I spent a decade at Google and I see it as rotten to the core. I used to think this was all Eric Schmidt but given the things that we have learned about in the

I spent a decade at Google and I see it as rotten to the core. I used to think this was all Eric Schmidt but given the things that we have learned about in the last 2 or 3 years I am now convinced that all the founders are to blame. There are a lot employees there that want to do the right thing, which is a why activism has been such a big deal for so long. The tax avoidance thing used to annoy me but that's nothing compared to everything else that has happened. Even Vic Gundotra's incompetent management of Google+ looks tame now. Maven was handled really poorly by Diane Greene who seemed to live in her own bubble during the whole thing. Urs Hölzle didn't fare much better in this regard. Moving all of SRE under cloud was a big mistake and it has backfired spectacularly because there's enough in SRE who are not happy with the whole "We want to work with the military" thing. The shift towards cloud was a huge change and a lot of us would have preferred if Cloud had become its own company. The high profile sexual harassment cases that we learned about did not do much to improve trust in Google execs. And the fact that the founders of the company just vanished into thin air speaks volumes about how bad things were. Kent Walker in particular represents everything that is wrong with Google. He protected David Drummond, he's been pushing for more work with the US military and is as morally bankrupt as it gets. At one TGIF he tried to justify forced arbitration because it was better for employees to not have to go to court and when asked why not let them choose what they wanted to do he just walked off the stage. That's Kent Walker for you. Heather Adkins is not much better than Kent. We all thought she could be trusted until two things happened: She actively sought out to destroy every copy of the Dragonfly investigation document that delroth@ had put together using searchable information and then claimed that the privacy review had proceeded as usual, which we all know it's not true given that Yonatan Zunger eventually left because of DragonFly. Another interesting character is Laszlo Bock which many people used to look up to. When Eric Schmidt was caught colluding with other companies all he had to say was: "We do not believe we did anything wrong." That kind of moral compass, or lack thereof, is what defines Google's DNA. Rachel Whetstone used to be loved here as well, for some mysterious reasons given her political background. Google execs have managed to alienate many high value employees who either left on their own accord or were retaliated against until they had no choice but to go: Erica Joy, Liz Fong-Jones, Laura Nolan, Kelly Ellis, Claire Stapleton, Chelsey Glasson, Meredith Whittaker, Laurence Berland, Rebecca Rivers and so on and so forth. This company could have been a profitable version of Xerox PARC. Instead it became SV's version of Monsanto. It is a great place to work at. You will meet lost of ridiculously smart people and learn a lot. So put Google on your resume, learn a lot, and then run far, run fast.