{"slug": "how-google-lost-the-war-for-the-hearts-and-minds-of-its-employees-q-a-with", "title": "How Google lost the 'war for the hearts and minds' of its employees: Q&A with Claire Stapleton", "summary": "Claire Stapleton, a former Google marketing manager who helped organize the 2018 walkout of about 20,000 employees, has released a memoir titled \"Don't Be Evil\" that criticizes the company's management and tolerance for dissent. Stapleton, who left Google in 2019 alleging retaliation for her activism, spoke to Business Insider about the tension between Google's utopian ideals and its corporate realities, as the company faces renewed employee activism over work with the Pentagon and ICE and reshuffles its AI leadership.", "body_md": "In 2018, Claire Stapleton helped spearhead a walkout of around [20,000 Google employees](https://www.businessinsider.com/google-walkout-17000-google-employees-protested-sexual-misconduct-2018-11). The protest was a response to a [New York Times story](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/google-sexual-harassment-andy-rubin.html) detailing how the company had paid multimillion-dollar exit packages to executives accused of sexual misconduct.\n\nNow she's back with a memoir, \"Don't Be Evil,\" that pulls back the curtain on her time in the trenches at Google. It comes as the company faces renewed employee activism over its work [with the Pentagon and ICE](https://www.businessinsider.com/google-made-peace-war-protests-trump-defense-tech-2026-5), and departing talent as it [reshuffles its AI leadership](https://www.businessinsider.com/google-ai-leadership-demis-hassabis-steps-down-deepmind-ceo-2026-8).\n\nStapleton joined Google in 2007 and worked on internal communications, where her quippy, humorous companywide emails earned her the internal nickname \"the Bard of Google.\" At the time of the mass employee walkouts, Stapleton was a marketing manager at Google-owned YouTube. She left Google in 2019, [writing at the time](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jun/07/google-walkout-organizer-claire-stapleton-resigns) that she believed the company had retaliated against her over her activism.\n\nIn many ways, Stapleton helped shape Google's image internally.** **She talked to Business Insider about those early days at the tech giant, which, while successful in its aims to organize the world's information, later found its utopian ideals undermined by corporate realities. Google vowed not to become a conventional company, but sticking to that promise proved harder than its founders may have anticipated.\n\nThe interview has been edited for length and clarity. Google did not respond to a Business Insider request for comment.\n\n**The book has this central tension between Google's utopian self-image versus a pattern of bad management and lack of tolerance for dissent. Do you think Google was ever really the company it believed itself to be?**\n\n**Claire Stapleton: **I think that there's a lot of curiosity about whether the founding principles and philosophy were sincere, or if it was always kind of a ploy to squeeze more out of the workers.\n\nGoogle had this promise that innovation and tech can solve all these problems in the world, and also an interest in creating a company culture that supported that — not just through having top talent, keeping them happy, and having them creating and firing all cylinders. It was just like, \"green light, go\" in all these different lanes for the company as it moved through the world.\n\nSo I think that there are always tensions and contradictions in that. I read this amazing book called \"From Counterculture to Cyberculture\" by Fred Turner, a Stanford professor. He talks about how one of the great ironies and contradictions of the tech industry is that they started in this quite countercultural way. There was this distrust of centralized power, democratic institutions — everything was about decentralizing.\n\nEven [Mark Zuckerberg's op-ed](https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-vision-ai-future-takeaways-meta-personal-agents-2026-8) about AI uses the same language about how the future is for everyone. Meanwhile, these companies have consolidated tons of power, and it's all centralized. It's like they've become institutions, in and of themselves, with tremendous impact on society. So how does that square? How can these people who set out to be the leaders of this guerrilla movement for societal transformation now sit atop trillion-dollar companies?\n\n**You're in good company — there's been a run of books about Silicon Valley's darker side.**\n\n**CS: **People keep saying, \"Wow, this is amazing timing for this book because there's so much going on with Google.\" The company remains a sort of bellwether of the economy, but also how attitudes toward work have changed, how the public ingests a company as big and successful as Google is.\n\n**How much did you feel that sentiment against Big Tech shift by the time you left Google?**\n\n**CS: **The last year that I was there, something was fomenting. I think Trump's first term started to make Google look less sure of its values and its virtues, and I think that there were some changes in the culture that were happening as the company was reckoning with becoming so big and more corporate.\n\nWhere does transparency sit? How does the culture evolve? I think that was spurring this very strange thing where employees were feeling a loss of identity.\n\nIf I could say it's one thing, it's that Google maintained a startup feeling even though it was a big company. But somehow these tech companies have become the infrastructure of the world, and the people that run them are like heads of state.\n\n**Looking back, what do you see as the biggest lasting impacts from the 2018 walkouts?**\n\n**CS: **I was so fascinated when Marc Andreessen gave [this interview](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/opinion/marc-andreessen-trump-silicon-valley.html) to The New York Times a year or two ago, expressing this anxiety that management felt the workers were going to revolt. That to me expressed what was so kind of deep and emotionally triggering for the executives about the walkout because, from our perspective, of course, we were demanding accountability.\n\nAnd for an industry that doesn't have so much accountability because these companies have so much power, it seemed like the world could agree that having some pushback from employees was an important gate or some sort of limit for the company.\n\nOne of the biggest impacts was that it so freaked out the management that they were willing to kind of swing the pendulum back the other way from the corporate transparency and \"we can tolerate dissent,\" and then it was just sort of like, \"[no more political speech](https://www.businessinsider.com/google-community-guidelines-no-politics-2019-8) on the mailing list,\" and they fired people.\n\nAnd this chilling effect, which had ramifications on the culture, was worth it for them, I think, to recalibrate the power between employees and workers. It also just accelerated the disillusionment I think for a lot of people in the tech industry.\n\n**There is now an Alphabet union. Do you think employees at Google have more or less power today?**\n\n**CS: **It can always surprise us. The company has made a concerted effort — and you see it across the industry — in the way they're talking about workers, with the exception of the top AI people maybe. It's essentially: you could go at any given time.\n\n[\"Will AI replace workers?\"](https://www.businessinsider.com/list-companies-replacing-human-employees-with-ai-layoffs-workforce-reductions) is a less interesting question to me than how the management sees the threat of that as quite advantageous. It's very good for the management if people feel like, \"I need to work harder to prove myself even as a human being.\" It's such a 180 from \"people are the lifeblood of this company\" and all these other things that Google used to say.\n\nBefore it was all, \"let's nourish the workers.\" Now it's sort of like, \"you have to sing for your supper.\"\n\n**You saw from the inside how Google obsessively tried to buoy its image. The company has a lot more battles today — regulation, privacy, the AI war. What do you think those conversations inside Google look like right now?**\n\n**CS: **I think that the company that I saw was really eager to preserve its image. And I think that Google sort of lost control of its image in a lot of different ways. Again, it doesn't seem to harm the complete chokehold that has. It's really successful in the AI race, [despite recent setbacks](https://www.businessinsider.com/google-io-2026-gemini-3-5-pro-2026-5). It is absolutely a critical piece of infrastructure in the world at this point. So it's not like this sort of image necessarily has any huge effect on its bottom line.\n\nThey seem to have lost in the all-fronts war, the war for the hearts and [minds of the employees](https://www.businessinsider.com/google-workers-rally-for-job-security-at-mountain-view-hq-2026-7), which I think was something that was so huge to the company back in the day. It seems like they decided along the way that's not the most important thing. They don't do the same kind of all-hands and family feeling, and sharing all the company information.\n\n**After leaving Google you started an advice column called Tech Support — \"Existential advice for the modern tech worker!\" What has struck you most about the letters you've received from tech insiders?**\n\n**CS: **It surprised me that people I thought were happy and content were struggling with some of the things I did. I saw myself as particularly angsty those last few years, but I now know that angst is widespread. I think in general people are asking themselves, \"if you can't really make a good living being a creative person or following some passion project, how can those things coexist? How can someone continue to work at a job that makes their bread while also tending to their soul?\"\n\nI think because we no longer expect our corporate [job to fill our soul](https://www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valley-therapists-tech-workers-neuroses-2026-8), and it seems almost comical that at one time we thought it might, what space does that open up? The notes I've gotten have always been about the crisis of meaning, and I think AI only accelerates that.\n\nThere was someone I knew from YouTube who went and joined the circus. I think Covid pushed people who wanted to do a completely different thing to the type of tech marketing job we had, and I find that inspiring.\n\n**I have to ask — and you mention it briefly in the book — Google's first generative AI chatbot ****was called Bard****. Given that was your unofficial title inside Google, how did that feel?**\n\n**CS: **It's funny that it didn't work out. But it felt to me like this nostalgic idea of Google's culture. That to me is what it was playing off of. The Bard of Google, Google Poet Laureate — it all spoke to the spirit of the company, which was whimsical and friendly and also trying to be somewhat esoteric. I used to work for the internal news, which was a lot of waxing poetic about all the geniuses and tinkerers, the gurus and sages.\n\nIt was a company that loved characters, and it loved the lore. I didn't think someone made the direct connection to me, it's just that it was a chord and a thread in the culture for sure. It was funny that it didn't end up panning out, and they switched to something else. It fit.\n\n*Have something to share? Contact this reporter via email at *__hlangley@businessinsider.com__* or Signal at 628-228-1836.*", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-google-lost-the-war-for-the-hearts-and-minds-of-its-employees-q-a-with", "canonical_source": "https://www.businessinsider.com/claire-stapleton-google-employee-walkouts-protest-dont-be-evil-book-2026-8", "published_at": "2026-08-17 11:03:46+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-17 11:13:02.970080+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-policy"], "entities": ["Claire Stapleton", "Google", "YouTube", "Business Insider", "Fred Turner", "Mark Zuckerberg", "Pentagon", "ICE"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-google-lost-the-war-for-the-hearts-and-minds-of-its-employees-q-a-with", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-google-lost-the-war-for-the-hearts-and-minds-of-its-employees-q-a-with.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-google-lost-the-war-for-the-hearts-and-minds-of-its-employees-q-a-with.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-google-lost-the-war-for-the-hearts-and-minds-of-its-employees-q-a-with.jsonld"}}