The Blubber

An ex-Google, $GOOGL, employee has said that company has an "eroded" culture and morale is at "an all-time low," per BI.

Former Google employee Ian "Hixie" Hickinson has voiced strong criticism against Google CEO Sundar Pichai, accusing him of lacking visionary leadership and showing disinterest in preserving Google's original ethos that contributed to its success.

Hickinson asserted that employee morale at Google is currently at an unprecedented low, suggesting that therapists in the Bay Area would describe all Google employees as "unhappy" with the company. He specifically targeted the top leadership, including Sundar Pichai, holding them responsible for the current challenges faced by Google. Hickinson expressed concern about the proliferation of ineffective middle management as a symptom of the leadership's shortcomings. In addition to Pichai, he called out Jeanine Banks, a vice president and general manager at Google leading the Flutter team. Hickinson, a software developer specializing in modern web technologies like Custom Style Sheets (CSS), has spent the last nine years working on Flutter at Google.

Flutter is an open-source UI development kit that enables developers to create apps once and deploy them on various platforms. In his critique, Hickinson reflected nostalgically on the "old Google" that he initially joined, highlighting Flutter as one of the last projects emerging from the era of ambitious experiments initiated by Larry Page.