In the tech world, appearances can be deceiving. Open kitchens, relaxation zones, massages, video games, free personal transport, and a long list of extra perks make the big names in the market seem like ideal places to work. Naturally, Google tops the list, but if everything is so perfect, why do some people leave? Comments from several ex-Google employees form a very interesting pattern...
It's the dream of many right now, and even Hollywood has made a movie or two about it: someone in a garage or a small room writing code in the hope that one of the web giants will take notice and decide to bring them on board. More than once, that story has a "happy" ending because the search for talent is constant... but after a couple of years, the magic ends and the young enthusiast who wanted to be part of a super company shoots off in any direction, looking for a new challenge. Examples come from everywhere: WhatsApp is a creation of two ex-Yahoo! employees, and both Foursquare and Pinterest are linked to ex-Googlers. Failures are common, but still, those who leave the glass castles do so without intention to return. What brings us here is the specific case of Google. Over the years, all kinds of stories have accumulated about why its employees left Mountain View. The folks at Business Insider created a very striking list, and although we have to take any statement from ex-employees with a grain of salt, there are points that are definitely recurring:
Overqualification is the rule
The phrase says that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. The dilemma with Google is that if you go in there as an ophthalmologist with bionic eyes, you'll be surrounded by other ophthalmologists with bionic eyes just as qualified as you. Google can afford to hire the best of the best, thus forming an extraordinary team of "galacticos"... but when a particular galactico finds himself moderating content on YouTube or writing lines to change a couple of buttons on an interface, he feels he could be doing something else much more productive, especially for himself.
Too many chiefs, not enough Indians
Imagine a boat with 60 captains instead of one. It would be a true nightmare of administration and organization, but it's not that hard to draw parallels with Google's current situation. The company has people so talented and skillful at its disposal that those parameters (critical for any other company) simply aren't enough in the particular universe of Mountain View. Several of those techs and engineers have spent months fighting for the chance to get into a high-profile project, and at the same time they need to prove they're not useless.
If you can't measure it, no one cares
One of the most forceful statements about life inside Google came through Katy Levinson, who worked at the company from 2006 to 2012. One worrying aspect Katy describes is Google's apparent addiction to measurements and statistics. Have you improved user experience? Fixed bugs? None of that matters. If you can't put those improvements into a percentage or a scale, no one cares. This also led to extending maintenance of projects that should have been discarded long ago. Why write something from scratch when a brief optimization lets you improve efficiency by 20 percent, earning an extra bonus at the end of the quarter?
Work is your life
Transport, food, video games, pool tables, ramps, dry cleaning... Google says all of this is part of a global effort to improve its employees' quality of life and increase productivity within the company... but that's where the trap jumps out: They just want to keep you at work. According to one ex-employee, he never saw anyone take a vacation, or even a weekend. And although the company never forced anyone to work on those days, they generate and maintain the right environment for it to happen. If you're surrounded by perfect coworkers who don't rest and you suddenly decide you want the weekend for yourself... where does that leave you??
Projects get canceled out of nowhere
This is something we've seen quite frequently. Google has a special ability to launch new projects as if they were going to change our lives forever, but that ability is also present to wipe them off the map by magic. Only in the last two years, a total of 19 projects were closed, and as if that weren't enough, according to an anonymous comment, the people involved in them can't get promotions because they failed to generate an impact...
Inappropriate promotions for some
One of the many ex-Google employees said that certain people within the company ended up in important administration positions not because they were good leaders or coordinators, but because it was the only route that could guarantee them one or more promotions. This gives way to a truly undesirable condition: very intelligent people who repeatedly prove to be horrible at management..
Google disconnects you from reality
This was also mentioned in part by Katy Levinson: Google imposes a lifestyle and work to such an extreme that several of her colleagues became completely dependent on the company and its image, which will make finding a new job in the future very difficult. On the other hand, there's a considerable difference in pace: Google is a huge corporation and tends to move a bit slower, while many startups based on open source and with a more attractive dynamic make the Mountain View giant look like a turtle...
You can't make a difference
Several statements converge at this point: Google is simply too big to feel like your work matters. If you're part of divisions like Human Resources or Sales, the best you can aspire to is to be a cog in the machinery. The only ones with a more solid chance are the "dreamer" engineers who create something seemingly innovative and revolutionary. Needless to say, that detail makes engineers territorial and arrogant, refusing to accept outside opinions (unless they come from higher circles).
Much ado about nothing
There are times when certain people can be "fed up", and apparently that's exactly what happened at Google's Zurich headquarters. There is a special room there where employees can take naps, relax in massage chairs, and watch fish. The problem is that a dispute arose between those who wanted to use the chairs and those who wanted to sleep, since they considered the chairs too noisy. The "exchange" extended over more than a hundred emails, giving a new definition to the phrase "waste of time".
This is just a handful of collected examples, and the specific details about each of them can be found in different places, starting with a fabulous thread on the portal Quora. The first challenge for every ex-Google employee is to explain why they left, but in the end, the reason is very simple to understand: All that glitters is not gold.
Quora
