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When “Don’t Be Evil” Stopped Working at Google

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Eric Ries
September 28, 2025

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Once upon a time, Google was famous for its founding ethos: “Don’t be evil.” This potentially transformative idea was, among other things, a magnet for talent. As the company’s former Head of International Relations wrote in one of the legions of “why I left Google” posts that now litter the internet: 

I had exchanged a wood-paneled office, a suit and tie, and the job of wrestling California’s bureaucracy as Governor Schwarzenegger’s deputy chief of staff for a laptop, jeans, and a promise that I’d be making the world better and more equal, under the simple but powerful guidance “Don’t be evil.”

Claire Stapleton, who helped organize the 2018 mass Google employee walkout over the revelation that the company had given almost $90 million in severance pay to executive Andy Rubin after he’d been accused of sexual misconduct, was so convinced of Google’s commitment that she felt empowered to speak out against the company itself. “I got involved in the Walkout because I cared about Google and what I believed it stood for. This was, after all, the company whose corporate code of conduct famously states “don’t be evil,” and asks employees to speak up if they think something isn’t right.”

Both of them – and many others as Michael Aruvkin, Meredith Whittaker, and more attest to – eventually discovered that the company they had been so attracted to no longer existed. As Stapleton put it, while executives were initially on board with the walkout, including a message of support from Sundar Pichai and the CFO herself joining in at one point, “the corporate kumbaya was short-lived” 

In Ross LaJeunesse’s case, the realization began to dawn after he “executed the company’s landmark [2010] decision to stop censoring Search results in China, putting human rights ahead of the bottom line….Although difficult, I was intensely proud of the principled approach the company took in making this decision. However, the decision infuriated not only the Chinese government, but also frustrated some Google product executives eyeing the huge market and its accompanying profits. In fact, within a year of the 2010 decision, executives for the Maps and Android products began pushing to launch their products in China. I argued strenuously against these plans, knowing that a complete turn-around in our approach would make us complicit in human rights violations, and cause outrage among civil society and the many western governments which had applauded our 2010 decision."

What happened? 

The answer is right there in LaJeunesse’s words: “the huge market and its accompanying profits.” As competition ramped up, Google became obsessed not with its impact on customers and the world, but on the risk of losing them. One former engineer summarized it this way: “Google has become 100% competitor-focused rather than customer focused. They’ve made a weak attempt to pivot from this, with their new internal slogan “Focus on the user and all else will follow.” But unfortunately it’s just lip service. It’s not that they don’t care. The problem is that their incentive structure isn’t aligned for focusing on their customers, so they wind up being too busy and it always gets deprioritized. A slogan isn’t good enough. It takes real effort to set aside time regularly for every employee to interact with your customers. Instead they play the dangerous but easier game of using competitor activity as a proxy for what customers really need.” (Here’s another essay that notes the issues with incentives structured around stock price.) 

The result is that, "While two of Google’s core values are “respect the user” and “respect the opportunity”, in practice the systems and processes are intentionally designed to “respect risk”. Risk mitigation trumps everything else…

  • every line of code you change is risk, so put in a ton of processes to ensure that that every code change is perfect at avoiding risk (never mind if it is uninspiring for the user)

  • anything you launch is risk, so put in a ton of reviews and approvals (literally 15+ approvals in a “launch” process that mirrors the complexity of a Nasa space launch) just to deploy each minor change to a minor product

  • any non-obvious decision is risk, so avoid anything that isn’t group think and conventional wisdom

  • any change from the way things used to be done is risk, so stick to how it was

  • any employee you dissatisfy is career risk, so managers aim for 100% satisfaction among their employees, and employ kid gloves even with their worst under-performers (on the other hand, any individual customer you dissatisfy creates zero risk unless it is a mega-customer, so customer satisfaction is just a concept on a dashboard to be trotted out at an all-hands meeting, tut-tutted about, and then forgotten about)

  • any disagreement with the management chain is career risk, so always say yes to the VP, and the VP says yes to the senior VP, all the way up.

Innovation died, and with it, the company that once had been. "The days of old Google hiring smart people and empowering them to invent the future was gone. The new Google knew beyond doubt what the future should look like.”

When the focus is panic over competition rather than building products and a workplace that truly respects everyone they come into contact with, worrying about being evil falls by the wayside. As yet another ex-Googler wrote, “Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision.” The more this new ethos took hold, the weaker Google’s ability to bring in and keep people who might counteract it became: “The kinds of people whom you need to act as moral compass are the same kinds of people who don't join an organisation without a moral compass."

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