Thank you for posting this. I’m honestly a bit surprised that this genre of Google truth-telling is not more widespread, or perhaps I just haven’t seen it. Your experience of “the wall” between Latin America and the US is obviously also more poignant than ever. Seeing it described this way, in this context, kinda hit me over the head and is finally making me wonder if the US immigration/deportation mess will ultimately come to be seen as something equivalent to the Iron Curtain. Putting your experiences out there is worth it for that alone, at the very least.

It’s not that there haven’t been people out there who were willing to yank the curtain on Google, either; I just feel like it’s been more of a word-of-mouth thing in my experience. For instance, I knew a guy who was there during the Gmail launch. He made clear to me that “don’t be evil” was a slogan created by a later hire, and really had very little to do with the thinking of Page/Brin or later Schmidt, except that they found it to be convenient office propaganda. Thus, he ended up not really believing it at all by the time he was done.

Another good friend of mine was also a contractor in a technical department in Mountain View for a number of years. The US contractor experience (at least in that role) didn’t seem as firewalled off as you’re describing for the Brazilian contractors, but he was still under the twin guns of “your job is meant to be fully automated eventually, and your primary purpose is training the system towards that” and yearly contract renewals. And of course, it’s also where he and his eventual wife got infected with the Bitcoin prosperity gospel, a train they’re still riding to this day…

You think you can just post this and im not going to enjoy the rest of your blog??

this made me spit out my drink <3

É gente assim que me faz sentir orgulho do país 💚💛

Interesting, so Google was all bullshit even back in 2007, “don’t be evil” and “radical transparency” being façades that fooled everyone outside. I was finishing high school at the time and fully believed they were good guys, even if I didn’t like their Chrome browser.

Master let us eat right there with him, inside the big house.

100% Casa Grande e Senzala feels.

As for the business-casual laugh at slashing the “cost” of the Brazilian workforce, well, that just feels like the same old song the country has seen since it became a colony for USA commercial interests back in the early 1900s. I also thought one-dimensional villains didn’t exist and were stupidly unrealistic, until Bolsonaro was elected.

One thing that might interest you is reading The Dawn of Everything, if you haven’t already. One of the first chapters explains how the native americans of the Great Lakes region had excellent arguments against the “civilized” society of the europeans, and it was their arguments that started the enlightenment in yurop.

Looks like HN found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44200773

Holy shit the sheer amount of them saying they were confused by how you wrote your article has me rolling. These paragons of intelligence failing at basic reading comprehension.

Hopefully you find their jabbering about it as funny as I did.

Fun read. I remember when my coworker got hired by Twitter I was a bit jealous. Now in retrospect, I was the lucky one working at a web branding agency.

I really enjoyed reading this piece, thanks for sharing.

Your writing is so stylish and punchy that I found myself frequently highlighting or annotating sections, sentences or phrases (I try to annotate as I read when I find something that grabs me, as part of an ongoing quest to read more thoughtfully). I’m working on improving my own writing, so it’s always a useful exercise whenever I find writing that I enjoy so much that it helps me to understand my own taste in writing. I like your rhythm, in particular.

You caused me to think a lot about my own experience at one of the fancy UK universities (one that has a particularly strong Effective Altruist crowd). My time there radicalised me in the same way that your time at Google affected you. It’s quite striking to me that although growing up in poverty looks very different in the UK compared to in Brazil, there are aspects that are remarkably constant. For instance, how naïve young people are told that they are special in order to make us ignorant of (and complicit in) our own mistreatment and the oppression of those ostensibly beneath us.