TechTakes

Thank you for posting this. I'm honestly a bit surprised that this genre of Google truth-telling is not more widespread, or perhaps I just haven't seen it. Your experience of "the wall" between Latin America and the US is obviously also more poignant than ever. Seeing it described this way, in this context, kinda hit me over the head and is finally making me wonder if the US immigration/deportation mess will ultimately come to be seen as something equivalent to the Iron Curtain. Putting your experiences out there is worth it for that alone, at the very least.

It's not that there haven't been people out there who were willing to yank the curtain on Google, either; I just feel like it's been more of a word-of-mouth thing in my experience. For instance, I knew a guy who was there during the Gmail launch. He made clear to me that "don't be evil" was a slogan created by a later hire, and really had very little to do with the thinking of Page/Brin or later Schmidt, except that they found it to be convenient office propaganda. Thus, he ended up not really believing it at all by the time he was done.

Another good friend of mine was also a contractor in a technical department in Mountain View for a number of years. The US contractor experience (at least in that role) didn't seem as firewalled off as you're describing for the Brazilian contractors, but he was still under the twin guns of "your job is meant to be fully automated eventually, and your primary purpose is training the system towards that" and yearly contract renewals. And of course, it's also where he and his eventual wife got infected with the Bitcoin prosperity gospel, a train they're still riding to this day...