Seshadri recently quit and detailed the problems he saw during his time at the company. Seshadri says Google is "trapped in a maze of approvals, launch processes, legal reviews, performance reviews, exec reviews," and other bureaucratic processes, and while the employees are capable, they "get very little done quarter over quarter, year over year."

For those who don’t remember, Seshadri created AppSheet, a "no-code development platform" that he started in 2014. After several years of development, Seshadri's company was acquired by Google Cloud in 2020, and Seshadri spent the next three years turning the app into Google AppSheet.

He left Google the second his "three year mandatory retention period" was up, saying, "I have left Google understanding how a once-great company has slowly ceased to function."

Seshadri said that Google had four core cultural problems. They are all the natural consequences of having a money-printing machine called “Ads” that has kept growing relentlessly every year, hiding all other sins.

He said that the company had no mission or urgency, had delusions of exceptionalism and was mismanaged.

Seshadri used to work at Microsoft from 1999-2011, so he says, "this is not my first experience watching the gradual decay of a dominant empire."

Seshadri said that "very few Googlers come into work thinking they serve a customer or user," focusing instead on "a closed world where almost everyone is working only for other Googlers."

He said "risk mitigation trumps everything else" at Google, echoing a 2021 New York Times article saying CEO Sundar Pichai built "a paralysing bureaucracy" while running the company.