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Google engineer who criticized company in viral comics on why he finally quit:
Former Google engineer Manu Cornet describes his time at Google in two phases. First, there were "glitches in wonderland." Then, there was "disillusionment."
Those two descriptions are actually the sub-headings for Cornet's two volumes of comics he has published about his former employer, which he called Goomics. Though Cornet was an engineer, he also spent 11 of his 14 years at Google drawing comics about employees, quirks, culture, and, eventually, larger societal and ethical issues facing the company and its workers. Some of those topics included Google contracts with government agencies like ICE, making a search engine for China's government that complies with censorship laws, and more.
Chronicling those issues allowed Cornet to reflect on his place at Google, and prompted him to make a change. Cornet recently quit, and has taken a new job (at Twitter, a company with whom he says he has fewer ethical qualms). He is now the latest big tech employee — including employees at Facebook and Amazon — to publicly resign from their positions in protest of the company's overall behavior.
"As the years passed by there were more and more things to have ethical qualms about that the company was doing at a higher level," Cornet said. "I had to look at the bigger picture and think that maybe I would be better elsewhere."
[...] Unfortunately, Cornet found plenty of fodder for less-buoying Goomics. What infuriates him most — and provides frequent inspiration for his comics — is what he views as hypocrisy at the company.
"The mismatch between what they say and what they really do is growing," Cornet said. "The thicker the gap is, the easier it is to point out that hypocrisy."
That extended to both major news items at the executive level, and changes within the company that affected employees. Google made headlines in 2019 for banning political discussion on employee message boards. But Cornet described one of their internal mottos as "bring your whole self to work." He sees a gap between messaging the company uses to attract employees, and the needs of shareholders.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Sunday July 18 2021, @02:11AM
I thought this one [goomics.net] was a pretty good representation of software development and tech companies in general. Everything isn't brittle, fragile, and slow because of all this shit we've accumulated, and we can prove that by grafting some more shit on top to make it faster! Work harder, people, you're just doing something wrong and it's not our decisions at fault!
This one about Google's icons [goomics.net] isn't anything new (seen similar jokes elsewhere) but it's interesting to see that people inside the company voiced similar concerns and complaints that were apparently ignored. The one about Google Reader [goomics.net] and this more general one [goomics.net] both have a similar vibe, and are basically more succinct versions of this rant about Google deprecation [medium.com] (with a side remark on Amazon's poor employee treatment). Though if you read through that whole thing, there's one part that says it better than anyone else has:
There are probably other decent ones mixed in, but I haven't been through most of them yet. Seems like they have the same problem as xkcd, where sometimes there's a good one but most either make the mistake of describing the joke to you (thus ruining the joke) or thinking they can leave out an attempt at humour because people "in the know" will think it's funny by virtue of the joke pandering to them directly. Xkcd basically made its entire reputation off of the whole "you don't need a punchline if you cater to a niche enough audience because they'll be impressed you referenced them" gimmick and a lot of these have the same feel.