This image was lost some time after publication.

"Google is different, even on a list of distinctive companies," an article from the March issue of Fast Company begins. It goes on:

Here, more than a dozen describe what life is like at a place where no goal is too audacious, agility means more than power, and even cafeteria food —

OK. We'll stop there because we're starting to gag. Google's PR team landed itself yet another wet kiss in black ink about the cafeterias, the freedom to pursue side projects, and everything else you already know about Google. Here's the good news: Ex-Googlers are as sick of it as the rest of us. And one of them, AdMob's Kevin Scott, says enough is enough. Here's his whole rant.

Google is undoubtedly an awesome company and was certainly a great place to work the entire time I was there. But. These unreservedly positive fluff pieces really aren't doing the company a service. They irritated me when I was an employee given the too-perfect pictures they painted and what they missed. For instance, ideas at Google do not burst forth from the heads of geniuses and then find their way unimpeded to huge audiences of receptive users. Rather ideas emerge, are torn to shreds, reformulated, torn to shreds, prototyped, torn to shreds, launched to internal users, torn to shreds, rebuilt and relaunched, torn to shreds, refined some more, torn to shreds, put back together one last time, torn to shreds by [site reliability engineers], tweaked again in a seemingly-endless frenzy of last minute work, and launched ... whereupon they are torn to shreds by bloggers, journalists, and competitors. The magic of Google is that tearing to shreds, even when founders are shredding, doesn't often mean outright project cancellation.