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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: 3, Informative) by Socrastotle on Sunday July 18 2021, @01:27PM (1 child)
It's somewhat tiresome seeing rhetoric like this which generally implies all bad decisions are caused by some outsiders of companies driven only by profit, enrichment, and so on. In some cases that is certainly true, but in many it is not. And this is one of those cases.
Google has tiered stock. The stock people buy on the market has 1/10th the voting power of the primarily insider owned class B stock. As a result of this arrangement, Page owns 25.9% [businessinsider.com] of the voting power at Google, and Brin owns 25.1%. With a majority of voting power, the desires and interests of outside shareholders are irrelevant. Google (and Alphabet) is, for all intents and purposes, a private company owned by Brin and Page.
The same is also true of companies like Facebook except there Zuckerberg alone controls a majority share. That made the whole 'shareholder vote to oust Zuckerberg as chairman' was mostly just a largescale demonstration of ignorance and absurdity. Literally 100% of shareholders could vote to oust Zuckerberg, and he could laugh it off.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 20 2021, @03:38PM
good comment, thanks