Not excusing it, but I’d say it’s very easy to feel disconnected from others when you’re in a privileged position of power.

Everyone else becomes “them”, and you lose track of what “normal” or “average” experiences are like, because you tend to live within a very different space to others, and tend only associate with people with similar privilege levels.

I remember visiting my country’s Parliament building, and within about 15 minutes having this weird sense of disconnection due to the incredibly different beautiful and privileged environment. Everywhere were massive pieces of art, beautiful marble inlays, everything was clean and well ordered, great big wide open spaces, beautifully carved wooden chairs in dining areas etc.

I remember thinking no wonder politicians tend to be labelled disconnected and removed from the concerns of the average citizen. If I was working in that building 8-12 hours a day, 4-6 days a week, 40+ weeks a year, I’d find it hard to remain grounded and to also remind myself that what I was experiencing was something less than 5% of the population might experience, rather than being the “norm” or standard for the majority of the population.

Not really that weird.

It’s a common occurrence.

It’s a passion project that someone or a team spend a lot of time and energy on, likely thinking that the advantages of implementation will be so obvious that it’ll just be out into production based on its self-evident merits or improvement on existing practices.

Then it hits the concrete wall of reality, where there’s actually lots of friction and barriers in the process of trying to get the project into production and implemented. Management just doesn’t want to go ahead with it for whatever reason, and people don’t seem to be as enthusiastic about it and clamoring for it as the dev/team thought they would be, despite it solving a number of common issues they have with a product/service.

So the dev/team can either go home and forget about it, starting a new project, or write a manifesto remembering and defending the project they’ve spent many hours on.

It almost reads like a PhD thesis defence. At least that PhD then gets recorded, filled and archived, and despite it potentially having no immediate real-world impact, possibly someone down the line might access the extensive work and research already done here, and use it to further their own project, and fingers crossed that project has more success in making a real-world change than this one.

TL;DR: I imagine his management don’t want to go ahead with implementation for whatever reason, but because the research and any coding was done during his time at Google, he can’t just go and create his own app or implementation, or approach another more willing company for implementation. But by providing the research and element summaries, and points for how a better system might work, he not only memorialized his hours of work on a “dead end” project, but allows others in a less captive situation the advantage of taking his summary and using it to actually try to get change happening elsewhere.

Yep. I wasn’t aware that I had a habit of just ending a conversation with co-workers and walking away (and honestly believing and remembering it had finished) when it was getting into difficult or emotional territory.

Several years later I found out I had undiagnosed autism, but at the time, was confronting but extremely helpful when the supervisor scheduled a meeting with me and a co-worker to make me aware of that behaviour, and especially that this particular co-worker considered it extremely rude and disrespectful towards her. It had never occurred to me that walking away might be taken that way, but also more importantly, that those conversations weren’t actually finished.

The co-worker felt much better after learning that it wasn’t disrespect towards her, but me apparently not being able to deal with difficult or emotional conversations, and my brain appearing to completely excise those memories of the end of those conversations at the same time as removing me from the situation.

If I’d found out about it by social media, or overhearing others calling me a misogynist (probably because it was the female coworkers that tended towards emotional or confronting conversation) or weird, I can imagine getting instantly defensive and me not believing them, or thinking that they were over exaggerating, misinterpreting etc. Basically, that the problem was them, not me.

It would have been an impossible leap, while feeling attacked “socially” and indirectly, for me to realise on my own, and then admit, that my brain was doing something weird and unusual, and that I couldn’t trust it’s recall in those situations.