Leaving while making it clear to your higher ups and coworkers that it's due to the dying work culture is not leaving without anything.

Individual employees shouldn't have to make personal sacrifices, especially for a megacorp, beyond what they contribute each day as an employee. Unless they are an executive or management and get paid (and mandated) sufficiently to do culture stuff.

There are people at Google who have this responsibility and are either failing, or possibly it's not really that bad and the news is overhyping a bunch of highly vocal individuals/small groups, while most Googlers are apolitical and happy with the group of people they work with. It's always hard to tell but most companies aren't getting multiple articles a year written about their culture.

> Leaving while making it clear to your higher ups and coworkers that it's due to the dying work culture is not leaving without anything.

The company does not care about you. Your boss does not care about you. Managers learn to stop being emotionally invested in their employees because everyone is replaceable and everyone leaves. The company is fine with the dying work culture as long as the money keeps rolling in. Things will not get better from the efforts of employees below the Senior Vice President level. And probably not even then without that person spending all their political capital.

I struggled with this at a job where I was systematically marginalized but tried to "change things from within". After I realized that nobody was going to help me and it was what was burning me out, I lawyered up and negotiated an exit. The only way to change the culture is to make having a shitty work culture expensive.

I wouldn't take it that far nor so cynically.

This extreme view of business is popular in dystopian fiction and with the pure customer service level interaction with some of the worst mega corps like telecoms companies but I don't think it reflects reality of most people's office workplaces.

This person is describing their own experience; what you're saying is that you haven't had that. Which is great for you, but it's not universal.

Hopefully your experience is more common. But if this person's is, then the "dystopia" isn't that fictional.

You're also making a lot of assumptions about me but I'd rather not make this anecdotal. I would have probably agreed with OP when I was 18 after watching Fight Club a hundred times that was what modern business life was like. But I've had a large variety of jobs in my life from working outdoors, brutal factory floor jobs in an auto factory and a wood flooring plant, to office-space style boring corporate HQ jobs for a big brand, to tech companies for the last decade and it's hardly the standard. Especially once you get past lower level drudgery work.

I already mentioned it'd be stupid to put that level of sacrifice into a company unless you were adequately compensated or given enough power/time to accomplish actual culture change. And of course there are modern bigcos who are borderline dystopian where it's impossible or SMBs with sociopath leadership who doesn't want change. Which is when you leave if you can't tolerate the environment, assuming you can, but attempting to change it is a whole different beast.

I've also been a manager at a company with a shitty culture, and you simply can't stop your good employees from leaving for greener pastures. You're kind of happy for them when they do. I care about my employees and value them as human beings, but I also couldn't address their grievances or promise them any resolution to larger cultural issues. I knew they would leave, so I stopped being upset when they did and started taking the turnover as part of the job.

It's not that managers don't care about their employees, they just don't care if or why you left because those circumstances are outside their control. HR collects that info in exit interviews, and a line manager has no influence with HR. If turnover starts hurting the company's bottom line, they'll do something about it. Otherwise it's not going to be a priority at the levels it needs to (how effective is your "Diversity Officer" in creating real diversity?)

I would also say it's not a good idea to burn bridges; which is what inevitably happens when you run around telling people the reason you're leaving is because the company sucks. They can't do anything about it anyway (see my original comment), and you risk coming off as toxic to people you might want to give you a recommendation later in your career.

Very few people think their company is perfect, and being able to be honest about a company's shortcomings without resorting to "it sucks here" and similarly unhelpful non-constructive criticism is a sign of emotional maturity. People leave all the time, for various reasons, and most places I've worked that actually conduct exit interviews are genuinely curious as to why high performing employees leave.

I hesitate to say they "care" because I think that gives the wrong impression. Everybody wants to make a little more money, get a little more freedom in deciding their priorities, get a little more flexibility in their hours, etc. So if you say your only reason you're leaving is that you want more money, they're probably not going to give everyone a 10% raise next quarter. But if you have well thought out grievances that can be addressed without spending millions of dollars or completely changing the structure of the company, I think you'd be surprised how willing executives would be to try and make things better.

I think giving honest feedback at exit is a good thing and I view it as showing respect. I would probably avoid the word “sucks” though.

Right, but the place for the honest feedback is the exit interview. Spare your co-workers your grievances; they probably already know why anyway.

This just boils down to social skills really. Some people are just killjoy grievance machines though so it's worth noting.

I'm not convinced that burning out trying to change something that's unchangeable is the right strategic way to fix things for anyone other than the company.

If enough people leave and go work on next-generation things because the previous-generation has run it's course - that strikes me as having many parallels in nature.

Large companies don't adapt quickly unless they have a true (ie, in-practice, not just in-speech) mandate to do so.

A leaf contributes to the health of the tree, but it doesn't control where new branches grow.

Googlers are trained not to think of themselves as leaves, but as roots. That's the source of the friction.

The way we change things in this industry is by creating new companies and either outcompeting the incumbents or getting acquired by incumbents and taking them over. Trying to significantly change a company from the inside is a fool’s errand and these employees who keep trying are just reinforcing the incumbents’ positions.

I don’t think this works. It reminds of the discussions about improving code vs rewriting. A lot of people think that improving existing code is not worth so they rewrite it. Often only to find out that the same problems come back just in different form. Same with new companies. If we just jump to the next company we will find out that they are basically all the same run by the same principles. Where do you want to from google? Any company will run into the same pressures as soon as it reaches that size.

* Any company will run into the same pressures as soon as it reaches that size.*

Then size is the problem.

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: https://www.amazon.com/Exit-Voice-Loyalty-Responses-Organiza.... A classic for a reason.

Voicing your concerns might make you feel better, but voting with your feet and your dollars is the only thing that matters.

> I think the mindset of changing of something from within is actually a good one. “Moving on” is probably easier and pragmatic but as a society it’s better to change things instead of just tossing them aside and going to the next thing. I hope the same people will also be active in politics and try to change things.

I agree. "Moving on" is a market/capitalist attitude, while "trying to change the company from within" is a democratic/civic attitude. The US has has way too much of the former and way too little of the latter than what I'd consider healthy for a democratic nation. Civic participation is often a thankless slog where it seems like your efforts are having no effect, but it's extremely necessary.

Also I think "moving on" often isn't so much "tossing aside" but simply ignoring/avoiding the problem.

On the other hand, the United States was created by people who preferred the former.

The tree root, branch, leaf, metaphor is nice. It could just be that institutions, whether economic or civic, go through a lifecycle, and that notions of 'progress' are just a cell's perception of advancements towards the next step of the cycle.

Being a solid root or branch is no bad thing. But neither is being a seed. Not all seeds will sprout. Not all have too.

Nature forces an economy of energy. Problems are 'solved' by mutants as they become adaptive in a certain ecology. This also implies a crowding out of the less adaptive.

Go, and be a happy root. But do not despair over the happy leaves on the wind, nor the happy seedlings.

I agree. You see the same mindset in politics where people fanatically stick to one party or the other but barely can formulate an own opinion on issues.

>I think the mindset of changing of something from within is actually a good one

Yes except experience tells me unless you get your hands dirty and climb to the top of the ladder nothing will ever be changed.

You may stop a company from doing things, ( Dragonfly or BlitzChung ) but their mindset wont change, their culture wont change. The attitude and culture of these companies will only change when people at the helm change, like Intel Bob Swan and AMD Lisa Su for example.

And as with all things there is a long tail and slow death, Numbers on Balance Sheet and Report wont show immediate effect but over the years the trend will be undeniable. Normally by that time most of your talents are gone, you are left with people who are comfortable with current ways of things. ( Look at IBM )

Remember Companies is not a democracy, it is pretty much the other side of it more like Imperial ruling.

there are democratic companies (called cooperatives) if you think workplace democracy is important, you should join one.

> I think the mindset of changing of something from within is actually a good one.

This assumes the disagreeing people are right. In reality people genuinely like different things.

If a disaffected minority tries to change what a majority likes, I'd expect they'll just ruin things for everybody.

Finding (or founding) a company that acts according to your ideals to work for, while letting Googlers work they way they like, is the obvious solution to me.

This exactly describes the two major schools of thought in economics:

-stay and fight to fix

Vs.

-vote with your feet and compete

Each of these have positives and negatives :)

Do you have similar thoughts on emigration (or brain drain) from less fortunate countries?

Yes. In general it’s better to either stay or come back. Otherwise we are concentrating more and more into “good” countries and leave other countries behind. I understand it from an individual perspective but in the big picture I don’t think it’s a good thing. In the US it’s the same. Tech people and companies concentrate in a few centers. It’s probably better for companies and employees but not very good for the whole country.

In a capitalist society, for small minority groups within large firms, changing from within is a strategically better. "Moving on" is only good if, as a baseline, you can line up a 'relatively equivalent' position, and if you want to enact change, there is enough momentum within the firm to do damage with 1) a mass exodus or 2) media attention. Both are made easier the higher up you are.

Sounds like you need to read up on unions.

By and large unions focus on pay and conditions, not corporate direction.

Insofar as unions do anything political it is usually inappropriate and better done through actual regulation so all companies obey in a coordinated fashion.

Hard disagree. A union is there solely to give employees a proper voice at the company. That this has by and large been to support working conditions historically is only because it was the issue of highest importance.

If the concern is corporate direction, the union has a seat at the table as well.

Labor unions serve to protect workers from poor physical working conditions...and in some cases their fragile ego too???