Why I'm Forced to Say Farewell: Google Management Has Lost Its Moral Compass
docs.google.com
docs.google.com
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"
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.
...And finally we know that this is a love letter to get themselves hired at Anthropic. I think you might need more than that honestly.
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.
Pretty much any Googler who leaves will be leaving lots of money on the table.
This is because they are usually 3/4 year grants, so 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%)
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.
"Security" vs Openness
> “make things so secure that we ourselves can’t break them, whether the device costs $1000 or $100, or the user is a celebrity or a refugee“
That can mean different things to different people in different contexts. Could easily mean building a software platform with security features that banks will build their apps to require.
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
This needs a "2004" date.
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.
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.
Seems like a much better bet for my values, at least.
European companies exist to extract profit without regard to decency, same as American companies. BP filling up the Gulf of Mexico with oil? European. Wirecard's fraud? European. HSBC money laundering? European. Dieselgate? European.
I'm sure I could find more.
Hell, Sergey Brin was born in Moscow and raised by Soviet parents.
The US was founded mainly as an experiment in European mercantile colonialism. This is just a continuation of that.
The downside of there not being any American exceptionalism is that everything you see in America is not an exception.
Systemically and structurally? Already on its way there.
Excessive moral policing results in strangling regulations, which is exactly what Europe is facing right now. The opposite of innovation.
Good luck in your endeavors.
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.
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. It's not possible for a corporate entity to have one.
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?
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. Litterally anyone with internet can access and use the same youtube and office suite that a billionaire on his yacht is using (perhaps the billionaire has yt premium though).
And here we are, 25 years later, and google is considered one of the most evil and malicious corporations, despite most people never paying them anything (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 openness, and prices to align with first world upper class, still being largely beloved.
Your comment in itself is deeply ironic.
Google's founders never had a moral compass, at least not one that ethical people would understand
Perhaps some employees thought they could make one up. It didn't last long
And it worked --- for a while. Until the path became impossible to deny.
I'm sorry, but this is very hard to believe. I get 9 years is a lot of time, but Google has been awful for much longer thant that. In fact, 2018 was the year the motto was removed from the handbook, which certainly indicates it wasn't anything like a "North Star":
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-dont-be-evil/2540...
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
Why make this about trump and politics. It’s just a job.
They go on to explain exactly why in the fifth paragraph.
> It’s just a job.
Nobody operates in a vacuum.
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.
No it wasn’t.
I wish people will read "Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet" by Yasha Levine and stop feigning ignorance. I even expect that minimal level of awareness about the real business culture and inherent nature of these internet mega-corps for people in top positions.
"Don't Be Evil" is a psychological machination for people working at google to ease their life in work related cognitive dissonance and marketing speak to the rest of us.
If I were an angel (actual, not fallen yet) I will not tell my self: "Don’t Be Evil". My motto will be "keep being holy" or "be holier" or something that keep me in my angelic state or better.
So even the “Don’t Be Evil” motto by itself already spill the beans!
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?).
Very convenient to suddenly decide it's enough after collecting a massive paycheck for 10 years.
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)
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 changed for the worse in some ways" and the overwhelming majority of posts are these weirdos attacking them for why didn't you specifically say the opinion that I want, and why didn't you say 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.
Your response to that is "my personal opinion is canonical, your specific examples to the contrary don't matter, and I'm going to go ahead and imply you're bad for working there or saying anything."
I'm not going to spend more time here. I don't think you and these others are commenting in good faith.
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."
Because people don't want to admit "I made a mistake."
That's why.
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.
Maaaaaybe when Dunbar's lower number was 13, the people working did. When Dunbar's 150 was hit, sure they had " do no evil" but that was just marketing spiel.
When they bought Doubleclick, that coffin was welded shut and thrown in the ocean. Only the rubes believed the adtech marketing shit.
This is par for the course.
If it sounds like hypocrisy, why? They gained the freedom from the grind and would have stayed if they believed in what they were doing.
Bruh.
Also, Google, later: No comment.
Like a slap in the face from a psychopath. It's not about "good", "bad", "honest", etc. It's literally the world EVIL that they no longer want to swear off. Astronomically monumentally fucked up psycho shit.
Dictionary:
*EVIL*
: morally reprehensible : sinful, wicked
an evil impulse
an evil tyrant
evil deeds
the evil institution of slavery
: arising from actual or imputed bad character or conduct
a person of evil reputation
There’s nothing more useless than a multi-millionaire “finally” taking a moral stand on something. I guarantee that this same person without the money would not have posted this ridiculous manifesto declaring his moral piety.
If he donates all his wealth away because it was made “immorally” then I will change my stance. We both know he won’t and that’s how we know his courage is really just because he’s rich.