> It did not even occur to me that it was all a scam, that everyone else knew it was all a scam and the actual point was to get rich.

I feel that as a GenX'er I should now dispense some wisdom to Millenials and Zoomers about life, but I just don't have the energy. Read Gaetano Mosca.

> What is crypto mining if not a textbook Captain Planet villain scheme—to kill and raze and destroy for nothing but imaginary tokens proving that you did lots of killing and razing and destroying?

Are you serious? You complain about the 2008 crisis and capitalism and yet completely neglect the true purpose of crypto? No wonder you drank the Google kool-aid

Very well-written. My main takeaway and constant reminder is that our privilege, no matter the size, usually comes at someone's expense.

> Like most employees I blamed myself for not working hard enough to get good compensation

ohh. I feel like I understanding something about my peers now that I had not caught onto before

I just love how John Patience became Джона Пейшенса, like it is some exotic slavic woman's name.

hmm, disagree with many of the takes in here, although some sentences of insight and truth.

> You cannot make people work for you and hoard all the profits while they are stuck with fixed salaries, without in the process developing strong feelings on why you're entitled to do that and how they deserve it actually.

I wonder why we don't see more software engineering co ops?

Oh yeah the horror of not being able to go behind your boss's back in a company email. The tragedy of being ignored when bringing up office equipment in a discussion about saving costs in a tech platform. The inhumanity of having workers hired to make food and do dishes on a Friday. The absolute gall to be asked a question about the identity you are proud and obnoxiously open about. What a dystopia, Brazil would have been better off without Google definitely, if only they had polyamorous anarchists running things.

What a terribly written article. I do not understand at all why you wouldn't start out by saying that you worked in Brazil for Google, instead the reader has to discover that half way in, suggesting you were in Phoenix was a really nice move to make sure that essential detail was hard to extract. There was "tea" promised but the story is literally "I was an obvious nuisance because I was the only one who believed corporate propaganda and got fired for it", how absolutely uninteresting and I do not understand why it would take this amount of space to write down.

Man, "bring your whole self to work" was well intentioned but ultimately a mistake. Just bring the part that knows how to program computers, and leave whatever part this is turned off from 9-5.

My manager at Google wanted me to change my personal “about me” snippet in the introductory email he was about to send out: It needed some information about where I previously worked (which I intentionally left out — who cares?? I’m here now!)

I never really thought much of it at the time. Internalized that as “oh, I misunderstood the purpose of the email.” But it tracks with elements of OP’s story; the exposition of your identity is curated.

> Today, the concept of “spyware” has been obsoleted because every software is spyware

This is not true. Free software is not.

> And all that with wages well below even the local market in our crumbling Third World economy. With no exciting research positions nor self-managed time nor compensation, what was the advantage over a high-paying job at Microsoft or IBM?

When did Google pay less than Microsoft/IBM?

Peter Thiel said it better: https://youtu.be/gQPlhycLmMk?t=415

> Today, the concept of “spyware” has been obsoleted because every software is spyware. Google's “organising the information of the world” turned out to be indexing which Gaza families to bomb, children and all; “making money in the free market to invest in social change” was about bankrolling literal, textbook fascism. Today, for us Latinx to even briefly step in the USA, if we don't have an always-on handheld device with spyware “social media”, its absence is taken as proof of criminality. I will never visit Arizona again, and my kids will never know a world that's not like this; but for me I saw this world being forged up close and personal, deep in Mordor where the shadows lie.

This hits home.

I was a teen in the 90s, in my circles it was Understood that the data was not private.

Some of this in any case sounds like the usual "did not grow up in white collar society, got white collar job, got in trouble for violating white collar norms" that class-changers go through. Lots of !!fun!!.

I too get troubled when the operations staff get "invisible'd" - they are members of society too and should be treated with dignity. But in a tolerably decent situation, they are recognized and respected in their field as well. Even if its the evening shift to do the janitorial work. There's nothing _immoral_ about having a party and hiring some people to clean up. It's treating them as _lower_ than you that is the failure.

Anyway. There's an - as far as I know - as yet unwritten story around those of us who came from non-white collar backgrounds and found this new world confusing.

> Google back then prided itself on broadcasting its Best Place To Work award, won year after year after year. Younger people will have trouble picturing this, but Google used to nurture an image of being the “good one” among megacorps;

It's crazy to think about now. Google's image was a big driver in my choice to go back to school and start a tech career, my end and pretty much only goal was to work at google. I made it through several rounds of interviews and got rejected pretty late. It hurt really bad at that time, but looking back now, I think it was one of the best things that could have happened to me.

I never sold out. When I sold off the last of my web sites and domains (mostly ad driven), I only sold the web sites, and not the code that ran them. I had built a very complicated spider that scraped all the main social media sites looking for my articles, that would suggest places they weren't found that might do well. I never built an auto submit bot, but could have easily. I submitted them manually to each site, so as not to break there TOS. I'd then track the newly submitted articles and see how they would spread on social media. I built a basic visualization tool that allowed 'seeing' the way information flows in an intuitive way.

What I learned about memetics and the way information flows was incalculable, and I realized it was like holding a weapon of mass destruction. The last thing I wanted to do was allow others to understand how it worked, or how to build one. I essentially burnt what I built because I didn't want it to fall in the wrong hands.

Could someone build it themselves? Probably, but I put 15 years of my life into building it, and I did so when the Internet was still useful. I only put enough of my thought process about the system online to allude to the fact that I had built it, not enough for someone to reconstruct it. When I sold the last of the sites, I took the code offline and unplugged the hard drive and hid it.

It's been almost 6 years since then and the only companies to come close are wasting there time with LLM. I do not think the current iteration of A.I. is even close thankfully, but at some point someone is going to crack it, probably even better than I did (I had a limited budget, slow internet, and was working mostly by myself).

> Google, if you remember, was the Best Place To Work. It was very important that every promising young engineer thought of Google as the dream job where everyone is happy. Unhappiness isn't allowed. My manager was severely scolded by his manager for having dissatisfaction (gasp) within his team.

Gotta love the pure distilled dystopia concentrate here, complete with totalitarianism vibes!

The dictbot story's interpretation of why TVCs (that's what they were called when I was at Google; never heard "temps, part-timers, and contractors") need to be treated like second-class citizens is incorrect.

It's not because they wanted Engineers to feel like golden gods to build their egos - it's because they don't want the TVCs to be treated as employees under employment law. There was a guy who worked in the kitchens who got added to access the music room storage closet in PDX so he could keep his guitar there, and we were told he had to be removed since he was a TVC. That closet is apparently "FTEs and interns only", because if we treat our kitchen staff too well they might have to be given the same benefits as the rest of us.

It used to be possible for somebody to work their way up from the mailroom to the executive suite. This path has been deliberately destroyed because the owning class wants to divide employees into different classes.

No war but class war.

The article is better than I expected. I'm about of the same age of the author and Brazilian, and I can relate to the feeling that Internet companies would improve the world

My only nitpick it to charge Google of the invisibility of maids and servants in Brazil. Brazil is one of the most unequal countries in the world and this is part of the country culture. Google is not guilty here.

At least we are improving. Nobody with a brain still think that techno companies and billionaires are anything more than comic book super villains.

Started off naive and then transitioned to considering Google to be representative of all Capitalist enterprises. Progress?