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Pretty tragic story of a man who knows for years he is doing evil, but is unable to get out of his comfy bubble of exploitation before being actively laid off. It reads as a case study of how evil triumphs when good men do nothing.
Kind of like the state of the USA right now.
America is an example of the narcissism and psychopathy that extreme wealth creates, and capitalism rewards, rotting a society to its core.
It’s most prevalent in America because it has the highest wealth inequality, and the most religiously indoctrinated poorly educated population, but the ultra wealthy tend to be narcissists everywhere; especially those born into extreme wealth, like Trump.
Never seen it put so concisely before. Well done.
How does it go? America is when 1/3 of the people could eat another 1/3 alive and the last 1/3 would only watch passively as it happens?
I took a voluntary layoff from Google last year. It’s probably self-rationalizing, but IMO I had an excellent role at the company for the last 5 years of my time. I helped design a system that locks down and redacts server logs across many of Google’s services. Only on-call engineers with an emergency backed by a post mortem review could get temporary access to original server logs. The system doesn’t delete all data but it can enforce codified contracts, country/state regulations, make certain privacy gurantees, and surface problems for auditing.
Google has made and continues to make poor business decisions, but from my experience they are one of the best big companies managing user privacy. I can’t speak for all of Google’s business units (well I can’t speak for the company at all, heh), but the privacy zeitgeist says the opposite which I’ve found misleading, but could never really speak to while being employed.
User data is taken extremely seriously at Google, and I worked with hundreds of people that would gladly get fired if asked to do anything unethical with user data. They audit and lock down access, build systems for guaranteeing anonymization (systems in place long before I worked there), report compliance, and most importantly they work independently from the employees that use the data. Every business unit had committees to consult and review privacy specifically. I was also an expert consultant for several privacy incidents and the number of people involved and the seriousness taken was personally impressive for even minor incidents.
IMO it’s still one of the best companies to work for, but there’s many legitimate reasons to cut them out. My opinion switched when Google had their first layoff in January 2023. The company had issues (I am sure there are plenty of legit lawsuits that I know nothing about that can be fixed with money and internal/external controls and improvements), but in that moment I realized it’s not the company I thought I knew. Rough ordering of reasons for my exit:
- Government contracts supporting fascism (Israel, CBP, ICE, face tracking, etc.).
- The layoffs.
- Pichai going to inauguration and capitulating. GOP donations.
- 180 on remote culture.
- AI slop.
There’s probably more if I reflected longer. Maybe I should have resigned sooner, idk. I’m glad I made the choice that I could.
Google was good to me for the years I was there. I got up to L6 and saved enough for my family to exit on my own terms and find a better environment. I’m still looking heh.
Happy to answer some questions (culture, privacy, SWE/SRE, oncall, etc.) if there are any. The company is massive and I saw only a small slice.
As a young adult these were the innovators to aspire to. But the last 3/4 years things have turned. I keep thinking back to the apple 1984 ad and that they have become what the hated. Big tech are no longer innovators. They are becoming exploitive and controlling.
Your list is pretty much my thoughts on them. I have mostly de-googled as far as i know. Good luck in your next adventure.I hear you on that. It seems like there’s room for it, but it’s just covered in this gross amorphous hyper-capitalist structure.
I am inspired by DeepMind giving away the AlphaFold protein structure database for free. That was awesome!
Or developing and giving away anonymous, decentralized, Bluetooth-based proximity detection for COVID tracking. That’s freaking awesome!
YouTube too is awesome, and it’s profitable, but they slowly make insane, gross decisions to chase 30% YoY growth. 1.5 hour ads, double ads, cutting creator payments, etc. Just make it sustainable!
Repeat ad nauseum across the business units. It’s upsetting.
Do you feel you are turning away from tech as a result? I have pushed the other way recently and started to enjoy stepping away, regaining control of privacy an adjusting to suit my needs.
I have for sure been avoiding programming since I left. Yes avoiding some tech as a result. I’m de-googling as they say. I’ve spent a lot of time with my family, pursued other hobbies, and volunteered more, which has all been fantastic.
I know I will get back into programming at some point. I really enjoy the selfhosting community and I think I will likely be focusing on the areas of decentralized private networks (similar to Tailscale), decentralized apps (not really web3, but open source apps that can leverage ipfs easily and make it dead simple for others), and tools for public good (promoting good information, skepticism and rational thinking, promoting democracy, fighting against fascism/GOP, etc.).
I would add exploitation of precarious workers both in the USA, Europe and third-world countries. That said, were you involved in Alphabet Workers Union? If not, why?
Good question. I wasn’t. I was not located in California, and the union never really came up in any of my conversations with colleagues. I vaguely thought dues were 5-8% of total compensation (I see now they are 1% which seems reasonable, either I am misremembering or they have since lowered, or maybe I looked at a different union) and they did not have any negotiating rights. Admittedly, if the union isn’t negotiating then I don’t know what it is for. But maybe it just needed to get to critical mass to have that negotiating leverage and I could have helped by joining. My total compensation was very good though, so it didn’t really seem like something a union had to protect. I had excellent work-life balance, good benefits, etc.
Edit: Internally, Googlers are fairly transparent. There were multiple anonymous surveys run by employees for collecting compensation statistics broken down by gender, role, region, office, etc. It had a pretty high number of participants. That was very informative and I always participated.
No union in the world asks rates that high. You’ve been probably have been served some kind of management union busting material if you have ever seen a number that high. 3% is considered very high already.
Anyway AWU is not necessarily trying to bargain for higher wages, but they do work on better job security, better working environments, fairness against abuses, sexual harassment and similar stuff, and obviously they support the political work of anti-genocide groups within Google.
There’s always a reason to join a union if you’re a worker.
Tech isn’t an airport: you don’t have to announce your departure.
I like reading those actually. Its always interesting to see people leave and why they do it. And many of the reasons can be summed up with how its not worth it anymore.
Since i left tech myself after 25 years also. :)
Techno fascism is a thing. But thats not why I left. I just didnt like AI being forced into the culture. Changed the entire profession from creating solutions to asking for solutions.
I didn’t mind this article. It highlights a struggle of someone clearly at odds with the betrayal brought on by tech The example of IBM is a good one, and the fool me once concept. And for many they got into tech to bring good change, that got hijacked by the greedy.
What I struggle with is the fact corps gonna make money with that and people have made big money and gone with this, and it’s only after being laid off they are open to the ills of the what has happened.
The bigger question is if you are still willing to support and perpetuate big tech and bad behaviour in other ways. There’s no indication of the viewers nationality but do they have investment funds in tech? are condoning bad practices against minorities? or only the ones that align with their background beliefs. For many in the tech industry introspection is a good practice. It’s easy to say at the end of your career hey I don’t wanna work with them. It’s even easier when you are comfortable.
I suppose it is a start people are openly voicing this.
He’s a brown guy immigrated to NA and writing on a Marxist magazine. I don’t believe in reducing the personal to the biographical like Americans do, but also I think you can guess the answer to a few of your questions.
