What not to take from the "Why I left ______" articles

Two similar pieces are getting a lot of play this week: James Whittaker’s blog post about why he left Google and Greg Smith’s op-ed about why he left Goldman Sachs. Both talk of their high level of company loyalty and enthusiasm in the past. Both bemoan the changes in their respective corporate cultures that led them to leave. Neither seems all that hopeful about his company’s future.

What neither of them does, however, is demonstrate that the problem is that Google/Goldman Sachs used to care about more than just making money but doesn’t anymore. That’s important to note, because for those of us who don’t have a direct connection to the tech or finance industry, it’s tempting to generalize the main takeaway here as “When did the American corporation lose its soul?”

But while you may have heard that corporations are people, they’ve never had souls. They’re governed by rules and structures, not by anyone’s conscience or deeper convictions. In the case of for-profit corporations, those rules and structures are aimed at making money. It’s not one goal they weigh against others; it’s what they exist to do.

Whittaker doesn’t try to argue otherwise about Google, all tech-startup mythology aside. His complaint is about emphasis within the corporate culture:

The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus.

Technically I suppose Google has always been an advertising company, but for the better part of the last three years, it didn’t feel like one. Google was an ad company only in the sense that a good TV show is an ad company: having great content attracts advertisers.... Our advertising revenue gave us the headroom to think, innovate and create.... The fact that all this was paid for by a cash machine stuffed full of advertising loot was lost on most of us.

For those of us who weren’t working there, it’s not immediately clear why it matters what the place felt like or whether its employees thought a lot about its business model. As for Smith, he makes a stronger claim: