from WND:

After 2019, a year in which there were multiple major upheavals at Google, the company no longer is what it once was, and no longer the company the founders created, reports CNBC.

“While it’s unclear what prompted the two to leave their formal management positions, longtime employees, many of whom also left the company this year, described to CNBC a massive cultural shift that percolated throughout 2019,” the report said.

Among the changes were “to Google’s all-hands meetings, human resources processes and transparency from management.”

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Already this year, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent Alphabet, “admitted the company’s challenge in scaling the trust of its own workforce which numbers more than 100,000 people. More recently, Lazlo Bock, former director of human resources for Google, told Bloomberg that he thinks Alphabet is ‘a different company than it used to be’ but that ‘not everyone’s gotten the memo.'”

Veterans say the company now is “unrecognizable,” the opposite of what founders said they hoped for.

“What the hell is going on over there?” tweeted Andreessen Horowitz partner Martin Casado over the summer. “The brain drain at Google right now is astonishing.”

CNBC said the company’s reputation for transparency was shattered when it was revealed it was working on Project Dragonfly, a “secret Google plan to develop a censored search engine” for use in China.

The project was soon dropped.

An engineer with 11 years with the company charged, “There’s no way a few years before, they would have had a secret project with these kinds of ethical concerns.”

Then, the report said, there were golden parachutes for people “including Android co-founder Andy Rubin,” even “after finding sexual misconduct allegations to be credible.”

Zora Tung, an engineer, told a recent rally for employees: “Google is built on trust. If the company wants to succeed, it needs to regain that trust through transparency and accountability.”

Another issue, CNBC said, has been the changes in culture as the employee count grew toward 100,000, many of whom are contractors, not employees.

CNBC said: “Bureaucracy was the reason for a former engineering director who left the company in August after seven years. This engineer, who asked to remain anonymous because he’s not authorized to talk about his time there, said upper management began placing extra emphasis on head count in recent years. Because of that, the company has become reluctant to eliminate weaker team members, which affected his and others’ organizations, he said.”

Changes in human-resources policies also have raised questions, the report said.

Read More @ WND.com