Careless People (a story of where i used to work) by Sarah-Wynn Williams

I had a naive belief that the new age technology companies are not as evil as the old time tobacco or oil companies. I believed that we as a society have evolved to have tighter regulations against how much a company can misbehave under selfish interests. That belief got shattered after the first round of layoffs in Google, while i was working there, in 2022.  Reading the stories of people who were laid off, even women on maternity leave, and the absolute ruthless and random handling of the situation planted a doubt in my mind against this pristine status of these big tech companies. 

In my first stint at Google, i had expected to come across extremely smart people who were keen to solve problems. I was prepared for my product manager craft to be brutally scrutinised, and in that process grow as a product manager. Not only did i not encounter these smart people, more disappointingly navigating the bureaucratic corridors seemed more important to most people than building something useful. This had already dented an idealistic image that i had in my mind. That image would completely break apart when i and my entire team would eventually get laid off as well, in March 2022. 

Donald Trump winning the US elections in 2024 seemed like a true test for the ideological principles (what did they stand for) of the big tech companies, with the ideological landscape in the US shifting right-wards. It looks like most tech companies caved in and were happy to let go of the 'inclusive' programs like DEI. Google for example dropped a caveat to not use AI for military technologies from their AI principles. Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg's 5 minutes video around some fundamental changes in Facebook is a great moment to highlight this change, or rather caving into the political pressures. 

In this context, Careless People articulates and re-iterates what seems to be emerging as plain facts, to me personally through my experience and to the broader world as well. Big tech companies are not so different from those old timey evil oil companies. They share a fundamental framework - that they are institutes for profit. Everything else is PR. In the context of the book for Meta, it could mean compromising of privacy of its user to enter into a new market (China), compromising on fact checking fake news which would lead to riots and deaths in Myanmar, or being open to be used by despots and dictators to win elections - as long as it makes ads dollars. 

If you abstract out the details of the busineeses, these organisations are nothing but a collection of type-A people who want to succeed no matter what. And there are not creative ways to define success here, its the same old better job, more money, brushing shoulders with celebrities. I dont know why it is not a surprise that the companies they build turn out the way they do. 

Of course, everything on the book can and should be taken as face value. I felt the book tends to simplify the narrative. The thing that didn't sit well with me throughout the book is the author's holier-than-thou tone, which suggests every top management person at Facebook is evil except for the her, and she tried her best to change things, and failed. Anyone who had worked in a large organisation knows it is not as black & white as that. A double click on why people were the way they were, and why they did not heed the writers advice would have been more useful, than 'Mark Zuckerberg bad'.

Despite that, the book captures an important truth of how big tech companies operate. And its a very engaging read. This is the fastest i have run through 300 pages. Maybe because it also reads like gossip for someone workin in big tech, and who does not like gossip. Except, this is a very harmful gossip. 

As a redemptive arch, i hope someone somewhere spits on a big tech HRs face the next time they ask the interviewee to 'think about the user first'.