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Google Changed Work Culture. Its Former Hype Woman Has Regrets.

What the Big Tech meltdown can teach all workers.

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and emailtranscripts@nytimes.comwith any questions.

lulu garcia-navarro

From New York Times Opinion, I’m Lulu Garcia-Navarro, and this is “First Person.” If you flip back through the mission statements of tech companies in their early years, it feels like a tour through a bygone era of techno optimism. Apple told us to think different. Facebook aspired to make the world more open and connected. And Google, their unofficial motto was simple. Don’t be evil.

The message to their workers was clear. This job wasn’t just a paycheck. It was a moral calling. And that philosophy spread out beyond Silicon Valley and changed what the rest of us thought corporate work culture should be. Today, of course, Google, now known as Alphabet, has taken that unofficial motto, “don’t be evil,” out of its handbook. And across Silicon Valley, there have been brutal layoffs and harsh action taken against worker activism.

Claire Stapleton saw all of this from the inside. She spent 12 years at Google and its subsidiary, YouTube, in corporate communications. Now, after leaving, Claire writes a newsletter for people in the tech world. It’s called appropriately, “Tech Support.” In it, she gives advice to those rethinking their place in an industry they say took advantage of them.

Her journey from being a Google evangelist to a critic is part of a larger cultural conversation about the place of work in our lives, and where else we can find meaning. Today on “First Person,” what the tech meltdown can teach all workers.

Claire, there is a lot of news about tech companies and layoffs. You run an online forum for tech folks. What kinds of words are they using to describe what’s happening right now?

claire stapleton

Some of the most common words I’ve seen over the past few weeks are dehumanizing, horrible, humiliating. Let me just — I’m just going to pull up one thing because someone left a comment to me that was very — hold on. Yeah, OK. “Getting laid off is one thing, but being disowned by your family after 18 years is another. And that’s what Google did to us. People I worked with for 10 years are not allowed to bring us in for lunch to say goodbye, but can bring in any random person off the street.”

I think that just really sums up how deeply identified people at these big tech companies, like Google, are with the place that they work and how shocking it is to be shown the door after all these years of service.

lulu garcia-navarro

I want to dig into some of those ideas. But I want to first ask you about your own journey, because you really know these tech companies. You got into tech right out of college, right, in 2007? I mean, how did you land at Google?

claire stapleton

Yeah, so I came to Google through college recruiting. I went to a job fair. And there was, alongside JPMorgan and The Gap, there was a table for Google. And that was a huge boom time for tech.

It was a couple of years after the Google IPO. Facebook was really starting and heating up. And soon, we’d see Twitter, and Instagram, Square, all these companies. And Google was in the news. It was breathlessly covered as this exceptional place to work.

And I thought, wow, this is an amazing opportunity. I had no idea what I’d do there. I wasn’t a computer science student. I was an English major who worked at the “Humor Magazine.” Not the cookie cutter corporate type of gal. And nevertheless, I was just absolutely entranced by the company. And I almost didn’t care what the job was.

lulu garcia-navarro

So tell me about the first time you actually set foot on Google’s campus. I mean, what was it like when you actually got there?

claire stapleton

I couldn’t believe it. I think I wrote in my journal that it looked like it was — the colors were punched up in Photoshop. Inside the offices, it sort of had this almost kindergarten color palette. There were bouncy balls, and cork boards, climbing walls. I mean, it was sort of this paradise for a young person. The cafeterias were incredible, the farm-to-table cuisine. And the people seemed incredibly dynamic, ready just to dive in and improve the world.

lulu garcia-navarro

I mean, that’s so visual. It feels so much like a sensory overload.

claire stapleton

It was. It was like a dream.

lulu garcia-navarro

When you were hired, what was your job?

claire stapleton

I didn’t even really know what it was going to be from the description as they gave it to me. It was in the communications department. I was placed on the internal communications team. So I worked on internal news. And then I also managed a weekly event called TGIF, which was, for many years, hosted by the founders Larry and Sergey. And I also sent emails around.

And my remit, as it was presented to me, was to reflect the specialness of the company back to Googlers, to get them as engaged in what Google was doing, as excited in Google’s mission as they could possibly be, because that was how the company was going to continue its reign of innovation and being the best company ever.

Google talked a lot about curing disease. It was not just about Google Search. So there was a lot of school spirit. I was really kind of like a cheerleader for the company in many ways.

lulu garcia-navarro

And you drunk the Kool-Aid at this point.

claire stapleton

I thought it was a really wonderful place to work. And I think that was genuine. I think there were definitely times where I would wonder, is this kind of a made up job?

[laughs]

What even is internal communications?

But, yeah, I will say I was guzzling the Kool-Aid. And not only that, I was helping manufacture it. Because I sent out a weekly email. It was just a routine thing announcing the TGIF topic, the weekly staff meeting.

But I would always riff on the themes of the company in a very quirky, dreamlike, whimsical way. And this is when I earned the nickname the Bard of Google.

lulu garcia-navarro

That must have felt good.

claire stapleton

Yes. It was a funny time.

lulu garcia-navarro

I mean, can you give me an example of what the corporate culture was that you were supposed to be reflecting?

claire stapleton

Yeah. So I mean, I think Larry and Sergey had so much philosophy around the workplace. But they always said, Google is not a conventional company and we do not intend to become one.

And so much of the way that the workplace was designed was to foster innovation and creativity across departments, across offices, to get people together to play volleyball, and cross-pollinate an idea. And so I think that they were trying to inspire maximum creativity out of their employees.

archived recording 1

This is Google in Mountain View, California. Google even has personal trainers on site. Google doesn’t just take care of their employees’ bodies. The company also does their laundry. Google has 18 different cafes. And the best part, all the meals are free. Only at Google.

claire stapleton

And that was really how it was presented. I used to give tours around that time as well. And I remember distinctly that, often, these would be foreign journalists. And a French journalist said to me, this laundry rooms, and cafeterias, this is obviously a plot to keep the workers here all the time. This is so exploitative. They just want you to never leave.

And I thought, wow, what a cynical perspective. Because I’m here listening to Larry and Sergey talk about why these offices are built this way. And it’s a very progressive vision.

lulu garcia-navarro

What was that vision?

claire stapleton

Yeah, I think that Larry Page was singularly obsessed with doing impossible and crazy ideas. And that’s when Google X was formed, which was supposed to be a lab for moonshot thinking. So this is where their idea came to cure death that Larry Page has an amazing quote that curing cancer was too small a problem for a company like Google with all of its brainpower, with all of its resources, that really they should be focusing on extending life. And —

lulu garcia-navarro

Wow.

claire stapleton

— it sounds incredibly grandiose. Larry Page said, if only we could have two million people working at this company, think of all the good we can do in the world. Think of all the problems we can solve that governments can’t. And so he said, his job, as the leader of the company, was to make sure that every person had meaningful opportunities to basically do social good. I mean, it was quite high-minded philosophical stuff. It was not BS from what I thought at the time.

lulu garcia-navarro

I mean, you obviously felt like you were at the center of something, yeah, really revolutionary. Did you think of yourself as ambitious at this point?

claire stapleton

Ambitious? That’s a good question.

I think that I thought of myself as a Google lifer, which is funny because, really, that’s not the typical millennial attitude is stay at one company your whole career. But I felt that it didn’t really even matter what my role was at Google. I was a part of something that was really historic.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

lulu garcia-navarro

So you’ve landed in this new kind of workplace. You’ve said that the job felt like a dream compared to other kinds of work. When did the way you saw the company start to shift?

claire stapleton

Yes. I got an opportunity — a transfer opportunity — to move to New York in 2012. So at this point, I’d been at Google five years. And I did have a certain degree of restlessness that whether it was a scene change, a role change, I’d seen so many people leave the company, shift to different roles. I was starting to feel a sort of itch.

And I got offered what I thought was the absolute perfect opportunity working at Google’s internal creative agency, which is called Creative Lab. Here I’d been singing and celebrating Google culture internally. And here, I was going to start shipping, and selling, and singing the praises of Google to the outside world.

Creative Lab does naming and branding for different early-stage Google products. But it also does a lot of traditional advertising, so Super Bowl ads and that sort of thing. I think that their motto is, remind the world what it is they love about Google. At least it was back then.

The environment there immediately shocked me. The majority of the creatives there — so the people who were doing the work of these campaigns — were temps, vendors, and contractors. And I was shocked by that, that there was this second-class citizenry of people who had red badges. They don’t get vacation days. They don’t get Google benefits. They can’t use the massage program. They can’t use the gyms.

lulu garcia-navarro

They can’t use the massage programs? Gasp. Gasp.

claire stapleton

I know. A good massage program — I mean, it’s — yeah. And then they, of course, they also don’t really have the same ability to speak up about their working conditions. And as Google always said, the most important thing for creating high-performing, productive, happy teams is psychological safety.

The fact of being a contractor, in fact, really means that there’s not the same level of psychological safety and just team health. And so I was — it was a real strain to sell the magic of Google. And that was what my day-to-day felt like.

lulu garcia-navarro

So seeing that temp workforce and what they were exposed to really changed how you thought about Google as an employer.

claire stapleton

It profoundly did. And none of this, I guess, is shocking. But it was to me.

lulu garcia-navarro

So you’re starting to have doubts in 2012 inside the company. But I think it hit more broadly in the culture that these powerful tech companies were largely unsupervised and unaccountable in 2016 during, of course, the US election and its immediate aftermath. Where were you at that moment?

claire stapleton

So in 2014, I took a transfer to YouTube’s marketing team. And —

lulu garcia-navarro

YouTube, which Google had bought in 2006.

claire stapleton

Yes. Long-time golden child of the Google company portfolio. But the issues — the societal issues that were coming to a fever pitch at the time of Trump’s election in 2016 were hitting YouTube particularly hard. So the golden glow that had surrounded these big tech companies, the optimism, and the hope that they would transform society, that was waning big time.

My remit was social media with an emphasis on YouTube’s values. So what that meant in managing YouTube’s social media, which is its various social media handles, is that we had a briefing every single day called “nightmare fuel,” as we called it. That was our nickname for it. And it —

lulu garcia-navarro

Oh gosh. [LAUGHS]

claire stapleton

The briefing that an analyst made for us was everything that was a brand vulnerability that day. So you can imagine —

lulu garcia-navarro

That must’ve been a pretty long list.

claire stapleton

Oh, it was unbelievable. But you can imagine in this era, there was, of course, Logan Paul, very powerful YouTuber at the time, cavalierly filmed himself in Japan in what’s called the suicide forest. He found a dead body hung on a tree, incredibly horrifying image. And he posted it in a vlog, I guess, to his young fans.

And YouTube had had a very laissez faire attitude with the content on the site. Freedom of expression was always its main value. But what does freedom of expression look like in a time when some very dangerous things are going on? So my job was to prove out and demonstrate to the world YouTube’s net value to society. And again, it’s challenging to do that job if you don’t really believe that’s true.

lulu garcia-navarro

So you’re really on the front lines of articulating the company’s position to people like me who were asking some pretty difficult questions about how YouTube was spreading disinformation, or radicalizing people through its algorithm, or having all these terrible things. I mean, how were you answering? What argument did you make?

claire stapleton

Well, I think that what happened there is that YouTube decided, and the executives decided, that they wanted to stand for things. They wanted to be out there talking about LGBTQ youth. This is a time when there were anti-trans bills going around. There was a lot of discussion of race in America. We want to do more for Black creators.

But time and time again, when you really talk to creators, what they really wanted was better protection against harassment, against hate speech. They wanted brand safety. Advertisers wanted brand safety to be able to run an ad and not have it be on a al-Qaeda video or something.

lulu garcia-navarro

So people wanted concrete action, content moderation, protection. And your job, though, was to offer messaging.

claire stapleton

Yes. It was to work with the designers to come up with the perfect Pride logo.

lulu garcia-navarro

I’m thinking about the call to cure death and now —

claire stapleton

Yeah, exactly. [LAUGHS]

lulu garcia-navarro

I mean, that seems like quite a fall from those lofty aspirations that you started off with.

claire stapleton

Yeah.

lulu garcia-navarro

Can you tell me more about that? What did it make you feel to have to delve into this nightmare briefing and come up with logos instead of concrete action?

claire stapleton

I think it just highlighted a sense of meaninglessness, which I had really not felt in my previous years, that my job didn’t matter, or my job was really about slide decks and making executives feel like we’re doing all these great things. And meanwhile, it feels like the world is starting to burn. And it just felt like we were trying to take credit for solving the world’s problems when we were actually making them worse.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

By 2017, 2018, there was no question that these companies were not net positive for society.

lulu garcia-navarro

So you’re starting to realize that the world outside of Google is being royaled by increasing polarization. And then, of course, in 2017, the #MeToo Movement brought awareness to sexual harassment in the workplace. When did that cultural turmoil come in through Google’s front door?

claire stapleton

“The New York Times” broke the story about a Google executive getting paid $90 million after he was asked to leave, essentially, after claims, one of which the company itself had found credible. And that was the inflection point from my perspective.

lulu garcia-navarro

So what happened?

claire stapleton

So I — from my old job of working on TGIF, I was always subscribed to a million email lists at Google. And this one email group was the moms group. The moms email list, which is an anonymous list. And the day that the Rubin story broke, that email list exploded.

And this was not a political list. This is people talking about the logistics of being a working mom, or I’m selling a bumble chair in Mountain View, or whatever. And what came through was, sure, some outrage at this bombshell story. But I was just shocked by the amount of stories that women had of all the crap they’d put up with, essentially.

And I think it really revealed to me this underbelly that I had certainly experienced in Creative Lab, and in different ways in my disillusioning experience at YouTube, and how universal that was, where there was this gap between the ideals of Google as a company, and what people’s actual experience was.

We were supposed to be the most empowered workplace in the world. Why did people not feel like they could actually raise a complaint against a manager or against a male executive in their organization? And from that moms email list, I said, why not a walkout?

And if anyone’s interested in helping plan this thing, I’ve set up another Google group here, all internal, this is using the company’s tools. And that was a Friday night. And I woke up Saturday morning and I knew that we were onto something.

archived recording 2

Women’s rights are workers’ rights. Women’s rights are workers’ rights.

archived recording 3

Thousands of Google employees walked out of work on Thursday at 11:10 AM local time to protest.

claire stapleton

So it was just rolling through the time zones throughout the day.

archived recording 4

This is one of the largest and most publicized company-wide protests of the #MeToo era, a scene repeating itself —

claire stapleton

I remember going to the walkout in New York and we filled a local park. It really felt like this was the birth of a new movement.

archived recording 5

Time is up on sexual harassment. Time is up on abuse of power. Time is up on systemic racism. Enough is enough. We demand structural change in the name of —

claire stapleton

The Google executives played it very cannily. The CEO of the company, Sundar, had sent an email to the company saying if people want to participate with it in this, they’re totally welcome to, which was great publicity for us as walkout organizers.

But they had decided to say that this Andy Rubin payout as well as the other executive payouts were in the past. And we aren’t proud of it. But that was a different time. Things are better now. And we will make this systemic change.

lulu garcia-navarro

I’m thinking about how you had spent most of your career celebrating this company and now you’re at the head of a protest against it. Did you see walking out as challenging the status quo of the company culture at that time?

claire stapleton

I did. And I think that I felt such courage and conviction in doing it because I’d been unhappy. I will also say, though, that in my Google brain of the time, and being — having been so nourished on the idealism of Google from the early years, I believed that, on some level, the company would welcome this challenge because Google — of course, things might have gone astray or gone off-course.

They strayed from these ideals. But the ideals still mattered to the company. And of course, they would want to fix these issues that were being raised. There’s a lot of naivete in that. But I genuinely believed that this was going to be a positive moment for the company in one way or the other.

lulu garcia-navarro

Yeah. I’ve got to say that is a pretty rosy view to take of one of the biggest corporations on the planet that’s just exposed how it doesn’t always practice what it preaches.

claire stapleton

Absolutely.

lulu garcia-navarro

So I’m wondering, after the walkout, how the company started dealing with you.

claire stapleton

Yeah, so, initially, there was an embrace of the walkout organizers. My manager, bizarrely, asked me to give my lessons learned about the walkout, which is, again, this weird misunderstanding of what the walkout was, but also a co-opting. And as part of this, I was presented with a pair of Doc Martens boots to celebrate my activism. I mean, it was absurd.

And then things proceeded, I guess, normally for a few weeks. And then I got on a routine one-on-one Zoom with my manager. And she laid out, what felt to me out of nowhere, a restructuring of my role. And that began my retaliation ordeal.

lulu garcia-navarro

Of course, Google denies any retaliation. And they claim they did an internal investigation on your allegations and found no evidence of retaliation.

claire stapleton

It’s — I understand how they have come up with some vague language to say this didn’t happen. But yeah, it quickly became a hostile environment for me to be in. And I was pregnant.

lulu garcia-navarro

So you left.

claire stapleton

So I left.

lulu garcia-navarro

Can you tell me about your last day?

claire stapleton

Yeah, so on my last day, my entire team had been flown out to Malibu for an offsite. And they spent their day doing goat yoga at a mansion in Malibu. I just couldn’t believe this.

Here I was ejected from the building as everybody else was laughing along with the goats. So I just, I cleaned up my desk. And yeah, remarkably enough, I was escorted from the building by security. And yeah, that was it.

lulu garcia-navarro

No more goat yoga.

claire stapleton

No more goat yoga, happily.

[laughs]

Happy to have no goat yoga, but plenty of dignity, and self-respect, and confidence that what I’m doing is not harmful.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

lulu garcia-navarro

After the break, Claire leaves a company culture she hardly recognizes. And the workers inside are changing too.

claire stapleton

As I was speaking to people that day when I left, I heard a lot about how people had been very excited about the prospect of organizing workers, and increasing the consciousness around worker power, which was so different than the Google lifer attitude I’d had myself in 2007 or 2008.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

lulu garcia-navarro

So you left Google after 12 years, at that point, your whole working life. How did you start doing what you do now?

claire stapleton

Yeah, so since the walkout, even before I left Google, even before I spoke out about retaliation, I really started to see that there were some very big questions being raised by tech workers around the nature of work. And I think a lot of people seem to be really reevaluating how they’re choosing to spend their time and their mindset or approach to the companies where they offer so much of themselves.

So I started an advice column for tech workers. That wasn’t me thinking I had the answers to any of this. But quite simply for myself, I had no idea of how to answer the question, now what?

And so I have a Substack where I publish letters from tech workers and respond to them. And I also keep a Discord server where that’s become a very active daily discussion space where people are just batting around life in late capitalism, life in these big tech companies, struggling with issues of meaning and purpose.

lulu garcia-navarro

We started this conversation talking about hearing from people still inside these companies who are feeling really destabilized by what’s going on in tech right now. You have your ear to the ground, as you say. And there is this huge realignment happening in the tech world.

claire stapleton

Yeah.

lulu garcia-navarro

I mean, what kinds of questions do you get from the tech workers and ex-tech workers who write in and they’re looking for your advice?

claire stapleton

Yeah, I think that the culture is quite grim, that — Google itself said that psychological safety is one of the most important parts of any work environment. And that’s kind of been destroyed.

archived recording 6

After five years of working at Google, I was laid off on Friday.

archived recording 7

So it’s been about an hour since I found out that I was laid off from Meta.

archived recording 8

I’m so hurt right now. I see this happen all the time. I just didn’t think it would happen to me.

claire stapleton

I was shocked by the number of people who were laid off during paternity or maternity leave, or who were on disability leave. I mean, there’s a cruelty is the point moment going on with the way that people’s livelihoods were curtailed.

I mean, there’s a lot of really shocking and heartbreaking stories that I guess are inevitable to this McKinsey-esque efficiency exercise that these tech companies seem to be undergoing. But I think it’s important to hear these stories and important to remember that work will not love you back.

lulu garcia-navarro

I mean, it seems like to borrow a recent “New York Times Opinion” headline, “The Era of Happy Tech Workers is Over.” No more hiding behind the mission statements about changing the world and Utopian corporate culture. The mask has been sort of pulled off. You just said work will not love you back. What does that mean?

claire stapleton

I think that the tech companies gain power and gain billions and trillions of market share through a kind of manipulation of culture. And it’s hard for me to stomach as someone who was really a big believer and a big enjoyer of the culture, I guess, frankly. A recipient of it in many ways.

Culture can be a way of controlling norms and controlling workers. Giving them all these sorts of lavish perks and whatever, it’s a way of getting what you want out of people, getting them to give more. If you feel so grateful to be there and so lucky to be there, and you’re just hanging on, do you really feel comfortable asking for a raise and pushing back when you see something that doesn’t feel right, doesn’t feel ethical?

And so I think in a lot of ways, culture was kind of about consolidating power. And what’s happening right now is another kind of power grab by the bosses.

lulu garcia-navarro

Why do you think this is happening right now?

claire stapleton

I think that it’s precisely what the opposite of what Larry and Sergey intended for the company. They said we are not a conventional company and we do not intend to become one. Well, Google has become a pretty conventional company. I think a lot of the big tech companies are.

And what, at least to me, what defines that is that the decision making is entirely focused on short-term, bottom line thinking to please investors for quarterly results. And I think with the layoffs, you have a lot of messaging around a Great Reset, or reining in the entitled workers.

But I think that there’s surely some opportunity here that the management is taking to put workers in their place. Because I think that you can’t look at the past few years and say that tech workers weren’t wielding power in some pretty interesting and creative ways.

So, yeah, what’s happening is I think there’s a shifting of the power back to the management. And I think that my basic — if I could boil my takedown is that management’s out of ideas and direction, and they forgot where they came from.

lulu garcia-navarro

Yeah, I mean, here’s the thing I want to ask you. Because we can look at this reckoning with tech and think, OK, the tech companies have shown themselves to be just like everybody else. They’re grabbing power. They’re acting callously when they feel they have to.

But broadening this out, they had such a huge impact on corporate culture in America. If you are making coffee, like Starbucks, or you are selling air conditioners, it doesn’t matter. Most companies have now adopted this mission-driven jargon that seeks to make workers think they are part of something larger than the bottom line, and to invoke this idea of family and trust.

It has metastasized to every part of corporate America. Do you think this unmasking of the tech companies will impact the broader conversation about work and the way workers understand their place in the system?

claire stapleton

I think it will. I think — I mean, in one very recognizable way, tech employees are now calling themselves workers. There is this sense that we are labor, and that’s shifting things around. There’s more talk of unions and other traditional solidarity building.

But I think that you’re raising a good point around what the nature of work in these tech companies is. Because one of the tipping points a few months ago was Elon Musk declaring that only hardcore workers are going to be welcome here at the company. Other tech CEOs were just salivating over this.

Then you had Mark Zuckerberg saying this is going to be the year of efficiency. And all of this focus on workers, and company culture, and the perks, I think obscures the fact that there’s been a lot of mismanagement of these companies. I mean, Zuckerberg has put billions into the metaverse. And it’s TBD if this will even play out as an investment. The entitlement and the absurdity that I see is the executives, the tech elites, not the workers.

lulu garcia-navarro

So you’ve argued that, in part, the company culture at Google was about consolidating power. At the same time, people do need to find meaning in their work. And you did that at Google for a long time.

As you think back, if someone comes to you now and asks, how should I relate to my work? What should I believe about who employs me and where I should find meaning? If you were giving advice to all those young tech workers that you saw at your last day at Google milling around, what would you tell them?

claire stapleton

Well, I think I definitely recommend a heavy dose of wariness of the kind of corporate propaganda. Again, irony. Because I was a happy propaganda shiller for many years. And then to just divorce your sense of vocation, and work, and meaning from the job as much as possible.

I think that part of what I’ve recovered since leaving is my own voice. What do I have to say? And that’s a really difficult exercise for me. And I’m envious of people that never really lost that connection to their own voice and sense of purpose and meaning.

But I outsourced that to Google for so many years. I’ve been really inspired by tech workers who shared with me that they have a clear, on-paper mission and lens on the world that’s company agnostic.

lulu garcia-navarro

So I guess what you’re saying is the work you do can have meaning, but the company you work for shouldn’t.

claire stapleton

Yeah. I think that’s right.

lulu garcia-navarro

Claire, thank you so much.

claire stapleton

Thank you so much for having me. [MUSIC]

lulu garcia-navarro

“First Person” is a production of New York Times Opinion. Tell us what you thought of this episode. Our email is firstperson@nytimes.com. Also, please subscribe and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts.

This episode was produced by Wyatt Orme with help from Derrick Arthur. It was edited by Anabel Bacon and Kaari Pitkin, mixing by Pat McCusker. Original music by Isaac Jones, Pat McCusker and Carole Sabouraud.

Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. The rest of the “First Person” team includes Stephanie Joyce, Olivia Natt, Rhiannon Corby, Sofia Alvarez Boyd and Jillian Weinberger. Special thanks to Kristina Samulewski, Shannon Busta, Allison Benedikt, Annie-Rose Strasser and Katie Kingsbury. I’m Lulu Garcia-Navarro.

Wyatt Orme and

Anabel Bacon and

Isaac JonesSonia HerreroPat McCusker and


The tech giants’ offices were once heralded as the workplaces of the future. Their employees enjoyed previously unheard-of perks, like free farm-to-table lunches, on-site laundry and weekly massages, all lavished on them as they set about designing the technologies transforming the world.

Claire Stapleton joined Google in 2007, during the height of the techno-optimism boom, and fell in love with the company. Over the next 12 years, she created corporate messaging and managed the company’s image, internally and externally. But during this time, she also witnessed it fall painfully short of its utopian promises, and as the world soured on Big Tech, she did, too.

Stapleton left Google in 2019. Now she writes an advice column for tech workers questioning their place in the industry, especially in recent months, as the sector reels from mass layoffs. She says the turbulence in Silicon Valley offers bigger lessons for workers in other industries about how we should find purpose in our work — and the kinds of meaning we can’t expect to find in a corporation.

(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)

ImageA black and white photo of a person in an office carrying a box filled with a fern plant and other desk items.
Credit...ljubaphoto/Getty Images

Thoughts? Email us at firstperson@nytimes.com. Follow Lulu Garcia-Navarro on Twitter: @lourdesgnavarro

“First Person” was produced this week by Wyatt Orme with help from Derek Arthur. It was edited by Anabel Bacon and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker and Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker, Michelle Harris and Kate Sinclair. The rest of the “First Person” team includes Stephanie Joyce, Olivia Natt, Rhiannon Corby, Sophia Alvarez Boyd and Jillian Weinberger. Special thanks to Kristina Samulewski, Shannon Busta, Allison Benedikt, Annie-Rose Strasser and Katie Kingsbury.

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