In 2018, 20,000 Google employees worldwide made headlines when they staged a walkout to protest how the company had handled sexual misconduct allegations against key corporate executives, among other grievances. One of the organizers was Claire Stapleton, a communications specialist whose distinctive voice and ability to channel the corporate ethos had once earned her the internal moniker “Bard of Google.”
Six months later, a disillusioned Stapleton resigned, claiming she had been demoted during the most recent restructuring as retaliation for helping to spearhead the walkout. The story of how she went from enthusiastic cheerleader to proactive dissident, and the many lessons she learned along the way, are featured in her new book, Don’t Be Evil: Bad Bosses, Fake Promises, and My Escape from Big Tech—A Biting Memoir of Twelve Years Inside Google.
Stapleton didn’t set out to be a rabble-rouser. When she joined Google out of college in 2007, it was like “getting the golden ticket in Willy Wonka,” she told Ars. Awareness of her good fortune offset any initial uneasiness or skepticism, although Stapleton was sufficiently independent-minded not to move into what was then Google’s new corporate housing development in Mountain View, California. Stapleton was very good at her job, and she quickly moved up the ranks, playing a key role in shaping the company’s public image.
Her first truly toxic experience came when she transferred to Google Creative Lab in New York, an environment she describes as “half utopian, half dystopian and unable to tell the difference.” She received little direction or guidance from management and found that much of the Lab’s work was simply advancing a kind of “cloying techno-optimism” she found uninspiring. Stapleton lasted about a year and ended up joining the marketing team at YouTube. But the cultural changes and her own shifting priorities and growing disquiet culminated in the 2018 walkout and Stapleton leaving the company she once championed.
Stapleton wrote an essay for Elle magazine shortly after that she describes as “a psychic attempt at wrapping up my time” at Google, to help process her complicated feelings about her former employer. “It was such an abrupt and kind of traumatic ending after such a long time at the company,” she said. “And a lot of my experience was really positive.” The essay garnered enough attention to draw the interest of book agents, but at the time, Stapleton wasn’t interested in writing a book, feeling that she didn’t really have much more to say. Instead, she started a workplace advice column and did freelance marketing communications for a venture capital firm founded by another former Googler, Bill Maris.