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Google engineer who criticized company in viral comics on why he finally quit:
Former Google engineer Manu Cornet describes his time at Google in two phases. First, there were "glitches in wonderland." Then, there was "disillusionment."
Those two descriptions are actually the sub-headings for Cornet's two volumes of comics he has published about his former employer, which he called Goomics. Though Cornet was an engineer, he also spent 11 of his 14 years at Google drawing comics about employees, quirks, culture, and, eventually, larger societal and ethical issues facing the company and its workers. Some of those topics included Google contracts with government agencies like ICE, making a search engine for China's government that complies with censorship laws, and more.
Chronicling those issues allowed Cornet to reflect on his place at Google, and prompted him to make a change. Cornet recently quit, and has taken a new job (at Twitter, a company with whom he says he has fewer ethical qualms). He is now the latest big tech employee — including employees at Facebook and Amazon — to publicly resign from their positions in protest of the company's overall behavior.
"As the years passed by there were more and more things to have ethical qualms about that the company was doing at a higher level," Cornet said. "I had to look at the bigger picture and think that maybe I would be better elsewhere."
[...] Unfortunately, Cornet found plenty of fodder for less-buoying Goomics. What infuriates him most — and provides frequent inspiration for his comics — is what he views as hypocrisy at the company.
"The mismatch between what they say and what they really do is growing," Cornet said. "The thicker the gap is, the easier it is to point out that hypocrisy."
That extended to both major news items at the executive level, and changes within the company that affected employees. Google made headlines in 2019 for banning political discussion on employee message boards. But Cornet described one of their internal mottos as "bring your whole self to work." He sees a gap between messaging the company uses to attract employees, and the needs of shareholders.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by fakefuck39 on Sunday July 18 2021, @01:46PM
I have an easier explanation. It's just a dumb powertrip. They stall projects any time they want as long as they want, just to make a point. When I pushed back and said "I need it in writing," this manager cancelled the next two batches of migrations, delayed the project by about 3 weeks, and reported it as "we're having personnel issues causing the delay."
lower and middle management, or low level directors, are fragile snowflakes. They try to run things like they're in charge of 16yo pot smoking walmart cashiers. But this doesn't stop at middle management. Just look at the orange clown when he was in office. Or the president of Brazil, who would go on live TV and rebut troll posts on his twitter.
The reason most management is bad is the same reason all the cops are bad. What person with actual skills would take that job? Oh, we'd take the CTO job. But not the middle management job you need to get to that c-level.
The dashboards and "metrics" and servicenow - the reason they make it all about that, is that it's all they can do. When I was 16, I had a job at bed bath and beyond, for weed money. I was always a couple of minutes late. But I did good honest manual labor. I got fired of course, by the manager who did nothing but talk about nothing. I need to restock the shelves bitch, why is there an hour-long pre-work meeting daily about how I need to stock the shelves? Well, being 2 minutes late to that meeting made me a bad worker. All the manager can do is come in exactly on time, so she makes that the most important metric.
All the manager at the hospital can do is create a process where to provision a disk to a server (5 minutes of work) takes a ticket with a task, subtasks for the OS guys and the storage guys, and a time entry for the 5 minutes of work, referencing those tickets. So the 5min task for 2 people takes half an hour of servicenow for two people. But she's good at that "process" and holds an hour-long meeting, at 8am, daily, about the process, and shows us all here graphs. We spent 10 hours provisioning storage this week, let's get that down to 8 next week and improve "process." Strangely, we spent 15 more hours on the process around those 10 hours.
There are exceptions of course. I've had several bosses who were absolutely amazing. Unsurprisingly, none of them lasted long. Management used to be people who climbed up the ladder, did the work themselves, and then managed people who do the work. Now, the most toxic dumb assholes who can't pull learning an actual skill go directly for the MBA. I truly believe that's the issue.
My wife has an MBA. She didn't go into management, she instead started teaching cantonese, mandarin, and japanese to little kids with rich parents. Of course, the pandemic killed that and she's now an assistant manager. I'm 99% sure she's going to quit or get fired before the summer is over.