Mourning Google

On March 15, 2010, I started a new job at Google. The fourteen years since that day feel like a century. The title of my announcement was Now A No-Evil Zone and, OK, I can hear the laughing from ten timezones away. I tried, then, to be restrained, but there are hardly words to describe how happy and excited I was. I had escaped from the accretion disk the former Sun Microsystems was forming around Oracle, that blackest of holes. And Google, in 2010, was the coolest place in the world to work.

Let me quote myself from a little bit further into that piece, on the subject of Google: I'm sure that tendrils of stupidity and evil are even now finding interstitial breeding grounds whence they will emerge to cause grief." Well, yeah.

This is in my mind these days as I'm on a retired-Googlers mailing list where the current round of layoffs is under discussion and, well, it really seems like the joy has well and truly departed the Googleplex.

Tim Bray

The honeymoon phase with the technology sector is well and long over, and we're deep into an unhappy, unpleasant, joyless marriage now - and the fault lies entirely with the big technology companies themselves. They promised they'd change the world for the better, but they lied - and still lie - about the price.