![]() The action was, she said, “Googlers doing what Googlers do best.” But the corporate kumbaya was short-lived. The company’s CFO, Ruth Porat, said at a conference the following week that she’d walked out herself. Initially, executives loudly embraced the Walkout: Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, sent a note to the whole company expressing his support in Googlers’ participating. 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. Sure, I was outraged by the Rubin severance, but I got involved in the Walkout because I cared about Google and what I believed it stood for. The Walkout glittered with the kind of optimism and promise that had drawn me to the company and kept me there. Stapleton, left, at one of the Walkout events. Even as the Walkout was planned in a flurry of Gchats and Google Docs, organizers were bracing themselves for the fallout, too. Mass protests threaten the status quo, and “the master’s tools will never be used to dismantle the master’s house,” as one of the more seasoned organizers had told me, quoting Audre Lorde. I’d been warned about becoming a visible organizer within one of the world’s biggest corporations. Something seismic was rumbling beneath the surface of the world’s storied “best place to work.” During my last six months at Google, I would become intimately familiar with just how closed off the company’s famously “open” corporate culture had become-and how far the management would go to prevent its staff from holding the company accountable. Little did we know it would be like waving a lit match in front of a powder keg: when people poured out of Google offices in 50 cities around the world a week after the severance news broke, it was clear this wasn’t just about Andy Rubin anymore. I helped to organize it after corporate documents obtained by the New York Timesshowed that Google paid executive Andy Rubin nearly $90 million in severance after he was accused of sexual misconduct. My last day came in May 2019, six months after the Google Walkout, during which 20,000 Googlers left their desks in a mass protest unprecedented in the tech industry. It wasn’t supposed to end like this: After twelve years at Google, I was unceremoniously escorted off the premises.
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