Google has been in the news for all sorts of staffing issues lately, and it looks as though this 13 year Google veteran has left the fold. He notes three main reasons for ending his tenure: Not willing to take risks any longer, being mired in politics, and simply being arrogant. Steve Yegge’s post over on Medium is a good read that gives us a peek inside the kimono. He does also note “indirect pressure from various VPs” being used to squash his past blogging.



I think this is obvious to anyone who has followed Google’s public launches over the past five or ten years. Google does all sorts of things these days that leave everyone scratching their heads: Picking unwinnable fights and then trying to force their product on us (e.g. Google+), launching products that are universally panned (e.g. Allo), deprecating and turning down well-loved services (e.g. Reader, Hangouts), launching official APIs with competing and incompatible frameworks (e.g. gRPC vs. REST), launching obviously competing stacks that don’t talk to each other (e.g. Android native vs. Dart/Flutter), etc. Their attempts at innovation have been confusing and mostly unsuccessful for close to a decade.

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Source: [H]ardOCP – Leaving Google Due to No Innovation and Bizarre Policy Enforcement