This mirrors my own experience as a European that worked at FAANG in the Bay Area.
It used to be a dream job. Now I've relocated back to Europe and want nothing to do with American Big Tech. It's become toxic and completely counter to my values.
America has become a much darker place that has a very different place in the world. American tech companies have not just accepted, but actively embraced this transition. I am not interested in joining them and being complicit.
It's an interesting time window you chose. Why would there be an anomaly during that window (if there is one)?
Perhaps it is due to the outward-facing, civic-oriented values coming out of WW2?
There was a lot of reflection in America on what went wrong in German pre-war thinking and culture coming out of that period.
The WW2 men in their 20s in 1940 were in their 40s in 1960s and their political power would have kept growing through peer older politicians into the 90s.
Time window is roughly to a non US citizen from when civil rights and women’s rights were ascending there. The last 20 odd years show a marked decline in both. I often wonder when segregation in the US will be introduced.
I'm glad to see Europeans wising up about the US. But as a Latin American whose country suffered from the US-backed Operation Condor, Yankees being soulless subhuman scum is nothing new. Europe was just too glad to reap the benefits as US allies to care about the truth.
The CIA instigated a coup in Guatemala in '54 which led to a civil war and the Maya genocide.
OK, but what about the open stuff? Like the current and previous president being publicly genocidal? Like the health care system being used as a weapon against the domestic population, or the US armed forces destroying the planet by just existing and spewing so much carbon oxides and pollutants into the global environment?
Either those votes are worth something, and it implicates US voters, or they're not worth something and the US political system is basically a sham deserving of revolution, which also implicates US voters who do not organise to this end. Arguably every state on friendly terms with the US is similarly morally implicated as well.
> While we vote for our leaders we don’t exactly get a say or have awareness of what sort of covert bullshit some over eager Yale graduate is doing as a top secret operation.
I obviously don't know who you voted for, but anyone who voted for someone who voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq is somewhat complicit (Clinton, Biden, etc).
And I'm not speaking just about those running for presidency, but all the Congressmen who got re-elected over and over again.
I don't think there's a big risk the European startup I work for now is involved in bombing brown people in the Middle East, actively accelerating climate change or dividing society for engagement.
Seems like a much better bet for my values, at least.
Maybe they should not have joined the company in the first place?
Company mottos, principles, slogans and values are all fake fronts to lure in these sort of people alongside the free food with the carrots on those sticks.
Once that all runs out or the company goes south and stops being a daycare, then they start doing silly virtue signalling posts like this.
Now you are seeing who was there for the 'good vibes', free food, rest n' vest and who was there to keep the company alive.
All of these things are 100% bullshit and always have been. It's tragic that Google actually had people believing them when they championed "don't be evil".
And yet it directly speaks to the comment it was replying to. It makes the point that RSUs are generally multi-year; so if you're getting them with _any_ frequency, you never get to the point of "the last RSU vests".
But does it matter that it is or isn't privileged? Thats the root question. What are you trying to highlight?
I have to assume you aren't trying to shame someone for moral opinion about talking about facts on the table - as that does 0 for any kind of public discourse.
So you agree your comment provides no value to the conversation here except a kind of "check your privileges - shut down the conversation I am greater than thou perspective".
I am asking you what value are you trying to bring here to the thread with this comment? Does one have to have a qualifier statement "I have certain privileges ascribed to my life" and now make a comment? Should I be adding qualifying statements to this comment to make sure the morality police don't come finger wagging?
The fact that it's privileged to have an X is irrelevant to the discussion. The discussion was about whether or not an X will Y. And it started with "If you have an X".
> I have my golden handcuffs too, probably most on HN do
I don't. And I expect I'm not in the minority here. If you're going to throw rocks, you might want to ponder your own privilege before you start tossing accusations.
Of course i realize how privileged it is. It seemed like useful information to the discussion, so i added it. I don't particularly care if people know how much or how little i made.
In my life i've been both very poor and very rich. I'm now happy, and that matters a lot more than either.
Wasn’t meant to shame, just a shocking thing to take in. Make as much as you can, if that is what is sought. Those numbers are a rarefied circumstance. It sucks that they cuffed you, but great you escaped. Tough decision to make.
It’s genuinely great to read you’ve found happiness.
I think the "last RSU" was more a figure of speech. At some point a person passes above an earnings level where they feel comfortable deactivating the "money making mode" and let their conscience speak.
This is going to be different from company to company. I worked for a different FAANG company, and the RSUs I got on day one, with a 4 year vesting period, were the only ones I ever got. Obviously, I resigned at exactly 4 years.
While transparency is admirable, I don’t find the “why I left Google” blog posts to be particularly interesting content to be posted to HN.
They happen relatively frequently and there are a number of things about them that feel distasteful:
- The authors are in the literal 1%, so for the 99% of us who are doing far worse it feels a bit like a tiny violin exercise.
“Sorry you worked for an unethical company, my company is unethical, too, and I can’t quit over morals or else my family won’t eat.
- The people who quit Google are one of 100,000 employees, which dilutes the value of hearing an individual story from someone who is leaving the company.
I don’t think it’s very fair to tell people who want to constructively criticize articles to just not engage with them. That feels like a deflection of my points rather than addressing the merit of what I actually said.
I genuinely think the author could read comments like mine and get something out of them.
Timing wise, I happened to leave after my old grants expired and before my new grants would be in my account. I was a VP of engineering when i left. Google pays VP's quite well.
If there's a reason you want more exact numbers, poke me over email.
yep, and happy to make everyone around them feel guilty when they got theirs. i strongly dislike people who do this performative crap while unfortunately believing in their right to say it.
<rant>
I am so tired of reading these stupid "why I am leaving my job after making millions". One thing I can say about myself: I work for money. That's it. Lots of things the companies that I work for (normally 25,000+ employees) do immoral and unethical things. Still, I stay, earn money, and I don't write stupid fucking self-righteous blog posts after I leave. At this point, blog posts like this look like an "own goal".
</rant>
This is incredibly annoying to see in the real world. People who pontificate values on LinkedIn but work for a company they disagree with, only to see them stay until they hit 4 years and leave. No idea how they think they have any moral high ground.
Google provides annual RSU refreshes. There is no "last RSU".
This announcement is also 9 years after they started, and Google has a 4 year vesting schedule, so it's not even possible that this coming after the initial grant vests.
This is a completely unfair and unsubstantiated dismissal of the article.
i am not american. have no idea what goes on there.
I know talking to europeans that they think they are peers of other 'white nations' like usa. But europeans are now closer to countries they colonized than to usa.
Whilst I appreciate the commitment to their values, I wonder where they stand on the 'safety' of their users as it relates to the Android Developer Verification update (currently top of HN, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48755965).
They should have stuck with the charging money model instead of giving away services for the cost of attention.
There is a deep irony in Google becoming one of the greatest corporations ever on the back of an ostensibly socialist utopia business model. Everyone on earth with an internet connection can use the full suite of google products (which pretty much every person reading this chooses to use daily) without having social class be a limiting factor like it is with paid services.
And here we are, 25 years later, and google is considered on of the most evil and malicious corporations, despite most people never paying them anyting (and a large subset of those never loading one of their ads either).
From a high level POV, its an incredibly perplexing outcome. Compared to someone like Apple, who charges money, has zero openess, and prices to aligns with Upper class, still being largely beloved.
You know, Google hinders competition. They are so powerful, they dictate the rules. If you do not play by Google's rules and align to their algorithms, you are allowed to consume, but not to provide. You have to pay them and others to even gain a small amount of visibility in their search results. The Google and YouTube algos are unfair as f*ck and promote the already successful.
Regular end-consumers didn't pay them anything. The people paying were corporations that advertised online. Through Google's publisher network (Adsense), their Doubleclick acquisition and the DART For Publishers middleware, and the ad buying tool (Google Ads), they completely price-fixed the market. Add to that "Jedi Blue", their non-compete cartel with Meta, and you can see Google is built on crime.
The last time I worked for someone else was 1992 so one didn't really use personal sites like this where one would whine about why they left their job for all the world to see. We all have our reasons for quitting but something like this just gathers the "Yeah!!" crowd but no one gains anything from it and it's quickly forgotten.
Good for you, just try to remember those old days when you complained about bosses and "whine" about things to your friends and some work colleges about day to day stuff. Now think what you would say about a situation when you were fed up and had to quit because you couldn't take it anymore and every day you had these tasks going against your values ( doesn't matter if they are "right" or "wrong", they are yours ).
Also, Google is a multi-billion dreadnought with hundreds of millions of dollars for PR, lawyers and lobbying every year. I'm sure they can take a post about someone "whining" and quitting their job in disagreement. Something tells me Google be fine...
so the guy who had a say when they wanted to restrict "sideloading" (the normal way of installing an APK) and "verify" which and whose apps may run on the platform, has resigned but not because Google is pushing for closing the platform, but just because the company politics didn't match his. well what can I say? good riddance.
Can anyone in this industry really say goodbye without posting it? We act like artists, believing our ideals will illuminate the world with our moral compass.
Not until tech companies stop pretending tech jobs are special. It’s part of the entire industry culture at this point that you join certain positions to “make a big difference.”
Yet most startups are just b2b AI sass or whatever.
The only stated reason for his resignation is that Google is no longer adhering to their promise to not use AI for weapons. I was surprised that the reasoning was so one-dimensional.
While I don't agree with the author exactly, I do admire someone sticking to their guns (no pun intended). Like Oscar Wild said, "Morality, like art requires drawing a line somewhere".
One of my favorite 80's movies was Real Genius with Val Kilmer. He accidentally helps develop a weapon and then goes to extreme measures to prevent its use. For some people creating weapons is a line they wont cross and that's not a bad thing.
right, I don't see the connection between being _forced_ to resign and his his pacifist principles + as EU academic he sees himself as target of likely mass surveillance
I stopped reading at "Yes, Trump was already president" 'cause I've read enough of such diatribes to know where this is going. As if things were better when Biden was president and 'Big Tech' was used as the censorship organ of the regime. Remember Biden's Ministry of Truth czar Nina Jankovicz? What about Katherine Maher, NPR's CEO who stated that Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction getting in the way of finding common ground & getting things done? Trump is not the cause of the decline in public trust, he is the result of that decline.
Ultimately it all probably goes back to the fall of the Soviet Union and with that the loss of the clear 'good vs. bad/us vs. them' distinction which could be used to distract people on both sides from the rot in their midst. Politicos have always been corrupt no matter their colours or stripes but when the world was a simpler place - the Free West versus the Evil Empire, before that the Allies against the Axis - there was a common enemy for the people to refer to. Yes, some "democrats" already tried to take the side of the Soviets but they were in a minority while most of the Democratic party considered the politics and culture of the USA and the western alliance to be preferable over those of the Soviet Union and its satellite states as well as Communist China. They preferred "our" corrupt politicians over "their" corrupting ideology, i.e. they might be assholes but they're OUR assholes. When the eastern bloc dissolved the western alliance was like the dog which had caught the car: clueless as to what to do next. Fukuyama thought we were at the end of history but as anyone who had read a bit of (real) history could then already see this was a nonsensical idea. We're now experiencing the effects of that lack of vision which led to a 'Free West' which has taken over a number of the bad habits "we" accused the eastern bloc countries of and with that the term 'Free West' deserves to be quoted.
It is up to us, those living in the western alliance countries to try to keep the authoritarians at bay and no, I'm not only talking about Trump. I'm talking about the Communists (who call themselves 'democratic socialists') taking over the "democratic" party, the the "woke right" (for lack of a better term, i.e. right-wingers who adopt progressive-style shaming, tribalism and purity tests to defend distorted conservative values [1]) attempting to make inroads, the authoritarians on all sides who see works like 1984 and Brave New World as instruction manuals, those who read Howard Zinn and believed all he wrote, etc.
I find it laughable how when all of these platforms were aligned with the Dems the same behavior was ok (and it was those darned russians that were the problem on facebook and other platforms), whereas now that the tables have turned (for now...), it's all the end of the world.
Whereas the feature of these platforms - their incredible power - was always the same. The outrage is then just a function of a person's preferences.
The censorship, the injection of government-approved standpoints, the shadow-banning, the organised campaigns to throttle dissenting voices and more similar activities. This all happened under the Biden regime with nary a peep from the media and those who pointed it out were labelled and called names. Then Trump returned and 'Big Tech' just followed along but this time around they're called out for being shills to the orange man.
The criticism of Google and their abandoning of their "Don't Be Evil" motto has been a constant here since before Trump's first term. There's no correlation with Dems being in government.
If anything, what Google (and Meta, etc) show during Trump is how hypocritical their "values" were at their core. When it paid them to pursue carbon neutral policies, and being seen as "inclusive" or whatever, being seen as against violence, they did so. Now that those in power are against all of that, it pays to quietly or not so quietly abandon those policies. They can do this because they were never their core values, they were just convenient for business at the time.
I should have been more precise. My point was merely that the tone of MSM and left leaning media and commentators took on those same platforms was completely different. So to your point, I agree, it was never fine, but it was only seen as problematic by the mainstream after the re-alignment with the Trump admin.
These tech-bro public resignations are so tedious. Ostensibly he seems fine with the existence of AI mass surveillance and AI powered murderbots but he just never envisioned a scenario where they would get used that wasn't congruent with his politics.
That doesn't appear to be stopping the current administration. That's why I think you should be more concerned about the tools of oppression existing rather than the laws that govern them.
It's a systemic issue unfortunately. When some of these unethical CEOs say that they feel like they have no control and that if they didn't do it, someone else would, I believe them and it makes sense. That's why they should do their part to reform the system. It's by reforming the system that they can start to regain sovereignty.
Why is this a Google doc and not just an HTML page? I was super-confused when the links didn't behave like normal links. This is like when people post a screenshot of an Apple note.
>" I still believe in Android as the (currently) best end-user facing operating system for mobile devices, with its balance between openness, flexibility, and security."
I do not give a shit whether it is the best. If one can be cut off instantly by whims of some algo with no recourse - thank you but I'll pass. Yes I still use Android phone but mostly as phone, GPS and camera all of which can be replaced.
I do not develop for Android or iOS exactly for the reason of not being in control. Stick to desktops, servers and browsers as deployment platforms
The blog post is from June 19th. Google Doc from June 17th.
My guess? He shared the Google Doc link with his peers, but forgot that Google Docs links are public for anyone who knows the link, so someone just forwarded it to oblivion, and he was forced to publish that as blog post. The addendums kind of reflect that.
That's a great reminded that any Google Doc with a shareable link is basically a public document for all intents and purposes.
This has little to do with shareable links and everything to do with the trust you put in whoever you share it with.
There's not much difference between them ctrl+v-ing the link to a third party, vs them ctrl+a, ctrl+c, ctrl+v-ing the contents to another party. If anything, by just sharing a link, you have a chance to disable the sharing and hope the content hasn't yet been copied.
it's typical for googlers to leave a note like this in gdocs when they leave As thats the standard at google. i imagine its the original and google hasnt decided to turn off public sharing on it
9 years ago was 2017-- and by that time Google was already doing sleazy SEO shit, scanning peoples emails to who them ads, trying to make ads seem like general search results etc etc
But the moto has always lacked any aspiration about how they should do good or make the world better. “Don’t be evil”. Who thinks they are being evil? No one.
This is the relevant historical context to understand how this ever got into big G's mission statement, it was to distance themselves from the then well-known anti-competitive mal-practices of the Redmond giant.. which seemingly they've learned a lot from. Don't no-one worry too much, they only have less than half of the world population's messaging metadata, schedules, realtime location and private pictures.
Google was providing cloud computing to the DoD before 2017 - there's no real morale difference between providing lower level compute vs providing a higher level AI algo other than giving yourself an excuse by adding one layer of abstraction (obfuscating?).
Most people that one would describe as evil do not see themselves as evil, but rather see what they're doing as justified. Saying you're not going to be evil means literally nothing.
Don't be the bad guy, ok, but if you think your goals are noble enough then crossing lines becomes acceptable. Google sold everyone on the "we're going to change the world for good and improve everyone's lives and make all information accessible and free" line, and in doing so justified everything else they did - privacy invasion, monopolistic behavior, etc.
The fact that they said "don't be evil" should have been a massive red flag for everyone, not a green one.
Exactly. Everyone who posts here regularly believes themselves to be “not evil”. Working for Google, Facebook, burning resources to produce ai slop, etc.
Not me of course. I’m making the world a better place by introducing ai into your Facebook feed.
Yeah, I think since it's getting provably worse no matter where you start the clock everyone can claim this whenever they actually do leave.
Just to give one example, you have the Google founders bending the knee to Trump these days whereas when Trump started his first term you had articles like this:
"Google co-founder Sergey Brin joins protest against immigration order at San Francisco airport" (2017)
I think a big difference is the majority of developers knew they could find employment relatively easily elsewhere, so they felt comfortable protesting things they didn't feel comfortable with, and google leadership had some level of accountability to employees. Now though, if you speak up you might get targeted for the next round of layoffs, and the current job market is a lot tougher, so you could end up unemployed for quite a while.
When one of those ways is supporting mass killing, I'd say even one way would be enough to make it a completely different company. Your post is asinine.
It is worse now than it was 9 years ago, but it even then it was clearly moving in the wrong direction. And the current google is the result of trends that started long before 2017.
I worked at Google; It was different 9 years ago, in ways that are specifically described in the blog post you're ignoring, which I can confirm are true.
Was it different or are the people who voluntarily started working for Google around that period unable to admit to themselves and others that it was always questionable to work for a entity like Google?
To certain observers this was obviously the direction tech monopolies were going to go.
What have those people always seen that you're only now beginning to admit is an inherently defective aspect of these organizations?
Holy cow dude, I am not personally answerable for all the faults of a megacorp, nor am I "only now beginning to admit" anything in your imaginary personal history about me that you made up now.
This entire thread makes me sad. A handful of people, the original writer and some other commenters, are saying "this corporation has bad things about it" and the overwhelming majority of posts are these weirdos attacking them for why don't you have the specific opinion that I want, and why didn't you have it sooner than this post I just became aware of?
> I am not personally answerable for all the faults of a megacorp
It's not very fair for you to answer for the faults of the megacorp but to be honest you kind of put yourself in that position when you defended the indefensible.
For all intents and purposes, looking from a user/customer perspective, Google is just as morally bankrupt today as it was 9 years ago. And that's what really matters. You can rationalize it, you can pretend that you couldn't see the trend, that it didn't smell as bad back then, but at the end of the day what Google is doing today is just as morally acceptable as the things they were doing in 2017 were at the time. We just pushed the baseline down and normalized the ever worsening behaviors.
So let's not judge 2017 with the eyes from 2026 when the things done back then look more palatable. If you were to ask 2017 me about Google you'd get the same answer as today. Then again I wasn't paid by Google so I could afford to give that answer.
Where did I defend the indefensible? The OP post described specific ways Google's culture changed, on the inside. Your response to that is "my personal opinion is canonical, your specific examples to the contrary don't matter, and you're bad for giving those examples."
And, dude, most employees at most corporations are not "being paid" to defend them on the Internet. I'm no longer with Google so they're not actually paying me for anything at all. Miss me with that conspiratorial thinking.
> It was different 9 years ago, in ways that are specifically described in the blog post you're ignoring
I'm not OP but I'm not ignoring anything. In 2017 Google was doing just as many "questionable" things for that time as today. Googlers at the time were embracing doing the shitty thing of the day. All that happened in the meantime is that Google did even shittier things that made those older ones look tame by comparison.
By the time you were at Google the company had a litany of reported concerns. Look at them [0], look at how many happened before 2017. And that's just one list, only about very public privacy concerns.
You know how $1 in 2017 is $1.37 in 2026? Well it's the same with character in a society that just degrades morality. What looks like an unacceptably high moral debt today in absolute figures is probably the exact same debt you took on a decade ago if you adjust for inflation.
> I don't think you and these others are commenting in good faith.
An entirely expected yet still disappointing cop-out.
> what Google is doing today is just as morally acceptable as the things they were doing in 2017 were at the time. We just pushed the baseline down and normalized the ever worsening behaviors.
You can’t hold together your premise for 2 sentences. If you admit that the behaviors are “ever worsening” then you cannot logically believe that it was the same 9 years ago.
> You can’t hold together your premise for 2 sentences
Or maybe you were so eager to lob a snarky remark that you failed to put in your full attention and intellectual capacity to understand what I said. See, this is how you assume good faith. So let's run through it again with clarifications that would pierce even a googler's shield, shall we?
>> morally bankrupt
...Is what I said. Morality is a sliding window, it moves with time to follow the tolerance of society. But when in the past you supported something that was outside that window for that time you can't come a decade later and over-impose today's window of morality to make it look like "we were pretty swell back then by today's standards". Morality by comparison isn't morality. Otherwise all you'd ever have to do is wait for someone to do worse and then you're Mother Theresa.
Google will do worse next year, and even worse the year after that. Because every generation of its employees see dollar signs and embrace doing the shitty thing of the day. Today's generation implements Android lockdowns, first party malware, more spying, you name it. Even the googler in the submission thinks this is a sign of moral bankruptcy. But ten years from now when Google will have promoted through a few more shittiness levels this same generation of googlers will come out to say "this is not the company it was x years ago". And if I'm still alive maybe I'll tell them the same thing as today: they went morally bankrupt when they embraced doing the shit of the day, not when that finally became tame by comparison.
Attacking someone for leaving Google because they are no longer comfortable with Google’s actions is some combo of virtue signaling and counterproductive purity testing.
You’re not influencing anyone’s behavior nor meaningfully educating anyone. You’re basking in your feeling of moral superiority while you look down your nose.
Did I? And who would this person I attacked for leaving Google be? My comment's right up there, feel free to just copy/paste the "you're shit because you left Google" part. It's fine, don't scramble, that's not the point.
Good on them to leave, better late than never I guess. In you frenzy you ignored that the point almost everyone on this side of the fence makes, this thread included, isn't "bad that you left", it's "don't pretend it was morally better when you joined". Because that's how all these people like to wash the stench and paint themselves in a better light. When (generic) you started a decade ago you had to wade through what in 2017 was neck deep shit, looking for that paycheck. Googlers of today also have to go neck deep, just in what 2026 defines as shit [0].
> You’re not influencing anyone’s behavior nor meaningfully educating anyone. You’re basking in your feeling of moral superiority while you look down your nose.
My friend, it's just me, you, and the other googler here on a submission marked as dupe and already in the HN cemetery. I wasn't putting on a show for the world. I know you are personally invested in defending your choices at any cost lest your internal moral framework collapses. Your livelihood and self worth depend on that. And I know I'm not educating you because every one of the people who lies to themselves that "they did it better in their time" will still lie to themselves for that paycheck in the future. Every few years they have to explain how it wasn't like that at the beginning, when it totally was for anyone with eyes and not just a money counter. No rando on the internet will ever educate you differently.
And believe me when I tell you I will never feel morally superior to anyone working for Google and friends for two reasons. I've probably done worse in my life before I've done better, and bragging about being morally superior to a generic googler is a victory without glory.
[0] But I'll leave you with what I told googler #2 earlier:
> You know how $1 in 2017 is $1.37 in 2026? Well it's the same with character in a society that just degrades morality. What looks like an unacceptably high moral debt today in absolute figures is probably the exact same debt you took on a decade ago if you adjust for "moral inflation".
It's too convenient that so many of these stories go something like "It was okay when I joined but somewhere along the way things there got dirty, but I'm still clean!"
Why is it always that way?
Why is no one ever writing "It was always dirty there but I convinced myself that it wasn't until I couldn't do it anymore."
Most of us have worked at a place that was either bad enough that we knew and didn't say anything or that we should have known was that bad. That isn't anything new. You do what you gotta do and all that.
What we're splitting hairs over is whether or not Google (and others) were already "too bad to work for" 10-15 years ago. And whether or not some people correctly identified this and others didn't / did but say that they didn't.
You're totally right -- very few of us have careers entirely at places like UNICEF. That's just reality. What isn't reality is the image some people like to portray that they didn't know or couldn't have reasonably known that the entity that they were a part of for so many years was no UNICEF.
Exactly. Google's "don't be evil policy" was never applied on Google itself.
It was enforced on users, advertisers and publishers.
Roughly 15 years ago, it no longer applied to advertisers. 50% of ads (if not more) are utter scams.
Good Google was functionally gone when Doubleclick took them over. That was a loooong time ago.
They gave up trying to fight search spam and just permanently broke their search in like 2008.
Not long after that (IIRC) they started serving the same obnoxious ads as everyone else instead of their “nice” text-only ads, and stopped clearly marking inline ads in search results, so they could trick users and better-run their extortion racket (“pay us to advertise for your own company name or who knows where the people who are definitely trying to find your website might end up?”).
The notion that they were notably better in 2017 than today reads like some kind of joke.
I came to Google via acquisition end of 2011 and left end of 2021. Google bought my employer so it could further cement its display ads monopoly. They never had a moral compass, they just wore one was a costume so that nobody would dig too closely into its business practices.
We got to wave pitchforks and ask tough questions at TGIF for a while, and march in pride parades under a Google banner, and get fed nice treats and the like but under it all was still just an old fashioned railway monopoly.
A huge fire hose of cash that let it play in all sorts of domains and espouse some vaguely California Ideology liberal/libertarian ideals while doing it.
But the moment that monopoly came under threat and the moment they felt they no longer needed the costume, it came off.
Google never had a moral compass. Anybody who thought it did was naive.
I could see some of that in 2011 (I started before the ipo), but it was almost all from ads. People in other parts of the company had a very different experience.
Ex-googler here as well. I'm not sure the distortion was worse outside of the core business. In the peripheral businesses (if one can call them businesses), I think you had more of an opportunity to ponder the larger implications of your actions. As an early Nester I argued vociferously for designs that would specifically dis-empower Google as a central service, in deference to the end user and as barrier to future misuse. Of course many of these ideas were not accepted. But my sense was, had I been part of the core Ad business, many of these ideas would have been third-rail topics, subject to immediate shutdown. Whereas within the Nest org I was able to foster discussions on the topics at multiple levels.
Indeed, my impression was that people within the core Ad business were more adept at maintaining an air of integrity while doing substantively the opposite for the goal of optimizing revenue. I suspect that the closer you got to Google's "center of gravity" the more distorted your reality and motivations became.
Surely, there is a spectrum between "founders doing whatever they want with the company" and "the market entirely dictating the company's every action."
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[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 69.3 ms ] threadIt used to be a dream job. Now I've relocated back to Europe and want nothing to do with American Big Tech. It's become toxic and completely counter to my values.
America has become a much darker place that has a very different place in the world. American tech companies have not just accepted, but actively embraced this transition. I am not interested in joining them and being complicit.
Perhaps it is due to the outward-facing, civic-oriented values coming out of WW2?
There was a lot of reflection in America on what went wrong in German pre-war thinking and culture coming out of that period.
The WW2 men in their 20s in 1940 were in their 40s in 1960s and their political power would have kept growing through peer older politicians into the 90s.
The CIA instigated a coup in Guatemala in '54 which led to a civil war and the Maya genocide.
Either those votes are worth something, and it implicates US voters, or they're not worth something and the US political system is basically a sham deserving of revolution, which also implicates US voters who do not organise to this end. Arguably every state on friendly terms with the US is similarly morally implicated as well.
I obviously don't know who you voted for, but anyone who voted for someone who voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq is somewhat complicit (Clinton, Biden, etc).
And I'm not speaking just about those running for presidency, but all the Congressmen who got re-elected over and over again.
Seems like a much better bet for my values, at least.
Company mottos, principles, slogans and values are all fake fronts to lure in these sort of people alongside the free food with the carrots on those sticks.
Once that all runs out or the company goes south and stops being a daycare, then they start doing silly virtue signalling posts like this.
Now you are seeing who was there for the 'good vibes', free food, rest n' vest and who was there to keep the company alive.
https://abc.xyz/investor/board-and-governance/google-code-of...
scroll to the bottom
that illustrates the point nicely...
"Yes, it was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'."
All of these things are 100% bullshit and always have been. It's tragic that Google actually had people believing them when they championed "don't be evil".
It obviously got promoted by marketing for external consumption as well.
Sometimes not.
I left with more than 4 million in RSU's left.
I wouldn't assume people aren't leaving lots of money on the table.
Because they are usually 3/4 year grants, it's pretty much impossible to leave without lots of unvested RSU.
There are some 1 year grants, but those are much more uncommon (~1%)
Not just the facts but the frame. Amazing.
I have to assume you aren't trying to shame someone for moral opinion about talking about facts on the table - as that does 0 for any kind of public discourse.
You’re right sir.
Nothing advanced here. I’ll get back to lashing myself for my insolence.
I am asking you what value are you trying to bring here to the thread with this comment? Does one have to have a qualifier statement "I have certain privileges ascribed to my life" and now make a comment? Should I be adding qualifying statements to this comment to make sure the morality police don't come finger wagging?
I’m sure you’re getting a nice adrenaline & dopamine hit and your ego feels amazing. Yay you!
But yes, very shameful of me to put these wordy words on these internets.
> If you have an X that Y
> If you have an X, it won't Y
to which you added
> Your statement is privileged
The fact that it's privileged to have an X is irrelevant to the discussion. The discussion was about whether or not an X will Y. And it started with "If you have an X".
> I have my golden handcuffs too, probably most on HN do
I don't. And I expect I'm not in the minority here. If you're going to throw rocks, you might want to ponder your own privilege before you start tossing accusations.
In my life i've been both very poor and very rich. I'm now happy, and that matters a lot more than either.
It’s genuinely great to read you’ve found happiness.
They happen relatively frequently and there are a number of things about them that feel distasteful:
- The authors are in the literal 1%, so for the 99% of us who are doing far worse it feels a bit like a tiny violin exercise.
“Sorry you worked for an unethical company, my company is unethical, too, and I can’t quit over morals or else my family won’t eat.
- The people who quit Google are one of 100,000 employees, which dilutes the value of hearing an individual story from someone who is leaving the company.
You don’t have to read and engage with everything on the front page. And you certainly don’t have to come make snarky criticisms of others.
I don’t think it’s very fair to tell people who want to constructively criticize articles to just not engage with them. That feels like a deflection of my points rather than addressing the merit of what I actually said.
I genuinely think the author could read comments like mine and get something out of them.
Timing wise, I happened to leave after my old grants expired and before my new grants would be in my account. I was a VP of engineering when i left. Google pays VP's quite well.
If there's a reason you want more exact numbers, poke me over email.
Something. $omething. something. $teinbeck?
>>"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." –Upton Sinclair
<rant> I am so tired of reading these stupid "why I am leaving my job after making millions". One thing I can say about myself: I work for money. That's it. Lots of things the companies that I work for (normally 25,000+ employees) do immoral and unethical things. Still, I stay, earn money, and I don't write stupid fucking self-righteous blog posts after I leave. At this point, blog posts like this look like an "own goal". </rant>
I tell employers I’m clearly a mercenary and I am only here for the money. I do great work, but I’ve been compensated well.
Don't read them. The rest of us may actually gain from another perspective, different from corporate marketing.
This announcement is also 9 years after they started, and Google has a 4 year vesting schedule, so it's not even possible that this coming after the initial grant vests.
This is a completely unfair and unsubstantiated dismissal of the article.
Now they are coping hard with "atleast we are not evil" when they literally building offsite detention camps for their own immigrants .
Whatever you think you have going over there, all things considered, you can keep it.
I know talking to europeans that they think they are peers of other 'white nations' like usa. But europeans are now closer to countries they colonized than to usa.
"Security" vs Openness
He discussed this briefly in a talk he gave at the Grazer Linuxtage 2026 in April https://media.ccc.de/v/glt26-615-what-can-we-learn-from-andr... at around minute 46
There is a deep irony in Google becoming one of the greatest corporations ever on the back of an ostensibly socialist utopia business model. Everyone on earth with an internet connection can use the full suite of google products (which pretty much every person reading this chooses to use daily) without having social class be a limiting factor like it is with paid services.
And here we are, 25 years later, and google is considered on of the most evil and malicious corporations, despite most people never paying them anyting (and a large subset of those never loading one of their ads either).
From a high level POV, its an incredibly perplexing outcome. Compared to someone like Apple, who charges money, has zero openess, and prices to aligns with Upper class, still being largely beloved.
Your comment in itself is deeply ironic.
And it worked, until the path became impossible to deny.
Sometimes it’s fine to see a topic and tell yourself “I have no relevant knowledge in this area so I won’t comment”.
Also, Google is a multi-billion dreadnought with hundreds of millions of dollars for PR, lawyers and lobbying every year. I'm sure they can take a post about someone "whining" and quitting their job in disagreement. Something tells me Google be fine...
You don't make your own food do you? Build your own car? Make your own git repos?
Seems like you might want to have a better view about who you work for.
venting can be helpful mentally/emotionally.
readers can feel solidarity, comfort in a shared experience, etc.
You are getting emotional. Maybe try calming down?
This is surreal.
Yet most startups are just b2b AI sass or whatever.
Someone else shared it out. Now, calm down. Your acting emotional. Maybe try smiling.
Longtime Googler DannyBee mentioned on this very thread that he left Google several years ago, but he never posted anything.
Most people do mention it to a few friends, because they are friends.
Others post for a larger audience, but don’t really target the general public.
But sometimes people find a personal story and forward it around and it goes viral. Which means thousands of people find it interesting.
One of my favorite 80's movies was Real Genius with Val Kilmer. He accidentally helps develop a weapon and then goes to extreme measures to prevent its use. For some people creating weapons is a line they wont cross and that's not a bad thing.
Would the author have left if they didn't have another job lined up? Definitely not. Then, how strong are their principles?
That's not remarkable to many.
https://www.mayrhofer.eu.org/post/leaving-google/
Ultimately it all probably goes back to the fall of the Soviet Union and with that the loss of the clear 'good vs. bad/us vs. them' distinction which could be used to distract people on both sides from the rot in their midst. Politicos have always been corrupt no matter their colours or stripes but when the world was a simpler place - the Free West versus the Evil Empire, before that the Allies against the Axis - there was a common enemy for the people to refer to. Yes, some "democrats" already tried to take the side of the Soviets but they were in a minority while most of the Democratic party considered the politics and culture of the USA and the western alliance to be preferable over those of the Soviet Union and its satellite states as well as Communist China. They preferred "our" corrupt politicians over "their" corrupting ideology, i.e. they might be assholes but they're OUR assholes. When the eastern bloc dissolved the western alliance was like the dog which had caught the car: clueless as to what to do next. Fukuyama thought we were at the end of history but as anyone who had read a bit of (real) history could then already see this was a nonsensical idea. We're now experiencing the effects of that lack of vision which led to a 'Free West' which has taken over a number of the bad habits "we" accused the eastern bloc countries of and with that the term 'Free West' deserves to be quoted.
It is up to us, those living in the western alliance countries to try to keep the authoritarians at bay and no, I'm not only talking about Trump. I'm talking about the Communists (who call themselves 'democratic socialists') taking over the "democratic" party, the the "woke right" (for lack of a better term, i.e. right-wingers who adopt progressive-style shaming, tribalism and purity tests to defend distorted conservative values [1]) attempting to make inroads, the authoritarians on all sides who see works like 1984 and Brave New World as instruction manuals, those who read Howard Zinn and believed all he wrote, etc.
[1] https://newdiscourses.com/2025/07/a-beginners-guide-to-the-w...
Whereas the feature of these platforms - their incredible power - was always the same. The outrage is then just a function of a person's preferences.
If anything, what Google (and Meta, etc) show during Trump is how hypocritical their "values" were at their core. When it paid them to pursue carbon neutral policies, and being seen as "inclusive" or whatever, being seen as against violence, they did so. Now that those in power are against all of that, it pays to quietly or not so quietly abandon those policies. They can do this because they were never their core values, they were just convenient for business at the time.
https://www.mayrhofer.eu.org/post/leaving-google/
Bruh.
I do not give a shit whether it is the best. If one can be cut off instantly by whims of some algo with no recourse - thank you but I'll pass. Yes I still use Android phone but mostly as phone, GPS and camera all of which can be replaced.
I do not develop for Android or iOS exactly for the reason of not being in control. Stick to desktops, servers and browsers as deployment platforms
https://www.mayrhofer.eu.org/post/leaving-google/
The blog post now also contains a second addendum that the Google doc doesn't have.
My guess? He shared the Google Doc link with his peers, but forgot that Google Docs links are public for anyone who knows the link, so someone just forwarded it to oblivion, and he was forced to publish that as blog post. The addendums kind of reflect that.
That's a great reminded that any Google Doc with a shareable link is basically a public document for all intents and purposes.
As per design.
Google gives you sufficient control over access permissions. If you make it public, you have to know anyone anywhere can see it once they get the URL.
I frequently share Google docs and sheets links widely and to entirely unknown readers. That is part of the utility of the tool.
There is also a great reminder next to the button you click to get a shareable link in Google Docs.
There's not much difference between them ctrl+v-ing the link to a third party, vs them ctrl+a, ctrl+c, ctrl+v-ing the contents to another party. If anything, by just sharing a link, you have a chance to disable the sharing and hope the content hasn't yet been copied.
I read that as "for all indents and purposes"
No it wasn’t.
9 years ago was 2017-- and by that time Google was already doing sleazy SEO shit, scanning peoples emails to who them ads, trying to make ads seem like general search results etc etc
Google was *exactly* this company it is today
Absent a stake in the outcome, it's just virtue signaling.
And when Google was forced to choose between juicing ad revenue and its morals, it chose the former.
> “Don’t Be Evil” wasn’t just a slogan of often-referenced Googliness—it was a north star for teams making hard calls.
It definitely counts for something that at least one senior leader felt the slogan was relevant for decision making.
Do you going around telling people how virtuous you are? No, good people just try and be good.
The slogan was a red flag right from the start.
Which isn't to say cynicism for these sorts of company charters isn't warranted, just not for that reason.
But the moto has always lacked any aspiration about how they should do good or make the world better. “Don’t be evil”. Who thinks they are being evil? No one.
Google was providing cloud computing to the DoD before 2017 - there's no real morale difference between providing lower level compute vs providing a higher level AI algo other than giving yourself an excuse by adding one layer of abstraction (obfuscating?).
Don't be the bad guy, ok, but if you think your goals are noble enough then crossing lines becomes acceptable. Google sold everyone on the "we're going to change the world for good and improve everyone's lives and make all information accessible and free" line, and in doing so justified everything else they did - privacy invasion, monopolistic behavior, etc.
The fact that they said "don't be evil" should have been a massive red flag for everyone, not a green one.
Not me of course. I’m making the world a better place by introducing ai into your Facebook feed.
Let’s not lump every ethical issue into one. And not conflate SEO sleaze with aiding murder.
Just to give one example, you have the Google founders bending the knee to Trump these days whereas when Trump started his first term you had articles like this:
"Google co-founder Sergey Brin joins protest against immigration order at San Francisco airport" (2017)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13512063
im surprised dave is still there too. probably can't let it go...
You’re not supposed to call people asinine just because you disagree with them.
Complied with legal orders. Do you have evidence that they did anything more?
> CIA on Iraq war
Are you talking about the Google earth data or something else?
> jigsaw was 2010
What does this mean? What did their jigsaw project do that I missed?
To certain observers this was obviously the direction tech monopolies were going to go.
What have those people always seen that you're only now beginning to admit is an inherently defective aspect of these organizations?
This entire thread makes me sad. A handful of people, the original writer and some other commenters, are saying "this corporation has bad things about it" and the overwhelming majority of posts are these weirdos attacking them for why don't you have the specific opinion that I want, and why didn't you have it sooner than this post I just became aware of?
It's not very fair for you to answer for the faults of the megacorp but to be honest you kind of put yourself in that position when you defended the indefensible.
For all intents and purposes, looking from a user/customer perspective, Google is just as morally bankrupt today as it was 9 years ago. And that's what really matters. You can rationalize it, you can pretend that you couldn't see the trend, that it didn't smell as bad back then, but at the end of the day what Google is doing today is just as morally acceptable as the things they were doing in 2017 were at the time. We just pushed the baseline down and normalized the ever worsening behaviors.
So let's not judge 2017 with the eyes from 2026 when the things done back then look more palatable. If you were to ask 2017 me about Google you'd get the same answer as today. Then again I wasn't paid by Google so I could afford to give that answer.
And, dude, most employees at most corporations are not "being paid" to defend them on the Internet. I'm no longer with Google so they're not actually paying me for anything at all. Miss me with that conspiratorial thinking.
I'm not going to spend more time here.
I'm not OP but I'm not ignoring anything. In 2017 Google was doing just as many "questionable" things for that time as today. Googlers at the time were embracing doing the shitty thing of the day. All that happened in the meantime is that Google did even shittier things that made those older ones look tame by comparison.
By the time you were at Google the company had a litany of reported concerns. Look at them [0], look at how many happened before 2017. And that's just one list, only about very public privacy concerns.
You know how $1 in 2017 is $1.37 in 2026? Well it's the same with character in a society that just degrades morality. What looks like an unacceptably high moral debt today in absolute figures is probably the exact same debt you took on a decade ago if you adjust for inflation.
> I don't think you and these others are commenting in good faith.
An entirely expected yet still disappointing cop-out.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_concerns_with_Google
You can’t hold together your premise for 2 sentences. If you admit that the behaviors are “ever worsening” then you cannot logically believe that it was the same 9 years ago.
Or maybe you were so eager to lob a snarky remark that you failed to put in your full attention and intellectual capacity to understand what I said. See, this is how you assume good faith. So let's run through it again with clarifications that would pierce even a googler's shield, shall we?
>> morally bankrupt
...Is what I said. Morality is a sliding window, it moves with time to follow the tolerance of society. But when in the past you supported something that was outside that window for that time you can't come a decade later and over-impose today's window of morality to make it look like "we were pretty swell back then by today's standards". Morality by comparison isn't morality. Otherwise all you'd ever have to do is wait for someone to do worse and then you're Mother Theresa.
Google will do worse next year, and even worse the year after that. Because every generation of its employees see dollar signs and embrace doing the shitty thing of the day. Today's generation implements Android lockdowns, first party malware, more spying, you name it. Even the googler in the submission thinks this is a sign of moral bankruptcy. But ten years from now when Google will have promoted through a few more shittiness levels this same generation of googlers will come out to say "this is not the company it was x years ago". And if I'm still alive maybe I'll tell them the same thing as today: they went morally bankrupt when they embraced doing the shit of the day, not when that finally became tame by comparison.
You’re not influencing anyone’s behavior nor meaningfully educating anyone. You’re basking in your feeling of moral superiority while you look down your nose.
Did I? And who would this person I attacked for leaving Google be? My comment's right up there, feel free to just copy/paste the "you're shit because you left Google" part. It's fine, don't scramble, that's not the point.
Good on them to leave, better late than never I guess. In you frenzy you ignored that the point almost everyone on this side of the fence makes, this thread included, isn't "bad that you left", it's "don't pretend it was morally better when you joined". Because that's how all these people like to wash the stench and paint themselves in a better light. When (generic) you started a decade ago you had to wade through what in 2017 was neck deep shit, looking for that paycheck. Googlers of today also have to go neck deep, just in what 2026 defines as shit [0].
> You’re not influencing anyone’s behavior nor meaningfully educating anyone. You’re basking in your feeling of moral superiority while you look down your nose.
My friend, it's just me, you, and the other googler here on a submission marked as dupe and already in the HN cemetery. I wasn't putting on a show for the world. I know you are personally invested in defending your choices at any cost lest your internal moral framework collapses. Your livelihood and self worth depend on that. And I know I'm not educating you because every one of the people who lies to themselves that "they did it better in their time" will still lie to themselves for that paycheck in the future. Every few years they have to explain how it wasn't like that at the beginning, when it totally was for anyone with eyes and not just a money counter. No rando on the internet will ever educate you differently.
And believe me when I tell you I will never feel morally superior to anyone working for Google and friends for two reasons. I've probably done worse in my life before I've done better, and bragging about being morally superior to a generic googler is a victory without glory.
[0] But I'll leave you with what I told googler #2 earlier:
> You know how $1 in 2017 is $1.37 in 2026? Well it's the same with character in a society that just degrades morality. What looks like an unacceptably high moral debt today in absolute figures is probably the exact same debt you took on a decade ago if you adjust for "moral inflation".
Why is it always that way?
Why is no one ever writing "It was always dirty there but I convinced myself that it wasn't until I couldn't do it anymore."
This “holier than thou” stuff is lame. Shaming people for having a job. You working for UNICEF?
Most of us have worked at a place that was either bad enough that we knew and didn't say anything or that we should have known was that bad. That isn't anything new. You do what you gotta do and all that.
What we're splitting hairs over is whether or not Google (and others) were already "too bad to work for" 10-15 years ago. And whether or not some people correctly identified this and others didn't / did but say that they didn't.
You're totally right -- very few of us have careers entirely at places like UNICEF. That's just reality. What isn't reality is the image some people like to portray that they didn't know or couldn't have reasonably known that the entity that they were a part of for so many years was no UNICEF.
“I’m shocked shocked to find out my pay cheque and stock money came from selling ads.”
“here are your winnings sir”
Noone cares, money talks.
They gave up trying to fight search spam and just permanently broke their search in like 2008.
Not long after that (IIRC) they started serving the same obnoxious ads as everyone else instead of their “nice” text-only ads, and stopped clearly marking inline ads in search results, so they could trick users and better-run their extortion racket (“pay us to advertise for your own company name or who knows where the people who are definitely trying to find your website might end up?”).
The notion that they were notably better in 2017 than today reads like some kind of joke.
We got to wave pitchforks and ask tough questions at TGIF for a while, and march in pride parades under a Google banner, and get fed nice treats and the like but under it all was still just an old fashioned railway monopoly.
A huge fire hose of cash that let it play in all sorts of domains and espouse some vaguely California Ideology liberal/libertarian ideals while doing it.
But the moment that monopoly came under threat and the moment they felt they no longer needed the costume, it came off.
Google never had a moral compass. Anybody who thought it did was naive.
The reality is that ads was 95% of the company revenue though, so it was all fantasy.
Working on promo committee I could see how different ads was
But there's also something about a PA being disconnected from its revenue sources to create a sense of unreality and distorted incentives.
Indeed, my impression was that people within the core Ad business were more adept at maintaining an air of integrity while doing substantively the opposite for the goal of optimizing revenue. I suspect that the closer you got to Google's "center of gravity" the more distorted your reality and motivations became.
Is it really not possible? Lots of corps are controlled by one or two people. They can decide what the company espouses, no?