A Google insider spills the tea on how the company forsook its founding ideals
A Google insider spills the tea on how the company forsook its founding ideals
一位谷歌内部人士揭露了该公司如何背弃其创始理念
In 2018, 20,000 Google employees worldwide made headlines when they staged a walkout to protest how the company had handled sexual misconduct allegations against key corporate executives, among other grievances. One of the organizers was Claire Stapleton, a communications specialist whose distinctive voice and ability to channel the corporate ethos had once earned her the internal moniker “Bard of Google.” 2018年，全球2万名谷歌员工举行罢工，抗议公司处理高管性骚扰指控的方式以及其他不满，这一事件登上了各大媒体头条。组织者之一是克莱尔·斯泰普尔顿（Claire Stapleton），她是一位传播专家，因其独特的表达能力和传达企业精神的天赋，曾被内部称为“谷歌吟游诗人”。
Six months later, a disillusioned Stapleton resigned, claiming she had been demoted during the most recent restructuring as retaliation for helping to spearhead the walkout. The story of how she went from enthusiastic cheerleader to proactive dissident, and the many lessons she learned along the way, are featured in her new book, Don’t Be Evil: Bad Bosses, Fake Promises, and My Escape from Big Tech—A Biting Memoir of Twelve Years Inside Google. 六个月后，心灰意冷的斯泰普尔顿辞职了。她声称自己在最近的重组中被降职，这是对她带头组织罢工的报复。她如何从一名热情的拥护者转变为积极的异见者，以及她在此过程中学到的许多教训，都被收录在她的新书《不作恶：糟糕的老板、虚假的承诺，以及我逃离大科技公司的经历——关于谷歌十二年的尖锐回忆录》中。
Stapleton didn’t set out to be a rabble-rouser. When she joined Google out of college in 2007, it was like “getting the golden ticket in Willy Wonka,” she told Ars. Awareness of her good fortune offset any initial uneasiness or skepticism, although Stapleton was sufficiently independent-minded not to move into what was then Google’s new corporate housing development in Mountain View, California. 斯泰普尔顿并非天生就是一个煽动者。她告诉《Ars Technica》，2007年大学毕业加入谷歌时，感觉就像“拿到了威利·旺卡的金奖券”。意识到自己如此幸运，抵消了她最初的任何不安或怀疑，尽管斯泰普尔顿足够独立，没有搬进当时谷歌在加州山景城新建的企业员工宿舍。
Stapleton was very good at her job, and she quickly moved up the ranks, playing a key role in shaping the company’s public image. Her first truly toxic experience came when she transferred to Google Creative Lab in New York, an environment she describes as “half utopian, half dystopian and unable to tell the difference.” She received little direction or guidance from management and found that much of the Lab’s work was simply advancing a kind of “cloying techno-optimism” she found uninspiring. 斯泰普尔顿工作非常出色，很快便晋升，在塑造公司公众形象方面发挥了关键作用。她第一次真正感到“有毒”的经历是在调往纽约的谷歌创意实验室（Google Creative Lab）之后，她形容那里的环境是“一半乌托邦，一半反乌托邦，让人分不清区别”。她几乎没有得到管理层的指导，并发现实验室的大部分工作只是在推行一种让她感到乏味的“令人作呕的技术乐观主义”。
Stapleton lasted about a year and ended up joining the marketing team at YouTube. But the cultural changes and her own shifting priorities and growing disquiet culminated in the 2018 walkout and Stapleton leaving the company she once championed. 斯泰普尔顿在那里待了大约一年，最终加入了YouTube的营销团队。但文化变革、她个人优先事项的转变以及日益增长的不安，最终导致了2018年的罢工，以及斯泰普尔顿离开她曾经拥护的公司。
Stapleton wrote an essay for Elle magazine shortly after that she describes as “a psychic attempt at wrapping up my time” at Google, to help process her complicated feelings about her former employer. “It was such an abrupt and kind of traumatic ending after such a long time at the company,” she said. “And a lot of my experience was really positive.” 此后不久，斯泰普尔顿为《Elle》杂志写了一篇文章，她将其描述为“在心理上试图为我在谷歌的时光画上句号”，以帮助处理她对前雇主的复杂情绪。“在公司待了这么久之后，这是一个非常突然且带有创伤性的结局，”她说，“而且我大部分的经历其实是非常积极的。”
The essay garnered enough attention to draw the interest of book agents, but at the time, Stapleton wasn’t interested in writing a book, feeling that she didn’t really have much more to say. Instead, she started a workplace advice column and did freelance marketing communications for a venture capital firm founded by another former Googler, Bill Maris. 这篇文章引起了足够的关注，吸引了图书经纪人的兴趣，但当时斯泰普尔顿对写书并不感兴趣，觉得没什么可说的了。相反，她开始撰写职场建议专栏，并为另一位前谷歌员工比尔·马里斯（Bill Maris）创立的风险投资公司从事自由职业的营销传播工作。
“There were a lot of ex-Googlers there, and we talked a lot about our experiences,” Stapleton said. At some point, she started wondering if they had unwittingly been in a cult, she said. “The way we were processing the separation was a bit like that,” she said. “It’s bigger than a job. It’s like an identity. It’s very emotional and psychological. It got me thinking. How did we, as an industry, end up with such whiplash from our experience of working at these companies? Big Tech in general has gone from being incredibly admired, like Google, to being parables of the perils and pitfalls of large corporations, corporate overreach, and having way too much power and personal data.” “那里有很多前谷歌员工，我们经常谈论各自的经历，”斯泰普尔顿说。在某个时刻，她开始怀疑他们是否在不知不觉中加入了一个邪教组织。“我们处理离职的方式有点像那样，”她说，“这不仅仅是一份工作，更像是一种身份认同。它非常感性和心理化。这让我开始思考：作为一个行业，我们是如何在这些公司的经历中感到如此巨大的落差的？整个大科技公司已经从像谷歌那样令人无比钦佩，变成了大型企业危险和陷阱、企业越权以及拥有过多权力和个人数据的代名词。”
A turning point
转折点
What happened to change a company that once famously embraced the altruistic motto “Don’t be evil”? Stapleton identifies one major turning point: When Larry Page replaced Eric Schmidt as CEO in 2011. Her job in communications gave her a unique inside perspective on the impact of that critical transition on Google’s corporate culture. 是什么改变了一家曾经以利他主义座右铭“不作恶”（Don’t be evil）而闻名的公司？斯泰普尔顿指出了一个主要的转折点：2011年拉里·佩奇（Larry Page）接替埃里克·施密特（Eric Schmidt）出任首席执行官。她在传播部门的工作使她能够从独特的内部视角观察到这一关键转型对谷歌企业文化的影响。
“Everyone would have said that Eric was the corporate guy and Larry Page was the pure tech guy,” said Stapleton. “Larry had incredibly lofty rhetoric about the company’s ambitions and his hopes that it would solve all the world’s problems.” “每个人都会说埃里克是企业型人才，而拉里·佩奇是纯粹的技术型人才，”斯泰普尔顿说，“拉里对公司的雄心壮志有着极其崇高的言论，并希望它能解决世界上所有的问题。”
What actually happened was a significant shift in Google’s organizational structure, with every executive being given their own communications team. The marketing department ballooned. “I think it created a culture that was more corporate—the opposite of what Larry said he wanted to happen,” said Stapleton. “The company became much more complex and inefficient. The irony was Larry was calling this out: ‘We’re going to become sclerotic, and we’re going to stop innovating if the company gets too bloated.’ But that’s exactly what happened: Google became a bloated Borg. And all of a sudden, Google wanted to do cool branding, like Apple.” 实际上发生的是谷歌组织结构的重大转变，每位高管都拥有了自己的传播团队。营销部门迅速膨胀。“我认为这创造了一种更具企业气息的文化——这与拉里所说的他想要的结果恰恰相反，”斯泰普尔顿说，“公司变得更加复杂和低效。讽刺的是，拉里曾指出这一点：‘如果公司变得太臃肿，我们将变得僵化，停止创新。’但事实正是如此：谷歌变成了一个臃肿的博格人（Borg）。突然之间，谷歌想要像苹果一样做酷炫的品牌推广。”
That led to a number of failed innovations as leadership sought to lock onto the next big thing. Longtime consumers of technology are no doubt familiar with the many missteps. Google Glass? The few who embraced it were ridiculed as “Glass-holes.” Google+? Stapleton sees that as a prime example of chasing the competition rather than innovating. (I was an early adopter and found it significantly inferior to the other social media options available at the time.) The one good product that was genuinely useful from that era was Google Reader—and the company killed it to focus on Google+ and to launch Google X. 这导致了一系列创新失败，因为领导层试图锁定下一个大事件。长期的科技消费者无疑对这些失误很熟悉。谷歌眼镜（Google Glass）？少数接受它的人被嘲笑为“眼镜混蛋”（Glass-holes）。Google+？斯泰普尔顿认为这是追逐竞争对手而非创新的典型例子。（我曾是早期采用者，发现它明显不如当时其他可用的社交媒体选项。）那个时代唯一真正有用的好产品是Google Reader——但公司为了专注于Google+和推出Google X而将其砍掉了。
Meanwhile, the storied worker-friendly corporate culture was proving to be anything but. “Radical accountability” in practice actually meant that individual workers absorbed blame for any issues, and questioning authority was dismissed as “whining.” The place where empathy was touted as “king” now viewed it as a weakness, Stapleton writes. Formally appealing to Human Resources about workplace issues resulted in gaslighting, Stapleton says, and what she calls “PR jujitsu,” professing support. 与此同时，传说中对员工友好的企业文化被证明并非如此。“激进的问责制”在实践中实际上意味着个人员工要为任何问题承担责任，而质疑权威则被斥为“发牢骚”。斯泰普尔顿写道，这个曾经将同理心视为“王道”的地方，现在却将其视为一种弱点。斯泰普尔顿说，正式向人力资源部门申诉职场问题会导致煤气灯效应（gaslighting），以及她所说的“公关柔术”，即口头上表示支持。