Technology

I took a voluntary layoff from Google last year. It's probably self-rationalizing, but IMO I had an excellent role at the company for the last 5 years of my time. I helped design a system that locks down and redacts server logs across many of Google's services. Only on-call engineers with an emergency backed by a post mortem review could get temporary access to original server logs. The system doesn't delete all data but it can enforce codified contracts, country/state regulations, make certain privacy gurantees, and surface problems for auditing.

Google has made and continues to make poor business decisions, but from my experience they are one of the best big companies managing user privacy. I can't speak for all of Google's business units (well I can't speak for the company at all, heh), but the privacy zeitgeist says the opposite which I've found misleading, but could never really speak to while being employed.

User data is taken extremely seriously at Google, and I worked with hundreds of people that would gladly get fired if asked to do anything unethical with user data. They audit and lock down access, build systems for guaranteeing anonymization (systems in place long before I worked there), report compliance, and most importantly they work independently from the employees that use the data. Every business unit had committees to consult and review privacy specifically. I was also an expert consultant for several privacy incidents and the number of people involved and the seriousness taken was personally impressive for even minor incidents.

IMO it's still one of the best companies to work for, but there's many legitimate reasons to cut them out. My opinion switched when Google had their first layoff in January 2023. The company had issues (I am sure there are plenty of legit lawsuits that I know nothing about that can be fixed with money and internal/external controls and improvements), but in that moment I realized it's not the company I thought I knew. Rough ordering of reasons for my exit:

1. Government contracts supporting fascism (Israel, CBP, ICE, face tracking, etc.).
2. The layoffs.
3. Pichai going to inauguration and capitulating. GOP donations.
4. 180 on remote culture.
5. AI slop.

There's probably more if I reflected longer. Maybe I should have resigned sooner, idk. I'm glad I made the choice that I could.

Google was good to me for the years I was there. I got up to L6 and saved enough for my family to exit on my own terms and find a better environment. I'm still looking heh.

Happy to answer some questions (culture, privacy, SWE/SRE, oncall, etc.) if there are any. The company is massive and I saw only a small slice.