https://www.wired.com/story/inside-google-three-years-misery...
The main thing that weirded me out and ultimately caused me to decide not to work for Google was that everyone was talking about perf and promotions all the time. Everyone in the team structured their work accordingly, and tales of people who obtained promotions because of heroic effort for achieving something was a recurring topic in group conversations.
There was cost cutting efforts everywhere. There was significantly more red tape involved in requisitioning a heavy duty computer needed for my work (compiler development). The food in the micro kitches were toned down in variety and quality. Food trucks disappeared. The food in the cafes was unchanged but dinner was no longer served at about half of the cafes.
Then they killed it.
To play devil's advocate (I'm no fan of Google in any way), but this is also how Elon Musk operates, and it seems to be going well for him.
When Sundar speaks he speaks politically, so that he can never be wrong (at the same time if I just watched his talks, I couldn't even know that I'm at a search company).
He seemed to do a pretty good job with that at Tesla/SpaceX, but I’d argue he’s really dropped the ball at Twitter. No one seems to have any idea what “Twitter 2.0” even is supposed to be.
I think all of us have an idea of what social media should be compared to what it is now (looking at what my friends and people I'm interested in it are doing), but it's not compatible with the amount of advertising revenue that needs to be generated to justify a $40B valuation.
There's a deep conflict between the value provided to the users and the value created to advertisers, and Elon highly underestimated that conflict, so now he's (and Tesla investors are) paying the price.
The self motivated bottom up Google way can’t scale like this.
Personal opinion and jaded perspective of course. Disclaimer: don't like shortsighted "follow the shiny thing" decisions. I haven't seen evidence the CEO of Google has positioned the company for the long term or to survive. Namely, the bus would have been going fine if not better without some if not all of the Google leadership on the wheel.
I hope I am wrong.