It may be entertaining to read internal laundry gripes about a company. But trashing your employer on the way out the door is bad form.
In major culture mis-matches, both parties know there is no returning anyway. I've had that experience, and I know I can never return.
In other words, if other companies with an approach to design similar to Google's don't want to hire him in the future, that's probably fine with him.
Coming across material like that when researching someone for a job would probably be a no-hire flag for me - and many others. I'm sure he's a great designer, but does a post like that expand or limit the number of future gigs he might get? You could say "he wouldn't want to work at places like that anyway", but I'd rather have that decision left to me rather than a lack of response when I'm looking for work.
Offering this in the spirit of advice. I've been hiring people in the valley for 10+ years. I used dejanews to screen applicants prior to google... today yes we will read your tweets, find your blog, and skim it all to get a sense of who you are. Be thoughtful about what you post.
You're talking about a guy who talks at numerous conferences every year (or at least did), who designed Blogger templates before being employed by Google, who designed Webmonkey, Wired, etc. (http://stopdesign.com/about)
Besides, he was simply pointing out that this was a complete mismatch for him and I can understand his "frustration", given the fact that he was supposed to be a UI Lead at Google. He wasn't hired to be some low-level pixel pusher.
Who cares about some middle manager's opinion?
Offering this in the spirit of advice. I've been hiring people in the valley for 10+ years. I used dejanews to screen applicants prior to google... today yes we will read your tweets, find your blog, and skim it all to get a sense of who you are. Be thoughtful about what you post.
It sounds like you are looking for people who will shut up and churn out mediocre code for 8 hours a day. There's certainly a market for that, but I doubt the author of this article is interested.
If I write a blog post about how much I hate cleaning up toxic waste, that will limit my opportunities for employment cleaning up toxic waste. But who cares, I would never do that anyway.
Even more so for a senior guy like that. He's leaving one hot company to go work at another - he can talk about the great opportunity at Twitter. He doesn't need to gripe about the job he's leaving.
His post spawned a bunch of mildly unfavorable press, which is currently #1 on Techmeme. Bad form.
You keep saying this. Perhaps you'd like to explain why.