r/AskReddit • u/DrCompenomics • 12h ago

Who’s the best real-life example of “you either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain,” and what happened?

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u/FarinaSavage 6h ago edited 1h ago

Don't be evil.\ ETA: Thanks for the award, lovely Redditor!

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u/SilverStar9192 6h ago

It would be interesting to be a fly on the wall in whatever meeting they decided to retire that slogan.  Like, a bunch of managers in a room having to face the reality that they may, in fact, be evil.  

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u/FarinaSavage 6h ago

Classic "are we the baddies?"

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u/Actually_No_One 3h ago

Slogan? They had a gigantic "dont be evil" in Google rainbow colored letters in Google HQ. I would pay to be a fly on the wall when they took that down.

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u/slashthepowder 4h ago

I can just imagine the conversation starting with a rhetorical question of “what is evil”

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u/FarinaSavage 1h ago

"Who are we to sit in judgment? In fact, isn't the real evil forcing one's own moral compass on another? In a data-driven world, what better True North is there than KPIs? Now, about Q4 projections..."

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u/Loneliestar 4h ago

I imagine they crossed out "evil" and wrote in "poor".

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u/Elkburgher 5h ago

One doesn't face that reality. They just dont care anymore

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u/rott 5h ago

But at some point they had to decide to remove the slogan from the website. That's the meeting I'd like to witness.

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u/Elkburgher 5h ago

By that stage they couldn't give a fuck, they prob laughed at it

Was a silly slogan anyway, they were a search engine

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u/ERedfieldh 4h ago

TIL "Don't be evil" is a silly slogan and you shouldn't adhere to it unless you're....something I guess? I dunno. Why would you think it's a silly slogan regardless the situation?

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u/ObscureGrammar 4h ago

My guess is, they would have had a discussion about how abuse of that slogan by a hostile outside force would be bad publicity and therefore harmful to business. No soul-searching needed or done.

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u/755goodmorning 48m ago

I was there, sort of. I was part of many meetings where we talked about how that phrase was problematic. It was a really dumb slogan that caused a shit-ton of internal issues.

I’m serious. AMA if you are curious.

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u/Tinac4 9m ago

Very interesting! Was the main problem controversy over what did and didn’t count as evil, if you’re okay with answering? I know there was some political turbulence at Google in 2018 and 2024, curious whether the second round was related.

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u/755goodmorning 3m ago

Lots of early people found it useful to say anything they had a personal beef with was “evil”. Since we had weekly all-hands where the founders/execs would answer practically any question, that meant a lot of difficult product decisions had to get emotionally litigated in public by people with little understanding of the underlying issues involved. Your version of “evil” might be my version of “keeping international employees out of jail”

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u/Klendatu_ 10m ago

When did it start to become challenging to reconcile with what the company was doing / about to do?

Also, can you give a range of examples?

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u/RogueJello 4h ago

It was always about pointing out the company was becoming evil, starting with it's adoption.

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u/LurkerZerker 1h ago

Yeah, anybody who needs a big sign like that as a reminder to not be evil must have some distinct evil leanings to begin with.

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u/LKZToroH 5h ago

I bet there was no decision on that. That they actually didn't even knew about it. Just some casual dev at some point looked it and said "yep, that went out of the window many years ago, let me remove this shit already"

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u/BLT_Trade_r 1h ago

These people don't feel that; they have always known it was just a manipulation to get customers behind them. The meeting probably went like, well we did a good job and we are now the market leader, we cannot pretend to be the underdog anymore so its now time to switch it up which was always the plan from the start.

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u/foodank012018 1h ago

No meeting, it was just quietly removed. Maybe a memo.

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u/Inzanity2020 47m ago

Honestly, this is probably what happens to most humans when enough money and power are on the table. We all like to imagine we’d stay principled and resist the greed and not be “evil”, but realistically, most of us probably wouldn’t. Redditors are no exception, despite how morally superior everyone acts in hindsight

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u/ichabod01 3h ago

They omitted punctuation on that line. It should be read:

Don’t, be evil.

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u/ChronoMonkeyX 1h ago

behave ethically? Don't!

Be Evil!