| I think Google has a culture problem (they're massive, doesn't apply everywhere, etc. etc.). There's a weird sense of internal entitlement where some (likely a small, but still substantial) number of people work there, are well paid, and yet act internally as if it's some terrible place doing terrible things (yet stay working there). Whatever way they rationalize this to themselves - it's odd. I don't have first hand exposure, have only heard things through friends that were employees. Some of the most coddled/well compensated employees in human history acting as if they're in some sort of oppressive sweat shop. Reminds me of this: https://paygo.ghost.io/why-did-i-leave-google-or-why-did-i-s... The employees also pushed to avoid working for the USG, pushed to avoid the JEDI contract (though they likely would have lost it anyway) while at the same time trying to work within China (while Deep Mind may or may not be indirectly assisting in Uighur camps [0]). I think this is morally wrong and the arguments are often simple/naive. [0]: ">>Peter Thiel: ...But somehow it’s very difficult to talk about this stuff coherently. I had a set of conversations with some of the Google people in the deep mind AI technology, “is your AI being used to run the concentration camps in Xinjiang?” and “Well, We don’t know and don’t ask any questions.” You have this almost magical thinking that by pretending that everything is fine, that’s how you engage and have a conversation. And you make the world better. And it’s some combination of wishful thinking. It’s useful idiots, you know, it’s CCP fifth columnist collaborators. So it’s some super position of all these things. But I think if you think of it ideologically or in terms of human rights or something like that, I’m tempted to say it’s just profoundly racist. It’s like saying that because they look different, they’re not white people, they don’t have the same rights. It’s something super wrong. But I don’t quite know how you unlock that." https://nixonseminar.com/2021/04/the-nixon-seminar-april-6-2... |
So far in my career I've worked for a government contractor, doing basically good things that benefit the government and the public, a large service exclusively serving gambling companies some of whom were committing obvious crimes including automatically gender detecting players and rate limiting anyone with a woman's name (under the assumption that any women on their service are men who've been banned or rate limited themselves using their wive's credit cards), and a supermarket, and honestly, the hardest place to leave was the gambling company that I thought constantly about how I should leave.
It took suddenly being made redundant due to the pandemic for me to really try hard to find another job, I'd applied to plenty but I never really pushed myself properly, or took them seriously enough because stability at the cost of bitterness and feeling like the smallest cog in a meat grinder of human misery is a weird sort of comfortable, it's leaving a splinter in because pulling it out is scary, it's not ripping off a bandaid, a "childish" failure of character, but ultimately relatable and human.
And I _wasn't_ making 6 figures. I _didn't_ spend years of my life building up to getting into that position, it was just the first job out of university paying slightly more than the average, I can't imagine if I had got into Google and realised what these people must've realised about themselves and the system and how they are really no exits that aren't steps down unless you're entrepreneurial and willing to take a big risk, you think Facebook/Apple/Amazon/Netflix/Uber don't make some big moral compromises to sell and produce in China?
I'm not (trying to) justify their decisions, just rather painfully admit that I can relate.