Text settings Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only Learn more Minimize to nav In 2018, 20,000 Google employees worldwide made headlines when they staged a walkout to protest how the company had handled sexual misconduct allegations against key corporate executives, among other grievances. One of the organizers was Claire Stapleton, a communications specialist whose distinctive voice and ability to channel the corporate ethos had once earned her the internal moniker “Bard of Google.”
Six months later, a disillusioned Stapleton resigned, claiming she had been demoted during the most recent restructuring as retaliation for helping to spearhead the walkout. The story of how she went from enthusiastic cheerleader to proactive dissident, and the many lessons she learned along the way, are featured in her new book, Don’t Be Evil: Bad Bosses, Fake Promises, and My Escape from Big Tech—A Biting Memoir of Twelve Years Inside Google.
Stapleton didn’t set out to be a rabble-rouser. When she joined Google out of college in 2007, it was like “getting the golden ticket in Willy Wonka,” she told Ars. Awareness of her good fortune offset any initial uneasiness or skepticism, although Stapleton was sufficiently independent-minded not to move into what was then Google’s new corporate housing development in Mountain View, California. Stapleton was very good at her job, and she quickly moved up the ranks, playing a key role in shaping the company’s public image.
Her first truly toxic experience came when she transferred to Google Creative Lab in New York, an environment she describes as “half utopian, half dystopian and unable to tell the difference.” She received little direction or guidance from management and found that much of the Lab’s work was simply advancing a kind of “cloying techno-optimism” she found uninspiring. Stapleton lasted about a year and ended up joining the marketing team at YouTube. But the cultural changes and her own shifting priorities and growing disquiet culminated in the 2018 walkout and Stapleton leaving the company she once championed.
Stapleton wrote an essay for Elle magazine shortly after that she describes as “a psychic attempt at wrapping up my time” at Google, to help process her complicated feelings about her former employer. “It was such an abrupt and kind of traumatic ending after such a long time at the company,” she said. “And a lot of my experience was really positive.” The essay garnered enough attention to draw the interest of book agents, but at the time, Stapleton wasn’t interested in writing a book, feeling that she didn’t really have much more to say. Instead, she started a workplace advice column and did freelance marketing communications for a venture capital firm founded by another former Googler, Bill Maris.
“There were a lot of ex-Googlers there, and we talked a lot about our experiences,” Stapleton said. At some point, she started wondering if they had unwittingly been in a cult, she said.
“The way we were processing the separation was a bit like that,” she said. “It’s bigger than a job. It’s like an identity. It’s very emotional and psychological. It got me thinking. How did we, as an industry, end up with such whiplash from our experience of working at these companies? Big Tech in general has gone from being incredibly admired, like Google, to being parables of the perils and pitfalls of large corporations, corporate overreach, and having way too much power and personal data.”
William Morrow Courtesy William Morrow Courtesy William Morrow William Morrow Courtesy William Morrow What happened to change a company that once famously embraced the altruistic motto “Don’t be evil”? Stapleton identifies one major turning point: When Larry Page replaced Eric Schmidt as CEO in 2011. Her job in communications gave her a unique inside perspective on the impact of that critical transition on Google’s corporate culture. “Everyone would have said that Eric was the corporate guy and Larry Page was the pure tech guy,” said Stapleton. “Larry had incredibly lofty rhetoric about the company’s ambitions and his hopes that it would solve all the world’s problems.”
What actually happened was a significant shift in Google’s organizational structure, with every executive being given their own communications team. The marketing department ballooned. “I think it created a culture that was more corporate—the opposite of what Larry said he wanted to happen,” said Stapleton. “The company became much more complex and inefficient. The irony was Larry was calling this out: ‘We’re going to become sclerotic, and we’re going to stop innovating if the company gets too bloated.’ But that’s exactly what happened: Google became a bloated Borg. And all of a sudden, Google wanted to do cool branding, like Apple.”
That led to a number of failed innovations as leadership sought to lock onto the next big thing. Longtime consumers of technology are no doubt familiar with the many missteps. Google Glass? The few who embraced it were ridiculed as “Glass-holes.” Google+? Stapleton sees that as a prime example of chasing the competition rather than innovating. (I was an early adopter and found it significantly inferior to the other social media options available at the time.) The one good product that was genuinely useful from that era was Google Reader—and the company killed it to focus on Google+ and to launch Google X.
Meanwhile, the storied worker-friendly corporate culture was proving to be anything but. “Radical accountability” in practice actually meant that individual workers absorbed blame for any issues, and questioning authority was dismissed as “whining.” The place where empathy was touted as “king” now viewed it as a weakness, Stapleton writes. Formally appealing to Human Resources about workplace issues resulted in gaslighting, Stapleton says, and what she calls “PR jujitsu,” professing support while never doing anything concrete to resolve the conflict.
“You point out a problem, you become the problem,” Stapleton said.
Stapleton cites a book by the former head of Google’s HR, Laszlo Bock, entitled Work Rules, as being particularly insightful about these dynamics. “He talks about how organizations can get out of control,” she said. “If you let managers have too much power over people, it’s corrupting, and so you have to constrain that power however you can, and that takes a strong HR function. But as my story shows, the managers had gotten control and HR had no ability to rein them in.”
Stapleton also witnessed the opportunistic shift in the tech industry’s political leanings in recent years. “I think we now all have a greater understanding that everyone’s just currying favor and power, and it’s all a big club at the top and we’re not in it,” said Stapleton. “People have broadly become disillusioned. It’s quite bipartisan to be skeptical of Big Tech. The net effect on the average tech worker is that people no longer are so hornswoggled into the image that we’re the good guys, part of something that’s changing society on the whole for good. Workers being so bought in gave these companies a kind of purchase. We haven’t figured out how to push back yet. We haven’t figured out how to solve for the excesses in tech culture. But it seems like there are some interesting sprigs of green. “
Perhaps the most moving sections of the book are those that address Stapleton’s close relationship with her older brother, Scott, a vital sounding board whose skepticism about corporate double-speak gave Stapleton a much-needed outlet for her occasional doubts. His tragic, sudden death in a motorcycle accident in Turkey in 2008 shattered her world.
A grief-stricken Stapleton threw herself into her work—“performing functionality to deal with grief”—and Google’s culture encouraged that single-minded avoidance. She admits that she never fully processed her grief at the time. That made it challenging to write about his death and the aftermath in Don’t Be Evil. Initial feedback from test readers on her first draft was largely positive, but several noted that the sections about her brother came off as being very arms-length and less personal in tone, unlike the rest of the book. “I was just describing what happened because at the time, I really couldn’t go there,” Stapleton said.
She ended up revising those sections while staying with her parents in Santa Barbara and going through Scott’s old emails and G-chats. “I just sobbed the entire time,” she said. “Because even though it’s been 18 years, it still feels fresh. There’s still this huge hole. But in a way, it brought him back to life a little bit. The waves of grief still come back to me now and then, but I feel like now I can welcome them a bit more because I’m also grateful to have had this wonderful sibling relationship.”
