Google

I've been at Google a long time, so the financial benefits still outweigh any cons. The people I work with are still mostly great, especially most of my management chain (though one or two are no-ops).

The company was founded on psychological safety, "don't be evil," hire smart creatives, etc.

Today, the company has grown so fast and so large that now the majority of people seem to be typical tech industry employees. That means most of the management has now come from outside the company, so that has killed the culture.

Psychological safety is gone, especially after the way the layoffs were handled. I miss Laszlo Bock; he knew how to treat the workforce. I miss Larry, Sergey, and Eric.

The general quality of my peers has gone down. Not as people; they're all lovely, but as practitioners. Most of them do what we'd have considered low-quality work 5 years ago. It's shockingly bad, really, by comparison.

They've all been hired so fast and in such an environment where they weren't properly trained, didn't have the proper background to begin with, or haven't been given the time and mentorship required to become great (investing in people).

The Cloud division, in particular, has had an outsized impact on the company and the culture. The wave of upper management coming from companies like Oracle and SAP (and some from Microsoft and Amazon) has created a culture that is typical of corporate America. And frankly, those people aren't the ones who made those former companies great. They were the people who came in later and built little fiefdoms for themselves. Now, they're doing that at Google.

It's not what Cloud needs. Cloud is still in startup mode. It needs innovative leadership, not power grabbing.