Sergey leaves Google and burns bridges

In my e-book “Enterprise Software Without the BS ”, I have a small section  called Rules of Resignation. And here’s one of the rules:

Don’t post negative blogs about the company you quit

It’s not nice, really. If you don’t like your firm, just leave it. When I read a blogger badmouthing a former employer, I just lose any respect for the blogger. It’s not professional, and besides, I’ve heard that some companies have started suing their former employees about these bad postings online.

Today, I ran into yet another example of how a person violates this rule. Sergey Solyanik left Google and became a Dev Manager at Microsoft.  He posted a detailed blog explaining his reasons.

Let’s read some extracts from his blog (shown in italic),

“There are many things about Google that are not great, and merit improvement. There are plenty of silly politics, underperformance, inefficiencies and ineffectiveness, and things that are plain stupid. I will not write about these things here because they are immaterial. I did not leave because of them.”

Every company has silly politics and stupid things. If they are immaterial, why mentioning them?

“Google software business is divided between producing the "eye candy" - web properties that are designed to amuse and attract people - and the infrastructure required to support them. Some of the web properties are useful (some extremely useful - search), but most of them primarily help people waste time online (blogger, youtube, orkut, etc).”

Sergey’s new employer would love to have lots and lots of web properties helping people wasting their time and reading ads, but Microsoft has missed that ad train, but that’s a different subject altogether.

“The culture part is very important here - you can spend more time fixing bugs, you can introduce processes to improve things, but it is very, very hard to change the culture. And the culture at Google values "coolness" tremendously, and the quality of service not as much. At least in the places where I worked.”

Any enterprise finds compromises between the quality of service and project deadlines.  I wonder if Sergey is aware of lots of low-quality releases of various versions of Windows made by his new employer in the past, which most likely  will remain the same in the future?

Here’s a piece about Google managers:
“The Google Manager is a very interesting phenomenon. On one hand, they usually have a LOT of people from different businesses reporting to them, and are perennially very busy.

On the other hand, in my year at Google, I could not figure out what was it they were doing. The better manager that I had collected feedback from my peers and gave it to me. There was no other (observable by me) impact on Google. The worse manager that I had did not do even that, so for me as a manager he was a complete no-op. I asked quite a few other engineers from senior to senior staff levels that had spent far more time at Google than I, and they didn't know either.”

There are good and bad managers everywhere, and I really wish that none of Sergey’s subordinates will ever have a reason to blog about poor managing capabilities of Sergey.

I’m sure, the time will come when Sergey will decide to leave Microsoft. I do not think coming back to Google remains an option for him now.  But hey, Yahoo might still consider his job application…unless it’ll be swallowed by his current employer by then.

That blog left bad taste in my mouth. Please,

don’t post negative blogs about the company you quit. It’s a lose-lose situation.

tags: google  

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