SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday July 18 2021, @07:13AM (2 children)
I've seen a few people like him in the various companies I worked for. Overwhelmingly, those people put a lot of emphasis on their originality in the company. But the one thing that stood out is that they didn't work very well or very hard. Not saying that's the case with this guy particularly - I supposed if he managed to hold a job at the big G for a decade and a half, he must at least have been passable enough - but in my experience if I was Google, I wouldn't cry over his resignation.
Also, the respect I had for him when I read he left Google over ethical qualms evaporated the next minute when he stated he had fewer qualms working for Twitter. His joining Twitter makes the ethics bit seem like an excuse to leave Google on his own terms quite frankly.
(Score: 2) by dwilson on Sunday July 18 2021, @04:31PM
I didn't read it that way at all. Standing outside both companies with no personal knowledge of their inner-workings, I read it more as "As bad as we all 'know' Twitter to be, Google, in a sneaky, behind the scenes sort of way, is evidently much worse than we ever imagined".
When you see something that's such an obvious anomaly and doesn't 'click' with your view of the world (someone leaving a 'bad' company citing ethical concerns, to join a 'known-bad' company that obviously has ethical concerns), you just have to pause and ask yourself, "What do I think I know that just ain't so?"
- D
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @05:11PM
Eh, I don't really care about this individual's ethics stance since I never had put him on a pedestal to begin with. Fact is, he worked for Google for 15 years as a serf, and he got another serf's job at Twatter. That's a long time for being at one company in the Bay Area. Wonder if he experienced the pre-IPO Google culture. Betting that most of his gen-Z colleagues would have thought of him as a crotchety old man if they didn't know he drew comics.
I don't know what Twatter culture is like, but continuing this comic there may get the people in the military uniforms to order him to stop or face the sack.