The ex-Google worker cuts through the tech giant’s bureaucratic “maze”.

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Google is a “big company” that has “slowly gone out of business” thanks to its bureaucratic “labyrinth”.

Those strong words come courtesy of Praveen Seshadri, a former software engineer at Google who shared his thoughts on the tech giant in a lengthy essay on Medium this week. Seshadri joined Google after acquiring AppSheet, a startup he co-founded, in early 2020. He left the company last month, according to his LinkedIn profile.

In his essay, Seshadri criticizes both Google’s bosses and employees for losing sight of what’s important, namely the user. While “respecting the user” remains a core value of Google, Seshadri writes, in practice “risk mitigation trumps all else.”

It’s understandable, he admits, given that everything at Google has been going “wonderfully” for years thanks to a “money-printing machine called ‘Ads’ that has continued to grow inexorably every year, hiding all the other sins.”

The problem, according to Seshadri, is that Google employees don’t go to work every day thinking they are serving users or customers. Instead, they serve something internal to Google, be it a process, technology, manager, or other employee.

“Working extra hard or extra smart,” he writes, “doesn’t create any new core value in such a world.”

If the focus was on value creation, he argues, it would “change the equation” at Google. Instead, the focus is on potential risk, which is seen in “every line of code you change” and “everything you throw,” resulting in layer after layer of processes, reviews, and approvals.

In terms of career development within Google, he writes, “any disagreement with the management chain is a career risk, so always say yes to the VP, and the VP says yes to the SVP, all the way.”

For Google, Seshadri’s essay comes at a delicate moment. Last week, shares of parent company Alphabet plunged after Google shared a video showcasing its upcoming Bard service, an AI chatbot similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In the video, Bard gave an inaccurate answer to a question about the James Webb Space Telescope.

Microsoft has invested heavily in OpenAI, and earlier this month it launched an updated version of its Bing search engine that offers ChatGPT-like answers in addition to traditional search results. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told The Verge this month that while Google is still the “800-pound gorilla,” he hopes his company’s AI moves will knock out his rival “and prove they can dance.”

Google employees took to an internal forum to criticize company leaders, including CEO Sundar Pichai, for what they described as a rushed and botched job announcing Bard, CNBC reported.

Amid that dissatisfaction, employees recently received a reminder of the company’s early days as a piecemeal startup. Susan Wojcicki announced on Thursday that she will be stepping down from her role as CEO of Google’s YouTube. In 1998, Wojcicki rented her garage to Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin as a place where they could work on their fledgling search engine project. She subsequently joined the company and played key roles in its rapid rise.

Few doubt that Google exceeded all expectations in those early years. But today, Seshadri argues in his essay, there is a “collective delusion” within Google that the company is still great, when in reality most people are silently complaining about the general inefficiency.

As a Google employee, “You don’t wake up every day thinking about how you should do better and how your customers deserve better and how you could do better,” he writes. “Instead, believe that the things you’re already doing are so perfect that they’re the only way to do it.”

If he’s right, with many believing that ChatGPT or similar tools will eventually challenge Google’s search dominance, that may no longer be enough.

Google did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.

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