A former Google manager says the tech giant is rife with fiefdoms and the 'creeping failure' of senior leaders who weren't making tough calls
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- A former Googler said senior leaders there allowed the company to be filled with small fiefdoms.
- Jonathan Bellack said Google was thus weighed down by midlevel managers debating decisions "for months."
- Other former Googlers have previously criticized the company over management bureaucracy.
A former product manager at Google said the tech giant suffers from a management bureaucracy filled with small fiefdoms that weigh the company down over decisions that senior leaders failed to make.
Jonathan Bellack, who worked at Google for 15 years after it acquired his employer DoubleClick in 2007, criticized its management culture in a Monday Threads post while responding to a software engineer.
The engineer, who did not claim to have worked at Google, wrote that they heard it included "lots of little fiefdoms" run by engineers who didn't pay attention to how their products were delivered to customers.
They said this territorial culture meant Google sometimes produced duplicate apps that did the same thing or missed important features its competitors had.
Those fiefdoms existed, Bellack said, but could neither be blamed on engineers nor fixed by product managers.
"It was a creeping failure of too many senior leaders, who lost the incentive/ability to make tough calls or resolve team conflict," wrote Bellack.
"Decisions that should have been made promptly by VPs/SVPs were dragged out for months of circular debate between midlevel managers using junior people as cannon fodder (turn another proposal into another deck for another leadership review)," he added.
Bellack said this management culture allowed non-tech executives from policy, legal, and finance departments more say in company decisions that senior leadership hesitated to make.
"Because it was easier for senior execs to hide behind warnings about risks or costs, than to negotiate competing views and move forward together into the unknown," Bellack wrote.
"By the end of my tenure, a PM would get into more trouble for disagreeing with Global Affairs than for failing to launch valuable software in a commercially reasonable timeframe," he added.
Bellack was one of the 12,000 Google employees laid off by the company in January 2023, though he said he'd previously expressed a desire to step back from his role there.
When reached by Business Insider, Bellack declined to give further comment.
Similar complaints from other former Googlers have emerged before.
In January 2023, a presentation document circulating internally among staff described a "hidden force" at Google that turned it into a slow, bureaucratic organization.
In the document, a former program manager said the company was a "slime mold" that could operate in many individual departments but became hard to predict and control when it grew too big.
And in February, another ex-Googler wrote a lengthy blog post lamenting how even tiny product changes would be scrutinized as much as a "NASA space launch."
He said in his three years at the company, he found four major cultural problems: "no mission, no urgency, delusions of exceptionalism, mismanagement."
Google's press team did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent outside regular business hours.