Google has 175,000+ capable and well-compensated employees who get very little done quarter over quarter, year over year. Like mice, they are trapped in a maze of approvals, launch processes, legal reviews, performance reviews, exec reviews, documents, meetings, bug reports, triage, OKRs, H1 plans followed by H2 plans, all-hands summits, and inevitable reorgs. The mice are regularly fed their “cheese” (promotions, bonuses, fancy food, fancier perks) and despite many wanting to experience personal satisfaction and impact from their work, the system trains them to quell these inappropriate desires and learn what it actually means to be “Googley” — just don’t rock the boat. As Deepak Malhotra put it in his excellent business fable, at some point the problem is no longer that the mouse is in a maze. The problem is that “the maze is in the mouse”.
I have never worked at any company – other than the hardware store for 7-8 years when I was a teenager and during university – so I have no idea if this is uncommon, but this sounds like my personal version of hell. No wonder Google has such a massive graveyard.
Thom: How do you make a living? I assume osnews doesn’t generate much money?
I believe Thom mentioned he does translation work.
It’s what happens when companies become giant companies. Bureaucracy has to be established to make it function, and that attracts a certain style of person. One who will play inside their box rather then break the box and use it to go sledding down the stairs. It’s not that the “maze is in the mouse” as much as the type of mouse required to function in the maze.
The mouse is perfectly capable of jumping out of the maze, wild mice are amazing jumpers for anyone who wants to do catch and release, but those aren’t the parameters. The mice who are in the maze need to be docile enough to stay on the ground and complete the maze rather then jump out of the maze and work from above.
Google is at Hewlett-Packard size levels, and if Google can’t see that, I’m concerned about their leadership.
Being in a large company pays well, and they can have interesting projects because of their size.
That was attributed to their culture of shipping features rather then supporting products, which Google still doesn’t know how to do.
Read the article, and yep, exactly what I though.
You’re not in a startup dude. You’re in a giant multi-billion dollar company with lots of people.
It’s about marshaling a diverse group of individuals into an unstoppable phalanx with operates with clockwork precision. It’s not about rugged individualism; it’s about the “we” not the “I”.
Yeah, that’s how bureaucracies work. People have this specialized task they perform every day, and there are backups to make sure the processes get done.
While two of Google’s core values are “respect the user” and “respect the opportunity”, in practice the systems and processes are intentionally designed to “respect risk”. Risk mitigation trumps everything else.
Once again… Yeah, that’s how the system works.
A multi-billion dollar company can’t break things on a whim. That’s how multi-billion dollar companies end up bankrupt companies with Time magazine writing articles about the fall of companies which were “once the darling of the tech sector.”
There are SLAs, regulations, and customer expectations.
I’m going to stop. This is a ridiculous article devoid of any real insights. Cynically, it’s cashing in on Elon’s Twitter purge, and hoping to get some coins from C-suites looking to get some of Elon magic.
The corporate life isn’t for the author, and the author lacks any sort of awareness to realize it’s him not Google. The maze is in the mouse, but he can’t see he’s the mouse and his maze is small to medium businesses.
Maybe the author should go buy a shack by a pond and pretend they’re Walden.