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Freeman [soylentnews.org] writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/02/app-founder-quits-google-says-company-doesnt-serve-users-anymore/ [arstechnica.com]

Here's some insight into what Google's problems are like lately, direct from an ex-employee. Praveen Seshadri, a founder whose company was acquired by Google, recently quit and dropped a scathing Medium post [medium.com] on his way out the door, detailing the problems he saw in his time at the company. Seshadri says Google is "trapped in a maze of approvals, launch processes, legal reviews, performance reviews, exec reviews," and other bureaucratic processes, and while the employees are capable, they "get very little done quarter over quarter, year over year."

Seshadri is the founder of AppSheet [wikipedia.org], a "no-code development platform" that he started in 2014. After several years of development, Seshadri's company was acquired by Google Cloud in 2020, and Seshadri spent the next three years turning the app into Google AppSheet [appsheet.com]. Seshadri left Google the second his "three year mandatory retention period" was up, saying, "I have left Google understanding how a once-great company has slowly ceased to function."
[...]
The post says that "risk mitigation trumps everything else" at Google, echoing a 2021 New York Times [nytimes.com] article saying CEO Sundar Pichai built "a paralyzing bureaucracy" while running the company.

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