Google has a lot of really stupid policies that are unethical and hurt peoples' careers. For example, Perf. Five percent of employees end up on PIPs for no other reason than getting shat on in Neutron-Jack-style stack-ranking. People on PIPs can't transfer. They rarely actually get fired (most quit, most PIPs on people who stay are inconclusive; rare is for a person to get fired and even rarer is for a person to actually pass... inconclusive PIPing isn't "passing" because it leads to a shorter and more obnoxious PIP, 2 quarters later) but the effect is just the same-- an utterly fucking pointless waste of peoples' time, jobs lost for no good reason, billions of dollars of capital being destroyed. I'd guess that most of those people who run afoul of the completely arbitrary 5% yank-point are on those launch-and-flee systems.
Then there is the rampant abuse of process that goes on related to Perf. I know one person who, as a protest, wrote negative unsolicited feedback to 5 random Googlers each cycle. I would actually say that he is a lot more unethical than Perf's designers, but it just shows how silly the whole system is.
Then there's Real Names (for which people were PIP'd if not fired, even though Google is supposed to be so open it would never do that). Don't get me started on that shit. With Real Names, I can only ask: do you not want your product to succeed? Are you afraid of users?
I think Google is unethical to promote and retain, in management positions, sometimes with global impact, severe and obvious incompetents in the same way that it's unethical to let a 4-year-old fly a plane. If you're a billion-dollar company, you have no excuse for promoting the kinds of stupid fucks who think that company-wide stack-ranking is good for your culture. That shit might make sense in a piece-rate sweatshop, but not in tech.
To me what you described looks like classic description of any big company not any one company in general.
The founders ideals are torn to shreds the moment the management layers begin to take control. Management by leadership either works only on paper or there are very few people who follow it.
Most managers rank only by following methods. The most competent guy is always seen as a threat. Promotions and rewards are given to guys who can polish their boots and offer a degree of allegiance to them. And a guy who is capable of growing and doing something on himself gets kicked in the teeth. Nepotism, partiality and biased behavior are extremely common in management layers.
I like Perf. I've worked at a lot of big companies, and promotions were correlated to whether or not they thought you would quit or not. Perf is a lot of work, but it seems perfectly capable of promoting the best employees. Everyone with a title above or equal to Senior Software Engineer has seemed worthy, which has not been the case at other companies.
I think your problem is: you can't work at Google if you want ego-inflating titles for doing nothing. When I was at Bank of America, the lowest title you could have (if you weren't hired straight out of college, that is) was "Vice President". It inflated your ego but meant nothing.
They do, and they were supposedly in the process of redoing titles as I left, but my guess is that it didn't go very well. Nobody likes to give up an important-sounding title.
"unethical to promote and retain, in management positions, sometimes with global impact, severe and obvious incompetents in the same way that it's unethical to let a 4-year-old fly a plane."
Then there is the rampant abuse of process that goes on related to Perf. I know one person who, as a protest, wrote negative unsolicited feedback to 5 random Googlers each cycle. I would actually say that he is a lot more unethical than Perf's designers, but it just shows how silly the whole system is.
Then there's Real Names (for which people were PIP'd if not fired, even though Google is supposed to be so open it would never do that). Don't get me started on that shit. With Real Names, I can only ask: do you not want your product to succeed? Are you afraid of users?
I think Google is unethical to promote and retain, in management positions, sometimes with global impact, severe and obvious incompetents in the same way that it's unethical to let a 4-year-old fly a plane. If you're a billion-dollar company, you have no excuse for promoting the kinds of stupid fucks who think that company-wide stack-ranking is good for your culture. That shit might make sense in a piece-rate sweatshop, but not in tech.