> in 2023, Google laid off some twelve thousand people, representing around six per cent of its workforce, and, in the years that followed, an estimated four hundred thousand jobs were eliminated across tech

This right here, ooh you're so close! Those 400k people were fired because white collar workers, as a bloc, became powerful, and started making demands of management, demands like "you should do something about social inequality." During the height of the pandemic, most of that energy was focused on race. And those demands were met! C-suite executives and board members were forced by their white collar employees to implement DEI initiatives at work, put pronouns in their email signatures, have complex conversations about social power and race and gender at company all-hands. These same people are now sitting behind Donald Trump at his inauguration.

Did they do those DEI things in 2021 because they wanted to, or because they had to? And if they had to, what power compelled them? Remember: these people gave 90 million dollars to someone who coerced one of his own employees to do oral sex on him in a hotel room!

The way I read this is that a company will sacrifice everything (in this case, incredible corporate culture) to maintain the balance of power between management and employee. As soon as I started reading about internal organizing, I knew exactly where this story was going to end.

Your job description re-written at the drop of a hat, sudden re-org and alienation from coworkers, feeling like an interloper at your own job, sudden gaslighting - that is what real power looks like. The only reason she was not immediately fired is because of actual labor laws, which H.R. knows inside and out. Were those laws not on the books every single one of those googler moms in that group chat would be fired within 24 hours. They probably were all pushed out in a manner exactly like Claire within the span of a few months. With a paper trail to CYA in case of a suit.

Google, Apple, Amazon, MS etc don't seem to be the default place for top EECS grads anymore. Maybe middling candidates and H1b prisoners but 4.0 GPA grads with personal projects end up at NVIDIA, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. And Meta, because they still pay insane.

James Damore won, we're living in his world. Or the Gamergate world. It makes me wonder why though, it's not as if half the country and many of the engineers don't still have the same progressive values. Honestly I think it's just the power of the rich men with all the money. SWE's labor power has been slipping away ever since Elon's "let that sink in" and this will only continue to accelerate.

> One recounted a tragicomic anecdote from a T.G.I.F. meeting on International Women’s Day, when a Googler had asked Larry and Sergey to name some of their personal female heroes.

..and they couldn’t just say “Grace Hopper”? These people have used computers before, right?

I'm struck at how brutal it is to be a woman in even pseudo-progressive tech spaces at times. How talking the talk does nothing if HR and leadership quickly and quietly work to undermine at all and make life hell. The HR line of "we investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing" always feels surreal.

> “We need moon shots,” Larry would say, big, world-­changing ideas and initiatives, to make employees excited about innovating again. (Curing cancer wasn’t necessarily a moon shot, he once suggested, since it would only extend the average human life span by about three years.)

And yet I'd much prefer to have one kid with cancer be saved and allowed to live an average lifespan than to have thousands of old rich people extend their extractive existences for decades.

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