Google has been watering down and further downplaying their motto of “Don’t be evil” for several years now. It’s hard to build the panopticon of infrastructure ripe for the subjugation of all humanity and not believe you’re doing evil.
There is an interesting idea about adtech. Instead of search being reactive, it needs to actively look for information you care about and every morning give you the top 10 most important news. Why do we go to HN every morning? Why do others go to their FB page every day? We try to find new valuable information. This is a form of addiction, but a useful one. In other words, there are users on the left, with their preferences. There are various domains of information and news on the right. The job of Google v2 is to connect the two. In fact, I'd pay 150/month for such a service because it's this valuable. Obviously, I don't really believe that Google can do this, as it's become riddled with greed and its management doesnt look further than the next quarterly profits.
What’s changed is, people are slowly starting to see google for what it is.
I apologize in advance if the reason is personal and you do not want to share, but why did you stay at Google for such a short period of time?
They did not, and showed an unwillingness to consider fixing any behavior. They even pushed back on removing forced arbitration for harassment and abuse. They spent most of the time I was there retaliating against people who organized the protest, and people who reported harassment.
There was an ongoing double standard wrt to homophobic, racist, and abusive content on their many platforms. They were super good at marking lgbt content as adult only, and super good at flagging 2s of “copyrighted content” as worthy of removal from the platform. While absolutely opposing any restriction and racist, homophobic, transphobic, islamophobic, antisemitic, or just completely false content. Despite all such content violating their repeatedly reworded rules.
The weekly “talks” basically consisted of them saying that everything was ok, and they were “working on” the harassment and arbitration problems. While avoiding any discussion of the promotion of false and bigoted content, or claiming that all the studies of their algorithms were wrong and that they didn’t promote such content.
For those talks there were unending bigoted questions and comments on the question submission form. Questions related to any of the aforementioned issues were routinely skipped and/or vote bombed to oblivion by a clearly super invested group of employees who supported the actions of the company.
After a while I decided I couldn’t accept money that was “earned” through such atrocious behavior.
I am not saying other big tech companies don’t have problems, but my experience was that google was hell bent on protecting the abusers over the victims in every circumstance and context it came up.
I hope you're happier wherever you're working now.