[galdosdi]

I used to work there and this kind of thing is why I left. Google lost their moral compass years ago. The greed I saw from top to bottom was baffling. People earning $200k already, who spent all their time figuring out how to get the next promotion (and thus inventing stupid unnecessary and uninteresting projects) rather than trying to find actually fulfilling-to-the-employee or useful-to-the-enterprise-or-the-user work.

You already make a ton of money and have a ton of status, why not enjoy it and find work that is actually fulfilling to you and/or useful to the user and/or failing that at least useful to the shareholders if nothing else. But no, they were conditioned to seek achievement blindly and without any moral or other introspection.

I could not stand it. I spent years regretting not holding my nose longer for the sake of being able to buy a house and so forth.... but I've made my peace with it. Since then I've had the opportunity to see how harmful Google's attempts to make money are to children (they are the new Joe Camel) and now I no longer have regrets at all. It's one thing to manipulate and exploit adults who should know better, but to target children is just the worst kind of low.

[bbor]

Very interesting perspective, thanks for the insight! Seriously.

I recently quit Google, thus the preachy tone above lol - it’s an emotional topic. Ultimately I wanted to prove to myself that I could cut it as a “big tech” software engineer, but the whole corporate structure and purpose was unbelievably anxiety and shame inducing. Probably an overreaction but hey, us engineers are a fragile bunch…

I was in ads, so it was the front line of the insanity: thousands of truly kind, smart people were pampered in brand new Science-Fiction buildings on NASA Ames land (kagi “Google Bayview Campus”) with the finest food, gyms, tech, transportation, everything. They talked all day about modernizing ads and pleasing customers and powering the Free and Open Internet, and never about politics. And promotions, as you said. Meanwhile:

- we were surrounded by an army of underpaid contract workers because the engineers refuse to collectively organize with them,

- desperate pleas from organizations I trust to stop [LATEST_GOOGLE_3PC_REPLACEMENT_PROPOSAL] because it would destroy the internet were hitting the top of hacker news every few weeks,

- lawsuits are landing from the DoJ for illegal business practices with quite shocking screenshots of internal slides, and

- The legal manipulation culture runs so deep that employees get regular training on why they need to tag everything as “attorney client communications” even if there’s no attorneys involved (something tells me that “”loophole”” isn’t gonna last long).

Such a weird, jarring experience. I’m still living off Google savings so haven’t quite hit the “miss the paycheck” stage for real, not looking forward to that! Hopefully someone finds this emotional rant illuminative.