Hi there! My name is jager. I've had an account for a while but never really started using the site even though it's really cool. I'm not all that social and until recently I've been working for Google which meant I couldn't really talk about the things that I want to anyway.
So, about me. I'm a liberty loving Iowan who messes with computers for a living. I am expert in GNU/Linux system administration and interested in all sorts of related things. I'm a member off the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the American Civil Liberties Union. I am a member of the Tor project as an exit node administrator. I like to play Go (I'm 9kyu on KGS.) I have my private pilot's license for single engine small airplanes. I live on a family farm (my cousin does the farming) and have been learning to garden. I just bought chickens! I want to make a food forest here, but currently it is more of a bad young orchard. I have a lot of work to do but now I have more free time. Perhaps I'll take some pictures and video of the stuff we are working on around here.
I have been away from the Internet for a long time. I used to hang out on Freenode and run some websites and services for my friends but I got burnt out by the trolls and malicious users. I've worked for Google for the last 10 years helping them build their Iowa data-centers which may be the biggest complex in the world, I'm not sure. I had been channeling my social and technical activities into their projects but have been increasingly disillusioned with them over the last years. Last winter I bought some crypto (mainly Litecoin and Monero) and was hoping it would make me rich so I could retire with style but they are mostly underwater now, alas. I have some gold and silver that are also underwater. I'm starting to think I'm terrible at finances. It's only going to get worse!
This year has been a hard one. Google has pissed me off more than they ever have, which is really saying something - I've had an excellent view of many controversies there from the inside. This year was the year I had to draw the line and go from complaining and trying to change things inside Google to making a hard break from them. Project Maven is something I can't apologize for. Insofar as the work I have done has enabled it I am deeply sorry. I'm just a datacenter tech, low level indeed, but I felt like I needed to Take a Stand, so last week I resigned from Google. I thought I'd share with you my (lightly edited for confidentiality) resignation letter. I had hoped there would be more of us to resign, although Heather Roff's resignation alone sends a pretty strong message, I think. I am proud to stand with her and the others
On Fri, May 4, 2018 at 11:01 PM, Christopher Yeager yeagerc@google.com wrote:
go/jager-is-leaving
I have been asked to write down why I am leaving. I have been putting it off
because it is complicated and I am sad about it, but I can’t procrastinate
forever. In order to know why I am leaving you need to know a little bit
about me, which requires that I talk about myself in ways that I normally
don’t feel like doing. I am shy, but I’m not afraid. This is gonna be long,
so feel free to just mute or browse away and ignore this. But maybe you want
to know. So here goes.My name is Christopher Yeager. I am 42 years old. I am Datacenter Technician
Level 3. I help maintain and deploy the hardware and networks that run the
applications that SWEs write and SRE supports, but I mostly work with other
Ops people, mainly DCOps and NetOps. I have been a fulltime Googler for 3568
days today and longer than 94.65% of all full-time employees. I was a
contractor for 6 months before that. I was the first Iowan hired to run the
Iowa datacenters. I will not quite make my 10 year Google birthday. I
collect Moma badges and write terrible scripts to make my teammates’ work
easier, but nothing you can call Software. I once won an Award for being the
Top Performing HWOpsen in my region, but I’m not exactly sure what the
criterion for selection were. :) I won a Google Citizenship Award once for
which the criteria were much more clear and I got $4000 along with it too.
I’m not rich though. :) My 3 word mission statement has always been “I
fight for the Users” even though it’s 4 words. I do as I please and ignore
the rules and suffer the consequences. I used to
run fiber in the CCNRs by feeding the fibers into the overhead trays while
cart surfing and walking on top of the NGF: faster and more efficient and I
promise you I was very careful indeed. I am a long time disciple of Richard
Stallman and I used to run only Free Software until I came to Google and
started making exceptions for our products. I am a Ron Paul Libertarian and
I caucused for him in 2008 and 2012 up the the Iowa State Convention - I
served on the Rules Committee. I stand with Kant and the deontological
philosophers. I love you all, even the ones I disagree with, which is
frankly a lot of you, as you can imagine. I study history in my spare time.
I feel like I am the smartest person in almost every room, but at Google I
am surrounded by my peers. Is that enough about me? Perhaps too much? I’m
not sure.I am leaving Google. I even cried about it. I feel like you are my family,
even the ones I never meet and only email and chat with. There are a lot of
reasons. I don’t think this is the same company it used to be, and I guess
that’s literally true: we are Google LLC (not Inc.) and have a Parent
Company now. I now work in Cloud which has almost twice the headcount as all
of Google had when I started. We have mostly all new executives. I miss
Patrick and Rachel and Marty “Leakers Get Fired” Lev. I miss when Larry was
in charge and went to Sergey for advice on what was Evil or not. I think we
have lost our way. Don’t be Evil was foundational, Do the Right Thing is not
the same. The 10 Things are still true, it’s just that we don’t believe they
are anymore.But you want specific reasons. Project Maven is the Last Straw, but I will
give you more. I believe James Damore didn’t do anything wrong and he should
not have been fired. I agreed with almost everything in his entire memo. I’m
not a racist or a sexist or an anything-ist, just a guy who wants to be able
to talk about science. Here at Google there is science and there is
“science” and you can’t talk about “science” because that might be harmful.
As far as I can tell there is also politics and “politics”. History and
“history”. We have decided to show only Right Answers. Pretty soon we’ll get
to the point that Eric wanted to be at: we can give the Single Right Answer
to every query. We are pretty sure of ourselves and that scares the shit out
of me. Science is never settled. You can always ask another question. When I
see fellow Googlers speak out in favor of censorship I don’t know what to
think. Trust me I understand being sure you are right, but why can’t you let
people who are wrong speak? Are you that afraid?I think you are. I think you are afraid of Global Warming so you want to
help stop it. You are afraid of disease so you want to eradicate it. You are
afraid of tyranny so you want to stop people from talking about it, lest it
spread. The one thing you aren’t afraid of is that you might be wrong. But
what if you are? What if the polio vaccine had a cancer virus in it, and in
order to get rid of polio everyone was compelled to get cancer? What if the
sun really did just get a bit hotter for a while, and we are preparing for
Global Warming when in reality the sun is falling asleep and the real danger
is crop losses and starvation from late springs and harsh, early, long
winters. Are you really so sure of yourselves that you would literally
punish people for speaking about these possibilities? I lurk on politics@
and you guys know who you are. Meanwhile we are being sued by Prager for
putting their videos in limited state. It's
probably a coincidence though right? I bloody well hope so, but I am losing
faith. If we are wrong about something important and we intentionally hide
information that could save lives I am afraid for what that means. Just
because you think the Health Ranger is full of shit doesn’t mean he is.
There have been conspiracies as long as there have been power structures,
and you should perhaps look into some of the terrible things that are true
that were once called conspiracy theory and mocked and derided - in fact
look into the origins of the term itself. I assure you that we will find
more. The best solution for speech you disagree with; hate speech,
conspiracy theories; alternative history, whatever it is; is just more
speech. We can’t get to the bottom of things we can’t talk about. And there
are things it is illegal to talk about already so we need to be very wary.We should talk about broken promises before I wrap up. I encourage you to
search for “google broken promises” and read about the things we have
changed our minds about over the years. I remember “Never Delete an Email”
fondly, but now Gmail storage is for sale so that had to go. In 2012 we
literally crossed out the line in our privacy policies that said “We will
not combine DoubleClick cookie information with personally identifiable
information unless we have your opt-in consent” and I’m pretty sure Sergey
himself promised that Gmail data would never be combined with DoubleClick
data. There are a lot, I don’t care to recall them all. In every case we
have been presented with at least a plausible reason why this should be
done. But it doesn’t change the fact that I’ve been watching the line move
farther and farther over literally a decade, with the perspective of an
ethically minded insider concerned about when I am going to have to write
this letter. :( I had other employees that I watched, and figured they
seemed sensible and I liked the way they thought and if they leave then I
should consider leaving. I think the only one left is Urs. Cory is gone,
Erica is gone, Rudd-O is gone, people with a strong voice and a compass
that, even if it points differently than mine is some ways, at least it was
pointing strongly and they were watching it. But they are gone. I suspect
people are watching me as their canary, and that’s part of the reason I feel
like it’s time to leave. I’ll tell a story about Urs, if you’ll indulge me
further.Once upon a time Urs cae to Iowa and I was feeling particularly cantankerous
because we had announced the deprecation of Google Talk, our chat service
which had served us well for years and which you can still read about at
https://developers.google.com/talk/open_communications, interestingly. On
that page we talk about the importance of open protocols, the importance of
client choice and server choice, things I was excited about and of which
Stallman would approve. Hangouts does not check any of the boxes which make
Stallman smile, however. I was fortunate to be able to ask Urs questions,
long, detailed, repeated questions while he was live on stage, about my
concerns. He was very gracious with his time and actually I took time away
from other questioners I’m sure, and I’m sorry for that, but I was sort of
on a roll. He finally settled on the answer which had to satisfy me: that
no-one else was federating with us, they were using the openness of the
protocol to do things that Urs felt was helpful to their business but not to
ours, and that at the end of the day, business trumps the ethics of
openness. In the course of his answer he managed to irritate me further by
expounding on the limitations of SMTP and IMAP and wishing out loud we could
deprecate those protocols too, or so it seemed to me. And I was crushed. And
now we are extending Gmail with features that other clients can’t support.
If you wait long enough, they will change their minds on whatever suits
them. New people will come, and they won’t even know a promise was made and
will anyway not care because it will be obviously better for the business to
break it. What does that mean about promises about Maven? I think I will
leave before I find out.We have lost our way. I don’t think you need to follow me out. You can stay
and fight and I will not think less of you. Not all of you live on a farm
and have squirreled away some Fuck You money; you need to pay the bills and
care for your families. I understand. In go/why-lnolan-is-leaving Laura said
something that I will quote here, I think it is worth repeating to you.“People will mostly do what the bureaucracy of their organisations tells
them to do. People will create small parts of larger wholes, which may be
used to do terrible things, and not feel as responsible for the outcome when
these projects come to fruition.I have come to conclude that this ability to diffuse responsibility is a bug
in the human firmware.”Remember this tendency and try to account for it. Remember the Millgram
Experiment and the Bystander Effect. Tell the truth, or at least don’t lie.
Try to assume that everyone you meet knows something you don’t. Assume good
faith in all humanity, I think hate is much less common than is generally
assumed - we just disagree, and need to talk it out.To those of you who know me well enough, try to sometimes think of what I
might have said and say it to the people who need to hear it. Be fearless.
Rules are made to be broken. When the rules are wrong the only way to be
right is to break them, actually. Laura also said the last 6 months have
shown us “the surfacing of a fundamental, radical, and deliberate change in
how Google does business.” I agree. So I have to leave. I will miss you all
and the last decade has been the best in my life.My final day is 5/9. My personal email is yeagerc@gmail.com, please feel
free to stay in touch.Goodbye, Google. :(