Manu Cornet cartoon shows life in Googleplex

Ever since Google has transformed from a small search engine into a global company, the company’s name has symbolized the great Silicon Valley. The workplaces, where snacks and drinks are abundantly served to employees, are legendary. Employment tests, in turn, are famous for being fair عادل The best of the best ever This allows you to calculate the chances of passing the first few laps.

But let’s be honest: Google Group Alphabet’s balance sheets now show nearly 140,000 employees. How much better could it be? In hundreds of storyboards that Google initially distributed internally, photographer and software developer Manu Cornet has recorded that life and work at Google’s headquarters are anything but legendary. However, as comics became more important, Cornet was eliminated. Today he works for Twitter. He has comics On his website Published – and in a book.

The collection shows the long journey of the Frenchman who hired Google as a software developer in 2007 and initially worked on the Gmail email service. The first comics show the astonishment: Cornet illustrates the many free snacks, ever-increasing salaries, and frustration when faced with bureaucratic hurdles at work. Meanwhile, you can watch Google employee’s disguised work here. Compared to other companies in particular, the company may seem crooked, but it always strives for the best.

Cornet had unexpected success when he compared the corporate structures of leading companies: Amazon as a perfectly organized business pyramid, Oracle as a legal division with a technical extension, Microsoft as a hostile group of divisions and Google as a chaotic network. Not only did The New York Times print the comic in large format, but Microsoft chief Satya Nadella addressed the criticism in a book of his own. Thanks to the newfound fame, the junior developer of Google Gearbox was able to give himself more and more freedom with his comics, and since then he has also criticized the top management of his own company.

For example, Google’s product policy continues to shed its weight as popular services like Google Reader have been discontinued because they don’t generate any revenue. Constantly changing product names and surfaces confuse not only the group’s customers, but also the developers. Enthusiasm about salaries and snacks wanes, but concern about one’s place in society grows.

You can see from the past few comics that Cornet had no future in the company. His criticism became increasingly acidic. From the old Google motto “Don’t be evil” – in German, for example: “Don’t get angry” – Cornett hastened to write “Pray so no one notices.”

There is no shortage of potential for conflict. From the armaments contracts the Google administration has been playing around with to the controversy over ethical researcher Timnit Gebru: Carnet is not only concerned about these issues, but also about how the administration would house itself in the event of a conflict. “Google’s transparency and accountability made us proud to work there in the beginning,” the developer wrote at the beginning of his book.

So it has been a tradition for management to openly answer the difficult questions of even ordinary employees in a regular round of talks. That frankness has now faded: Trump charts the many ways directors try to dodge problems—whether through non-binding and meaningless answers, or by pointing out informants who bring secret conversations to the public. His conclusion is that today’s Google, even if the founders wanted to avoid it, is more like a “normal company.”

External links: Three tips from other media

• »Steve Wozniak talks about the right to reform« (Video, 9:24 min)
  Apple engineer and co-founder takes us on a short journey through time, where you can repair TVs and other devices yourself with just a few spare parts and a little knowledge. The video is part of a campaign for consumers’ right to repair their devices themselves, which US President Joe Biden also addressed in a government decree. Wozniak says, “It’s time to do the right things.”

• »Inside the failed cybercrime investigation in the FBI, Russia, and Ukraine« (English, 19 lysminotin)
  Serious IT and especially ransomware attacks are becoming prevalent today. In his article, Patrick Howell O’Neill shows the origins of these criminal gangs and the difficulties American investigators faced when they decided to take action against criminals in other countries. Operation Trident Breach ended with five arrests, but it did not deter the successors into action.

• »Secret Service stops mining on 3800 PlayStation 4« (English, 2 minutes to read)
  While everyone is waiting for the Playstation 5, law enforcement officers in Ukraine find a computer farm with 3,800 game consoles that are used to mine cryptocurrency. Compared to the graphics cards available today, the hardware from 2013 is not very efficient. The operators compensated for this defect by not paying their electricity bills.

I wish you a nice week

Torsten Clynes