The 'Bard of Google' spins a tale of tech idealism and disillusionment

Claire Stapleton's Don't Be Evil recounts her 12 years at Google, the 2018 employee walkout and her growing disillusionment with the company's culture and corporate values

By Leah Rich

 

Don’t Be Evil: Bad Bosses, Fake Promises, and My Escape From Big Tech

By Claire Stapleton

Published by William Morrow

274 pages  $30

 

For two decades, tech jobs were all the rage, and not just for software engineers. Among a cohort of liberal arts graduates, tech was an industry of opportunity, a way to turn “useless” degrees into viable career paths. Now, in the wake of mass layoffs and a scarcity of once abundant roles, all that rage has been transferred to tech memoirs. But besides airing dirty secrets and getting everyone a little bit angrier, shouldn’t the tech memoir also offer valuable insider insights about how to keep things from getting even worse? 

Don’t Be Evil, by the former Google employee Claire Stapleton, is a tech memoir presented as a story of metamorphosis: A bright-eyed graduate with a degree in English is swept up in the Web 2.0 optimism of the 2000s before she becomes disillusioned with and is cast out of the organisation she loved. 

Hired by Google straight out of college, Stapleton works at the company for 12 years, writing copy for corporate communications and social media marketing. Well-known internally for crafting quasi-literary, sometimes self-parodic corporate hype (“Our corporate network is as boundless as the sea, our work force as deep”), she is better known externally as an organiser of the 2018 Google walkout, when 20,000 employees left their desks for one day in protest of the company’s handling of sexual harassment. 

Stapleton opens Don’t Be Evil with a scene from the end of her time at Google, in the immediate aftermath of the walkout. Her manager, a marketing exec, has convened a mandatory team off-site and asked Stapleton to give a presentation: “Could you share your learnings and insights from coordinating the walkout?” Stapleton knows the request is absurd, but she dutifully goes ahead anyway, presenting the walkout as if it were any other branding campaign. 

Between this grim moment and the book’s final chapters, she briefly shows us the powerful spell Google cast over doe-eyed millennials in 2007. The magical feeling was especially evident during so-called TGIF meetings, at which the company’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, heard from and responded to their employees. 

Eager to help sustain this enchantment, Stapleton quickly establishes herself as a major force of internal comms. She helps to write Page and Brin’s TGIF scripts and her own TGIF emails and memes. Her job, she explains, “was to tell the company its own story — to give it a distinct voice”. And so she became known as “Google’s poet laureate, or the Bard of Google”. 

It’s not clear how long the magic lasts, as the narrative soon takes a jarring turn: In 2008, a year after she joins Google, Stapleton’s beloved older brother, Scott, dies in an accident. The loss is devastating. She describes Scott as the cynic who could see through the mythos she was helping to create. 

Scott’s influence is a significant and formative element of his sister’s eventual political awakening, Stapleton suggests, but she unwittingly gives her co-workers more power in her narrative. Two weeks after her brother’s death, she plunges herself (and her reader) back into familiar corporate miseries: terrible managers, endless politicking, men behaving badly, glossy girlbosses and work that seems increasingly meaningless. Nothing she reveals will be a shock to casual readers of magazines like Wired, or even The New York Times. 

The author moves from internal comms to Google’s Creative Lab, and finally lands on a social media marketing team for the company’s video platform, YouTube, in 2014, the year that online discourse is dominated by the Ice Bucket Challenge and the culture war prelude known as Gamergate. Stapleton, meanwhile, crafts mission statements like “We remind the world what it loves about YouTube.” 

As the years pass, Stapleton shares her growing disillusionment with the corporate line. But how much do we believe her? Twelve years is a long time to stick around, and it’s unclear how deep her newfound understanding goes. In the wake of serious sexual misconduct allegations in 2018, she’s surprised by how much the company protects and even rewards male executives like the Google Android developer Andy Rubin. She’s surprised again, in 2019, when HR doesn’t deal more seriously with her allegations of retaliation after the walkout, or help her keep her position. 

For the reader, this last point may be most surprising. Despite it all, she still wants to stay. Her tenure at Google ends before Covid, before the roller coaster of the 2020 and 2024 presidential elections, before the industry layoffs and the crushing AI tsunami of recent years, all of which reshaped Silicon Valley and society at large. We know Stapleton is not at fault for where we are now. She never ascended to the upper echelons of leadership. But she did give her voice to a corporation that used it to do harm, as she recounts, both to its employees and to the world. 

In her conclusion, all she leaves us with, in the form of advice, is a watered-down riff on the company’s own motto: “Try not to be evil.” Surely the original Bard of Google should be able to spin a better rallying cry than that. 

The reviewer has worked in tech for over a decade, including at Instagram, Spotify and The Slack ©2026 The New York Times News Service