Why I Left Google

Well, I'll surrender: everyone wants to know why I left. Since I cannot answer each person individually, here is a long-form explanation. Read a bit (I reach the climax in the third paragraph) or read all of it. But first, a warning: there is no drama here, no juicy details, no beating of former colleagues, and nothing you couldn't guess yourself from the press surrounding Google and its approach to developer tools and user privacy. This is simply my personal account.

Leaving Google was not an easy decision. During my time there, I became quite a passionate advocate of the company. I spoke at four Google Developer Days, two Google Test Automation Conferences, and was a prolific contributor to the Google Test blog. Recruiters often asked me to help persuade promising candidates to join. No one had to ask me twice to support Google, and no one was more surprised than I was that I could no longer continue. In fact, the last three months of my time at Google were a whirlwind of desperation in a futile attempt to recapture past passion.

The Google I loved was a technology company empowering employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate mandate.

Technically, Google was always an advertising company, but for the past three years, fortunately, I didn't feel it. Google was an advertising company in the same sense that a good TV show is: excellent content attracts advertisers.

Under Eric Schmidt, advertising was always in the background. Google was run as an innovation factory, encouraging employees to be entrepreneurial through founder awards, bonuses, and 20% time. Ad revenue gave us a buffer for thinking, inventing, and creating. Forums like App Engine, Google Labs, and open source were platforms for our inventions. We didn't realize that all of this was funded by an ATM stuffed with ad revenue. Perhaps the engineers working specifically on ads realized it, but the rest of us were convinced Google was primarily a technology company; one that hired smart people and bet heavily on their capacity for innovation.

From this innovation machine came strategically important products like Gmail and Chrome: products that resulted from initiative at the lowest levels of the company. Of course, such an unstoppable innovative spirit sometimes led to failures. Google had them too, but the company always knew how to fail fast, get up, and learn.

Under these conditions, you didn't need to be part of some special "inner circle" to succeed. You didn't need luck in getting a cool project to build a career on. Anyone with ideas or collaboration skills could contribute. During that time, I had several opportunities to leave Google, but I couldn't imagine a better place to work.

But as they say, that was then, and this is now.

It turned out there was one thing on which Google's innovation machine stalled, and it mattered enormously: competition with Facebook. Informal attempts produced a couple of social outcasts in Wave and Buzz. Orkut never took off outside Brazil. Like the famous Hare, confident enough in his superiority to take a nap, Google woke from his "social dreams" to discover a threat to his leadership status in advertising.

Google still shows ads to more people than Facebook, but Facebook knows far more about those people. Advertisers and publishers cherish this personal knowledge so much that they even agree to put the Facebook brand before their own. For example, facebook.com/nike — Nike, a company of such power and influence, puts its brand after Facebook! No company ever did this with Google, and Google took it to heart.

Larry Page personally took command to fix it. "Social" became "state," a corporate mandate called Google+. It was an ominous name, implying that Google alone wasn't enough anymore. Search had to become social. Android had to become social. YouTube, once happily independent, had to become... well, you get it. Worst of all, innovation had to become social. Ideas in which Google+ wasn't at the center of the universe became distractions.

Suddenly 20% time became a show. Google Labs was shut down. App Engine raised prices. APIs that had been free for years became obsolete or paid. As entrepreneurial signs were dismantled, mocking talk of "old" Google and its weak attempts to compete with Facebook justified the "new" Google, which promised to devote more resources to fewer products.

The days of old Google, hiring smart people and encouraging them to create the future, were gone forever. New Google knew without a shadow of doubt what the future should look like. When employees understood the future incorrectly, corporate intervention guided them back on track.

Google officially announced that "sharing on the web is broken" and only complete surrender and consolidation of our minds around Google+ could fix it. You must admire a company willing to sacrifice sacred cows and rally its talent in response to threats to its business. If Google had been right, obviously many of us would have wanted to be part of the result of heroic efforts. I bought into it. I worked on Google+ as a developer relations director and produced a bunch of code. But the world and sharing didn't change. It's debatable whether we made Facebook better, but all I could show for Google+ was high scores in reviews.

As it turned out, sharing wasn't broken. It worked beautifully; Google just wasn't part of it. People happily shared around us and looked quite happy. No exodus from Facebook happened. I couldn't even get my own teenage daughter to look at Google+ a second time. "Social isn't a product," she told me after the demo, "social is people, and people are all on Facebook." Google was a spoiled child who, finding he wasn't invited to the party, threw his own in retaliation. And the fact that no one came to Google's party became the emperor's new clothes.

Google+ and I... we were simply not meant to be together. The truth is, I never particularly cared for advertising. I don't click on ads. I'm scared when Gmail shows ads based on what I write in emails. I don't want my search results to contain the ramblings of Google+ posters (or Facebook, or Twitter posters). When I search for "Pub crawl in London," I want the best result, not a sponsored offer to "Buy a pub crawl in London at Walmart."

Old Google got rich from advertising because it had good content, like television used to: make the best program, and you get more profit from advertising. New Google seems more focused on advertising itself.

Maybe Google is right. Maybe the future lies in learning as much as possible about our private lives. Maybe Google knows better when I should call my mom, or that my life would be better if I bought something at a Nordstrom sale. Maybe if they annoyed me enough with unoccupied calendar windows, I'd exercise more. Maybe if they offer me a divorce lawyer ad (because I wrote an email about my 14-year-old son breaking up with his girlfriend), I'd appreciate the ad so much that I'd divorce myself. Or maybe I'll figure all this out with my own mind?

Old Google was a cool place to work. But the new one...

Author: James Whittaker. Originally published on his personal blog in March 2012.