Ex-Employee: The Worst Thing About Google Is Google+

Spencer Tipping left Google about a month ago. We know this because he's written a blog post saying as much, and listing all of the pros and cons about working for Google. Juicy! Kind of. If you're into programming, mostly. But the money shot's the number one negative of Google culture: Google+.

To be fair, this is just one man's assessment. Clearly, someone at Google—a lot of someones, actually—are behind Google+. And for Google to arrive at its manifest destiny of "putting an entity of a person in a search box," it needs the personal data that social platforms like Facebook, Foursquare, or Google+ offer up. But this isn't the first time that we've heard a Google employee suggesting that Google+ isn't worth the time and resources that are sunk into it. Tipping's number 1 and 2 Cons for corporate culture were "Google+" and "Ubiquitous political emphasis on Google+ that sometimes compromised other engineering efforts." Here's his extended explanation:

I think Google+ is an effort that does not deserve the engineering minds at Google. This is mostly a personal bias. I see Google as solving legitimately difficult technological problems, not doing stupid things like cloning Facebook. Google, in my opinion, lost sight of what was important when they went down this rabbit hole.

The rest of Tipping's post is a deep look into what working at Google is really like. Totally open, and employees are able to code for basically any project, it takes Don't Be Evil very seriously, but it's a little creaky around the bureaucratic edges. Check out his full post for the details. [Spencer Tipping via Hacker News]

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