A tech memoir presented as a story of metamorphosis ... Her story, though familiar, has the potential to be powerful ... 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.
If you have ever worked at a dysfunctional office, Don’t Be Evil will likely make your cortisol levels spike ... Along the way, Stapleton makes a miscalculation common to the workplace tell-all genre: dwelling on her childhood ... Anxiety courses through her pages, as if she’s bracing to get smacked by some authority figure ... To read Don’t Be Evil is to remember that you too can rid yourself of the malignance.
In her eye-opening memoir, Don’t Be Evil: Bad Bosses, Fake Promises, and My Escape From Big Tech, she chronicles, with intelligence, wit and brutal honesty, her nearly 12 years with the company ... A blunt account of one woman’s transformation from eager-to-please corporate striver to clear-eyed activist. It well earns its place alongside other recent accounts of the misdeeds of Big Tech like Sarah Wynn-Williams’ Careless People and Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley ... Books like Stapleton’s will at least arm people determined to reform them with information they’ll need to make that effort.
Stapleton is best when she’s self-incriminating, as when she writes of realizing she 'had become someone who managed my life like I was in a permanent performance review.' The author’s blend of righteousness and gallows humor will resonate with readers who are disenchanted with big tech or their own high-pressure work environments.
In this sharp, searing account, a Bay Area native takes us inside Google’s frothy early days—and her own experience as a newly beguiled 'Googler' who slowly awakens to a harsher reality ... Stapleton’s account is personal and timely—puncturing the myth of tech companies’ self-proclaimed benevolence reveals how corporate merging of identity and work distorts the authentic self ... A witty, razor-sharp exposé from the ultimate insider—a true believer who lived it, loved it, and finally saw through it.
