The company's culture has degraded terribly over time. I used to be proud of working here, but that time is long gone. Employees are treated as numbers, everyone is replaceable, the only drive in any decision the company takes is impact on the stock price.
Senior managers are mostly incompetent, with few exceptions. Priorities keep changing, on a whim. To add to the decision-taking noise, new overpaid VPs are announced on a monthly basis, and in the meanwhile there has been no increase in salaries in 2 years (despite the inflation). A handful employees are paid significantly more than others, on a case by case basis. They made it impossible to become a manager, and there is a glass ceiling over a certain level for anyone who is not working on Gemini. There is no transparency, no point in attending town halls since it's only deflecting questions and corp speech. For all the diversity and inclusion that the company prides itself on it's completely imbalanced geographically, with 90-95% of the employees concentrated in London, and the other offices being peripheral and marginal.
With the exception of Gemini, compute is scarce and often comparable to a good lab in academia. Foundational research is a red herring to prevent half of the company from leaving, but it's really just lip service because it's clear that the company only cares about shipping products. The new publication process seems to have been devised to prevent anyone from publishing.
