Why do people bash so much about the company when they are leaving ? Is it they want to become famous all of sudden ? Why don't people accept that big companies won't be like the same company when it got started.
I was talking to a friend who works at Yahoo today. She's feeling terribly overworked and unproductive mostly because of some boneheaded organizational practices. I don't know the full story, but it sounds like she has pretty much accepted that management is brain-dead.
At Google, there's a culture that if something is broken, call it out so that it can be fixed. At best, you will save thousands of employees hundreds of hours. At worst, you'll learn why it's broken. Many problems are inherent in running a large company, and there is no easy fix for them. But many others have simple solutions that make everyone's lives better.
The way I see it (and this is completely my personal opinion here, not speaking for Google), he and other Xooglers who've written posts like this are being Googley. You don't work for seven years at a company without absorbing some of the culture, and that culture doesn't simply leave when you hand in your badge. Posts like this are not all that different from something you would see on internal Buzz or mailing lists, and I think the spirit of them is not to "bash" Google, but to call out things that Google could improve upon even after the Xoogler has left.
Ever watch a friend slowly slip away? They change from something you knew to something unrecognizable. You have to at least try to do something about it.
Speaking as an ex-Yahoo!, I have to say that with a company that big, with that many external commercial deals, and that many layers of management: effecting change as you see it is so non-trivial as to odds-on be a waste of your time. Additionally, trying and failing is actually quite demoralising.
I do think it's significantly more difficult at Yahoo than at Google. Google has a very much bottom-up culture. If you want to try something different, get the support of your manager and peers, and then just go do it. If it turns out to work significantly better, people in other parts of the organization will notice, and copy it. Pretty soon the whole company will be doing it whether or not Larry blesses it.
The introduction - and then pervasiveness - of unit tests was one such change that basically took over Google culture despite the ambivalence of the founders. People found they could simply move faster when they had confidence in their code, they started sharing the knowledge of how to write better tests, and eventually it simply became the accepted thing to do. (Interestingly, the testing intergrouplet failed several times before they struck on a bottom-up approached that worked. As with everything, persistence is important inside big companies too.)
I don't think Larry/Sergey will check for Why I left Google posts on the web and create taskforce to fix all these things. There is always a better way to give feedback to management without posts like this on the web. I hope Xooglers don't become Google haters and spend their energies on creating the next Google or Facebook and create a culture they dreamed of.
Larry and Sergey won't. Many other Googlers will. And if the concerns are real and fixable, then it'll get people talking about ways to fix them, and some of those ideas might bubble up to the top.
Or maybe not. Oftentimes, things don't even need to bubble up to the top to have an impact. You've got a very distorted picture of large organizations if you think that Larry suddenly makes a decision and then the whole company immediately does what he says. Large companies are really collections of small independent groups, and nobody really understands everything that's going on, and often times the worst problems are best addressed at the middle-management level. I think most rank-and-file Google employees have the same goals as Larry Page: we want to launch things quickly, we want people to use our stuff, we want to have a big impact on the world, and we want the share price to increase. The problem is translating that big-picture desire into specific practices and processes that'll result in that.
The answer is probably different for everyone. I suspect this individual doesn't feel animosity towards google, rather he would like to share his thoughts about why he left. Maybe it's a warning for other people about to join the company or just a way to commiserate with ex-googlers. Maybe he's showing off. What kind of person has the luxury to quit a job that legions of fellow coders would scramble for? Maybe he's advertising himself as a free agent. These, of course are all speculation. I don't think he's bashing google at all; I think he's telling them exactly what he thinks they need to hear so someone on-high steers the company in direction more attractive to creative engineers. But what do I know? Maybe you should ask him. Then you could write a "Why do people bash companies when leaving" blogpost. After you submit it to hackernews, expect the spanish inquisition!
The end of the second part explains it. It makes perfect sense to me. From google perspective, there are lessons to learn from this, but that is easy to say.
