.

So long as the adverts are printing cash and the inventory goes up, nobody will care concerning the cultural issues recognized by Seshadri. Earlier than founding AppSheet, the entrepreneur spent greater than a decade (from 1999 to 2011) at Microsoft, so he says this is not his first expertise with the sluggish crumbling of a “dominant empire” within the digital world.

“Only a few Googlers come into work pondering they serve a buyer or consumer,” Seshadri mentioned, as they simply concentrate on their “closed world” (i.e., the maze) the place everyone seems to be “working just for different Googlers.” The caustic publish of the AppSheet founder is simply the most recent criticism from a protracted checklist of disgruntled ex-Googlers, which lately confirmed that Google has no ardour, mission or innovation drive anymore. The one factor that appears to run “not like Google” inside the corporate is Android, which in response to Steve Yegge runs “kind of autonomously” because it seems like the best and dependable a part of the advertising-based empire.