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I worked for Google in 2012 and 2013. I've never really written about my experience there and why I left. But I was inspired to do so by a conversation several days ago. The summary is that I could not, as a self-respecting Socialist, work for a place where the difference between haves and have-nots was so obvious.
It's worth telling the backstory. The other day, I stumbled into a conversation on the Fediverse about someone who is fairly well-known in tech circles: Justine Tunney. The person who started the thread described her as "toxic", and when asked to clarify, gave some examples, including this choice tidbit from her Wikipedia page:
In March 2014, Tunney petitioned the US government on We the People to hold a referendum asking for support to retire all government employees with full pensions, transfer administrative authority to the technology industry, and appoint the executive chairman of Google Eric Schmidt as CEO of America.
That made me curious, so I went and did some digging. I turned up two articles about her involvement with Occupy Wall Street: this article from The Daily Beast and this article from The Nation.
Essentially, Tunney hijacked the Occupy twitter feed and tried to position herself as some kind of leader of the leaderless movement. She also dissed David Graeber, the now-deceased Anarchist intellectual and author, whom I deeply respect. Wow, this person sure does have one hell of an ego. The Daily Beast article also contained this tasty morsel:
Justine Tunney works for Google. Every day that she feels like it, Tunney goes to a playgroundlike office in Chelsea in Manhattan and eats her meals from the free gourmet rooftop cafeteria. She does her job and little else. On the beach in Puerto Rico this summer, at the wedding of two fellow Occupy veterans, she was working so hard on an algorithm designed to improve cloud computing that she lost track of time and got a sunburn.
“They basically bought my soul,” she says. But Tunney doesn’t seem to mind. “Google is the one company I don’t hate. I think Google is actually doing things that are making the world a better place.”
By now, I'm triggered. I used to work for Google! How does someone who wants to replace the elected government with a technocratic CEO and worships a behemoth with painfully sharp class distinctions manage to consider themself any kind of democratic socialist? That's when I decided to write about my own experience in some depth.
Google has a very sharply delineated two-tier work force. There are the engineers and other highly intellectual sorts on top. I was in that group when I worked there, though I was on the low rungs of the ladder. Justine Tunney is certainly in this class and quite successful. At the bottom, there is everyone else: the people who make the wheels turn and serve the needs of the tech nobility. It reminded me of The Cloud Minders, an episode of the original Star Trek.
The perks of Google engineers are pretty widely known. There is the free food, all of the toys, massages, even laundry service. Aaron Swartz, another person I really respect, described the environment as infantilizing when he visited Google headquarters.
I love telling this story about the coffee machine. One day, I was working in my cubicle when my teammates mentioned that they were going over to the Android building to get coffee. They asked me if I wanted to come with, so I said "sure, why not." "But what's so special about the Android building, other than that the Android OS is developed there?" "It has a $15000 coffee machine!" I went, and I had a cup of coffee. And you know what? I honestly couldn't tell you the difference between that cup of coffee and coffee that I have had from some convenience stores.
I like talking to people and hearing their stories. I'm a natural-born listener, and I probably would have excelled in psychology or the ministry, though I doubt there are many churches seeking a minister whose every third word is fuck and who is pervy. As for psychology, I am sure that no one wants a shrink who will tell them that life is indeed kind of pointless and at times terrible. Anyway, I met people from the servant class. I treated them with warmth and humanity (I hope), and I listened to them.
I remember one woman who worked in one of the cafeterias, preparing all of that free food that Google was famous for. She went to work early and left late, every day. There was no playground-like office for this woman, and in fact, most of her work was done on her feet. She was also paid substantially less than even the most junior of Google's engineering staff. She always sounded very fatigued when I talked with her.
That's when I realized it. I was working in a medieval hellhole, complete with nobles and serfs. The only thing that was missing was droit du seigneur, AKA jus primae noctis. That's when I decided that I could not work there in good conscience as a self-respecting socialist.