I\u2019ve left Google again, this time by choice.<\/p>\r\n
As I\u2019ve previously posted<\/a>, 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\r\n Sometime around late January, it occurred to me that the work I was doing wasn\u2019t work that I was particularly interested in. But I didn\u2019t make any decisions about what to do about that until early February, when Google\u2019s Chief People Officer Fiona Cicconi sent out a memo<\/a> to employees about Google\u2019s DEI programs. (I was a contractor, so I didn\u2019t receive the memo; I just read about it in the news.) Among other things, the memo said \u201cin the future we will no longer have aspirational goals.\u201d A silly phrasing (as someone on social media noted, aren\u2019t 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\u2019t explicitly say that Google was ending other DEI-related programs, but I\u2019m guessing that it is.)<\/p>\r\n 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\u2014things like increasing the percentage of Black employees from 5.3% to 5.6%<\/a> over the course of a year. (I\u2019m linking to archive.org because I can\u2019t find that 2023 diversity report on Google\u2019s website any more.) That\u2019s not nothing, but it\u2019s also not a lot\u2014especially given that that year was about ten years into Google\u2019s DEI efforts. (Note that over 12% of the US population is Black; note, too, that Google spent years saying no to employees\u2019 requests that the company open offices in various US cities with high Black populations.)<\/p>\r\n And Google has made various big mistakes around DEI, too, especially around race issues. For example, as Dr. Timnit Gebru pointed out<\/a> 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.<\/p>\r\n And although I\u2019m focusing on Black employees in the above paragraphs, the company has had recurring DEI failures in various other ways as well; it\u2019s not like Google was ever a paragon of DEI.<\/p>\r\n 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 \u201ccommitted to making diversity, equity, and inclusion part of everything we do.\u201d Now they\u2019ve left that statement out of their latest SEC report, and I feel like they\u2019ve given up on even trying to do better.<\/p>\r\n I have no inside knowledge about the change\u2014I\u2019ve only seen the memo in news articles. I don\u2019t know what the real reason behind the change was. I suspect that it was at least partly in order to get in Trump\u2019s good graces, because Google has been facing various high-profile legal issues lately (such as, but not limited to, the DOJ\u2019s request to break up the company<\/a> in November), and I imagine that executives don\u2019t want to be any bigger of a target than they have to be. But if that is what they\u2019re thinking (again, this is entirely speculation on my part), I think that\u2019s 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\u2019t see any reason to think that Trump and Musk will stop with one demand. If Google obeys in advance the very first time there\u2019s a potential conflict (as I feel that they\u2019ve now done), I imagine that Trump and Musk will make further demands.<\/p>\r\n Google has stood up for what execs believed was right at various times in the past. They\u2019ve made multiple major decisions based on idealistic ideas, and they\u2019ve 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\u2019re deciding not to.<\/p>\r\n Google has also been leaning Trumpward in various other ways lately. For example:<\/p>\r\n