9 August 2026

Don't Be Evil – Claire Stapleton

He roved over to me with his friend Henrique de Castro, a tall, oafish European whose heyday would soon be coming. (Marissa Mayer brought him over to Yahoo to be her number two executive, only to fire him for incompetence a year later. He would make $50 million that year, then collect another $58 million to leave – $108 million for twelve months of demonstrable failure. Capitalism, at work.)

“A bullshit job,” Graeber wrote, “is a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.”

She had an idea that we (meaning me) should write a “megadeck” explaining our social media strategy and socialize it (pun unfortunately intended) within the org and to higher-ups. It took months, but out it came: a presentation more than one hundred pages defining YouTube’s social media strategy in painstaking detail. We had little in the way of measurable business goals—despite our seventy million followers on Twitter, tweets drove negligible traffic back to YouTube, and platforms like Instagram drove no traffic at all, and I would describe the bulk of our engagement as “bot-driven” – but I framed the work with passion and purpose.

YouTube’s brand marketing consisted of a bunch of “brand moments” throughout the year. Pride, for example, or Black History Month, in which we would pour a ton of money and creative agency hours into creating ultimately forgettable hashtag campaigns, playlists, and videos no one in the world ever watched. But nevertheless every year the department swirled around these calendar events and obsessed over the concepts, trying to keep it all fresh and relevant, reporting back how big of a splash we’d made, how innovative we’d been, no matter how much that challenged the reality.

My leadership within the marketing team began to grow — managing people, running campaigns, overseeing the relationship with Big Spaceship, the Brooklyn creative agency that strategized, generated, and posted all the work that we packaged and took credit for internally. But the step-up to management felt occasionally confusing and fraught.

Marly looped me into a big idea she’d had for a YouTube magazine. High-end “corporate editorial” was a bit of a trend – Apple put out a gorgeous hardcover coffee-table book that year; Airbnb was selling a glossy travel magazine. Marly’s thought was that we could distribute this to “key opinion formers,” or “kofs” (this was new corporate jargon and could mean anything from lobbyists to journalists to “the UN,” and crucially it couldn’t be measured) to demonstrate the cultural power of YouTube. It definitely appealed to the vanity of YouTube execs, and a nostalgic sense for what had currency and value in the culture – magazines. She secured a big budget, and she recruited me and someone from Kevin’s team, a cool LA-based curator named Andrew Bangs, to help her make it happen. I wasn’t sure I wanted to get involved – I knew the project was headed for epic levels of delusional grandeur and chaos.

I let my guard down after a glass or two of wine and dished my truth about Kevin 2’s team, how depressing it had been, and further depressing to see him continue to rise the ranks – he’d recently been promoted. (So had the original Kevin from Creative Lab – he’d become a vice president, a herculean, generational wealth-making feat at Google, which had sent an electric current of fury through my body – had no one read his file, where I’d excoriated his management?!)

I more or less lost track of the magazine after that. It dissolved into the background hum of a thousand other corporate priorities. I think they took a few copies to Sundance, probably pressed them into the hands of some vaguely defined “kofs.” One afternoon months and months later, I literally tripped over a box of them in the office.

For the first time I sat in on a “calibration” session, where Danielle and her leads compared notes and settled on performance ratings. The process felt surprisingly subjective. At one point they discussed a guy on Kevin 2’s team whom I genuinely admired – I thought he did thoughtful, steady work. He wasn’t flashy or particularly self-promotional, and Kevin described him in a paternal tone. “Yeah, he really needs to work on his professional skills and how he presents himself.”

YouTube was too big, too volatile, too gravitational; it pulled in billions of eyeballs a day no matter how we managed the brand, the optics. Our whole mandate—shape the daily conversation, boost brand love, remind the world why it loves us – now felt almost delusional. And yet none of that chaos mattered when it came time for the performance review cycle. The only conversation that counted was the one about you, the marketing manager, and to get even more granular about it: how you’d managed up.

She explained – vaguely – that because I’d worked a couple of weeks of the new cycle, HR required another review. This allowed her to keep me at my “extra-high” rating, which fed into bonuses and salary – so really, I ought to thank her. Her voice had sharpened. Be grateful was the subtext. Nothing about it made sense.

Marion barreled on, delivering the familiar mix of flattery and rebuke. Praise I’d heard a hundred times that had lost all force and potency (No one has a better grasp of the voice or community), followed by the old admonition: I wasn’t aggressive enough, hungry enough, willing to fight in the petty turf wars that animated her. “People wonder if you’re truly hungry,” she said. “As you get more senior, you need to push.” Hungry? The idea that I lacked hunger – when I’d not only executed so much of Marion’s vision but written it over the past few years – was too absurd to compute.

The email announcing Marion’s promotion was all stuff I should’ve taken more credit for – all the thought leadership about social media and being the daily voice for the brand. I hadn’t been promoted in three years, despite toggling perennially through the top performance ratings: exceeds expectations, strongly exceeds expectations. I didn’t care about climbing the ranks and – I swore – I didn’t want more responsibility, especially now that I was trying to juggle Malcolm and mom life. I just wanted to do good work and collect my paycheck.

was a bit of a schtick but also refreshing—the rare person at Google who didn’t care about posturing their seniority, calling themselves a “global head” of whatever microscopic-in-the-grand-scheme project they’d been assigned to.

She had dropped my rating. After two years at “exceeds expectations,” I was down to “meets.” The dreaded “meets.” It was the technically acceptable rating for someone new to their role – but after years as a strong performer, it was a scarlet letter. I pressed for the rationale, and she couldn’t really explain it. She mumbled something about not doing enough “thought leadership.” “Thought leadership?” I said – my voice stronger and clearer than I expected. “I just presented to the CEO of the company four times.” She blinked, taken aback, and retreated to pecking at her laptop. On the shared screen, she pulled up the generic marketing rubric and read line items aloud – arbitrary one-size-fits-all requirements plucked from some dusty competence framework. “See? At your level you’re supposed to be sharing insights with the product team.” We had never done that. It was fiction. And yet here she was, shaping my performance narrative from a rubric no one actually used. I thought about all the “thought leadership” I had done for her – all the framing, messaging, analysis, daily back-and-forth, back-and-forth. The labor that undergirded her own ascendant trajectory. I wasn’t doing the right things to get credit, that much was clear.

Rich (her beloved well-paid Rich), she said, was going to be moved out under me, to be my peer. Now he would handle “daily social,” the stream of content we put out every day, which was inarguably the biggest and most influential thing I oversaw. The handful of young people I managed, plus the multiplicity of agencies, were all anchored to this “workstream.” Rich had told me before the holidays that Marion was trying to get him to take them on (in addition to what he was already doing) to build a bigger portfolio so she could promote him the next cycle.

My first idea was to email Marion, recapping our conversation and making the case, bullet by bullet, for keeping my job as it was. She replied quickly, not bothering to engage with the substance of the email. Instead, it was a blunt door in my face: hi claire. thanks for your email. sorry, for the needs of the business, the evolution of the team structure is going to will be happening thx. Ugh. Onward. I decided to reach out to Courtney, our department’s HR person, who I knew and liked well enough.

“Marion’s your biggest fan,” she said, or “I think something’s just gotten lost in translation,” without ever clarifying what, exactly, had been lost. Instead of facing the obvious – my demotion, the retaliation claim – we spent half the meeting circling around whether I was “demotivated.”

I’d given so much to Google and asked for so little. Surely when I did need something – support, a lifeline, whatever – Google would give it.

I don’t understand why I didn’t hear about this. There’s no documentation in your file, Lorraine pinged back. It was crazy to imagine Lorraine just pulling up my file right then and there. What else was in there? I reported it all to HR, I told her.

The employee relations meeting was first. I was joined in a conference room far away from my corner of the office by two women named Dina and Candace in crisp shirts and slacks. What a strange job: listening to people’s stories of “workplace misconduct,” also known as being bullied, abused, assaulted. There had been so many anecdotes unearthed in the Walkout about how these investigations never amounted to anything – they were there to protect the company from liability. They weren’t investigators, they were fixers, there to make the pain go away.

“But what I want to know from you,” Jodi said, “is can you find it in your heart to move forward with Marion? Can you work to restore the trusting connection?” My voice was steady, steely, resolute: “Marion’s the one you need to be asking these questions. She takes no accountability; she refuses to repair, much less to talk to me. I keep saying this is retaliation, and you all keep pushing the responsibility for fixing it back onto me.” “She cares so much about you, Claire,” Jodi replied. “She’s your biggest fan. I know with a little radical candor, you guys can find the path forward.”

Dina and Candace delivered the results of the investigation in a seven-minute phone call. “We looked into your allegations around ‘bro culture’ in Creative Lab as well as your specific work concerns and found that you were treated fairly while you were there.” A dozen women had reached out since the New York magazine article with their horror stories from Creative Lab. I mentioned that. “Understood,” they said. “We thank you for taking the time to share your concerns.” As for Marion, they’d found that my performance had been managed fairly for my work product. However, they determined she had not communicated well about her reorg, and she would be getting some communication training as part of her regular executive coaching. I nearly threw up.

After the investigation concluded, something inside me finally clicked into clarity. My conviction was rock-solid: I had been right about the retaliation, right about the toxicity, right about the harm – and Google had no intention of acknowledging any of it. But another realization surfaced, almost embarrassingly obvious once I could see it: The rupture with Marion hadn’t just damaged my job. It had exposed it.

Whenever I was looped into things (always indirectly, by someone other than Marion), it was like I was being trolled. Marion had another group on the team lead the plan for International Women’s Day, but I was brought in to “amplify” it.

This had always been the bargain, the deal, even before the drama; the only way it would work – the only way I could continue to work at Google – was if I was willing to self-contort beyond recognition. I would have to start playing along again: say, do, think, be whatever Google wanted.

She replied to Lorraine directly to help corroborate my account. I believe Claire, she recounted replying to her, because this very same department has been doing the same thing to me. Lorraine responded (not very promptly) and said she was willing to jump on a call to discuss further. Celie prepared for days, compiling all the screenshots, timeline, and notes into a presentation. It strikes me now that even this was an act of faith in a system that we already knew had forsaken us and was riddled with bad faith actors. Celie was devastated by what happened next. Lorraine was wholly uninterested in hearing her story. She knew all about it, she said, and anyway, it was her doing that Celie hadn’t gotten that job – Lorraine didn’t think she had the right profile for it (despite Celie writing the freaking job description for this role). “I barely got a word in, before she launched into trashing you,” Celie said over the phone afterward. “She said you’re crazy. Unhinged. You’re emotional. Crying in meetings all the time. I didn’t get a word in but was on the verge of tears the entire time.”