A Google insider spills the tea on how the company forsook its founding ideals

“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.” Perhaps the most moving sections of the book are those that address Stapleton’s close relationship with her older brother, Scott, a vital sounding board whose skepticism about corporate double-speak gave Stapleton a much-needed outlet for her occasional doubts. His tragic, sudden death in a motorcycle accident in Turkey in 2008 shattered her world. A grief-stricken Stapleton threw herself into her work—“performing functionality to deal with grief”—and Google’s culture encouraged that single-minded avoidance. She admits that she never fully processed her grief at the time. That made it challenging to write about his death and the aftermath in Don’t Be Evil. Initial feedback from test readers on her first draft was largely positive, but several noted that the sections about her brother came off as being very arms-length and less personal in tone, unlike the rest of the book. “I was just describing what happened because at the time, I really couldn’t go there,” Stapleton said. She ended up revising those sections while staying with her parents in Santa Barbara and going through Scott’s old emails and G-chats. “I just sobbed the entire time,” she said. “Because even though it’s been 18 years, it still feels fresh. There’s still this huge hole. But in a way, it brought him back to life a little bit. The waves of grief still come back to me now and then, but I feel like now I can welcome them a bit more because I’m also grateful to have had this wonderful sibling relationship.”