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I’ve left Google again, this time by choice.

As I’ve previously posted, I took a contract tech writing position at Google in November, working on documentation for the internal Core Data group. (I was an employee of a contract agency, doing work for Google via that agency.) It wasn’t an ideal job for me in various ways, but it was okay as jobs go. And it let me work entirely from home, and it provided some income and some benefits.

Sometime around late January, it occurred to me that the work I was doing wasn’t work that I was particularly interested in. But I didn’t make any decisions about what to do about that until early February, when Google’s Chief People Officer Fiona Cicconi sent out a memo to employees about Google’s DEI programs. (I was a contractor, so I didn’t receive the memo; I just read about it in the news.) Among other things, the memo said “in the future we will no longer have aspirational goals.” A silly phrasing (as someone on social media noted, aren’t all goals aspirational?), but a serious meaning: it presumably specifically referred to hiring and promotion goals that aspired to improve equity for members of underrepresented groups. (And the memo didn’t explicitly say that Google was ending other DEI-related programs, but I’m guessing that it is.)

Some background: Google has been trying for many years to increase racial diversity among its employees. It has generally made only tiny incremental progress over time—things like increasing the percentage of Black employees from 5.3% to 5.6% over the course of a year. (I’m linking to archive.org because I can’t find that 2023 diversity report on Google’s website any more.) That’s not nothing, but it’s also not a lot—especially given that that year was about ten years into Google’s DEI efforts. (Note that over 12% of the US population is Black; note, too, that Google spent years saying no to employees’ requests that the company open offices in various US cities with high Black populations.)

And Google has made various big mistakes around DEI, too, especially around race issues. For example, as Dr. Timnit Gebru pointed out after she was fired in late 2020, Google tends to ask Black employees how to improve things, then ignore what the employees tell them. Also, the company then sometimes fires those employees if they express unhappiness about being ignored.

And although I’m focusing on Black employees in the above paragraphs, the company has had recurring DEI failures in various other ways as well; it’s not like Google was ever a paragon of DEI.

But at least the company was previously, in some small ways, trying to do better, and it had made an explicit statement in its SEC reports that it was “committed to making diversity, equity, and inclusion part of everything we do.” Now they’ve left that statement out of their latest SEC report, and I feel like they’ve given up on even trying to do better.

I have no inside knowledge about the change—I’ve only seen the memo in news articles. I don’t know what the real reason behind the change was. I suspect that it was at least partly in order to get in Trump’s good graces, because Google has been facing various high-profile legal issues lately (such as, but not limited to, the DOJ’s request to break up the company in November), and I imagine that executives don’t want to be any bigger of a target than they have to be. But if that is what they’re thinking (again, this is entirely speculation on my part), I think that’s a hugely misguided approach. Google has a phenomenal amount of money. The company supposedly has a core value of trying to make the world a better place. If anyone can stand up to Trump and Musk, Google can. And as always with this kind of thing, I don’t see any reason to think that Trump and Musk will stop with one demand. If Google obeys in advance the very first time there’s a potential conflict (as I feel that they’ve now done), I imagine that Trump and Musk will make further demands.

Google has stood up for what execs believed was right at various times in the past. They’ve made multiple major decisions based on idealistic ideas, and they’ve gone to court multiple times to defend such ideas. They know approximately how to do the right thing (even though they sometimes fail to do it). But in this instance, they’re deciding not to.

Google has also been leaning Trumpward in various other ways lately. For example:

• Just before I accepted the contract, just after the election, Sundar (Google’s CEO) tweeted congratulations to Trump, along with an electoral map showing which states Trump had won. The congratulations were unnecessary; the electoral map was ridiculously unnecessary. I considered not taking the job at that point, but my momentum was too strong—I had just spent a week deciding to take it—so I went ahead with the job.
• Sundar attended Trump’s inauguration, along with other big tech CEOs. He didn’t have to do that.
• Google removed Black History Month and Pride Month, among other events, from its calendar. My understanding is that it did this in 2024, on the grounds that keeping track of country-specific holidays/events manually was too complicated for a poor little under-resourced company like Google, so they outsourced their calendar choices to a small Scandinavian company. Google didn’t have to do that. There are other sources of calendars they could have used, or they could have decided that DEI was enough of a priority for the company to put some resources of their own into it.
• Google Maps changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. Here again, Google is using data acquired from an official source; they didn’t make the active choice to change that name. But they do choose which official sources to rely on. The question of what names to use on maps is a hugely complicated and controversial issue—but Google has successfully navigated that issue in the past, without just passively going along with whatever name a particular government decides to use.

So even early on in my contract, I was already pretty uncomfortable with the whole Google-drifting-to-the-right thing. (And with lots of other things Google has done in the past five years or so—handling labor issues badly, going all in on AI, laying off 12,000 people, providing resources to the Israeli government, refusing to stand against caste discrimination, etc.) But that “aspirational goals” memo was the last straw for me.

…I don’t want to paint myself as being entirely noble here. It’s quite possible that if I had been otherwise loving my job, the company backing away from DEI wouldn’t have been quite enough to get me to leave, as the many deeply problematic things Google has done in the past didn’t get me to leave.

But the DEI reversal on top of everything else was enough.

(I made the decision to leave sometime around mid-February, but I stuck around for a couple more weeks, to reach a good stopping point on a project. But I was not doing my best or fastest work during that time, or for a while before that; I was feeling distracted and overwhelmed by the general state of the world. On Wednesday, a couple days before I had planned to give notice, the Google manager who I reported to complained to the contract agency that I wasn’t performing up to expectations. My manager at the contract agency was great about it—he started with the assumption that I was doing fine and it was just a communication issue—but I had to admit that the Google manager’s complaint was more or less valid. So I gave two weeks’ notice a couple days earlier than I had intended to. As I had expected, Google then told me that I was done—it said my last day would be Friday. Still, it was nice this time around to get to leave more or less on my own terms.)

When I decided to take this job, a friend suggested that I give some thought to what my red lines would be—what would be enough to get me to leave. I don’t like to think in those terms; figuring out red lines in advance isn’t generally a useful paradigm for me. But in this case, I’m glad that I nonetheless recognized my red line when it happened.

…I should also note that I still have a lot of Google stock (I divested from Tesla late last year, but haven’t yet divested from Google or Amazon), and I still like and use Google products. I still think the company does some good and valuable things, at least for now.

But it’s no longer a place where I’m willing to work.