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There's no doubt that working at Google + frugal living can give a rank-and-file engineer enough "fuck-you money" to make their own calls.

I don't see that as a bad thing though. Just because it's not a liberty everyone has to stop working for a firm they find morally repugnant doesn't imply one shouldn't take the liberty if one has it.

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Except they were there for 14 years. Unless it became instantly diametrically opposed to their belief system in the past couple of months, the author has put up with the changing environment for a long time. They're not some skill-less laborer; after all, they worked at google! they could get another job pretty easily, no, one with a company that shared their personal values?

The company has pivoted significantly in the past approximately three to five years (first with the founding of Alphabet, which resulted in Larry and Sergey stepping back from the helm, then with the appointment of Sundar as CEO). Some extremely unsavory things about the way the company operated at the top-tier management level during Larry and Sergey's years also came to light in that time period.

My wild guess is the author stuck around long enough to see if things would turn around and has become convinced they will not, and this is Alphabet's new trajectory as a compnay.

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