Google's Urs Holzle to step down from executive management

Urs also owned corporate engineering.

They had an IT residency program that lasted 26 months that underpaid and under-mentored "IT residents" to run their in-person helpfesk.

That job was depression central, many extremely sad and overworked ITRs who did their best and got little out of that program. It was a total burnout.

We were told there was going to be daily education, but what they didn't say was it was optional, unstrucured, and self-led (basically didn't exist).

Lots of little lies and managers who kept us understaffed and pushing to work harder with dumb experiments of throwing unproven ideas at the wall.

You "rotated" to another team for 3mo as part of the program but baby ITRs were completely ignored while on other teams.

The program was shuttered about 2 years ago, and they converted a bunch of the lingering ITRs, and fired many of them 6mo later when the layoff bug was biting the past few years.

Managers that led the program are all little project/people managers who get promoted away from responsibility for mistakes. They overworked us and gave little back, and refused to raise headcount, even if we were getting swamped.

IDK why this braindump was necessary but hearing Urs leave makes me feel like corpeng will get a new start.

Urs was the last of the Google old guard left. I wish him the best! He's tried to extricate himself from leadership before and that never worked out; hopefully it sticks this time.

> Holzle sparked internal controversy in 2021 after announcing he’d move to New Zealand while the company started asking employees to come back to the office

Sounds like a real piece of work…

He's been at the center of almost every publicized controversy between management and rank and file employees, it is somewhat shocking he was still managing people until now. I've seen almost as many leaked Urs emails as I have seen Larry or Sergey or Sundar emails.

Retired but keeps salary and privileges? Landed aristocracy.