A 2015 Tech Recruit's Faith, and the Motto That Echoed It
Tan joined the tech industry after graduating from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design in 2015, and what MIT News records from him is the shared conviction of that moment: that technology, and internet technologies in particular, had the potential to bring about a more progressive version of the world.
MIT News pairs that belief with a corporate artifact of the same era — Google's once-famous "don't be evil," which the company used as an informal corporate philosophy and code-of-conduct guideline. The pairing is the interesting part. A recruit's sense of what his industry was for and an employer's slogan turn out to be close enough in spirit that a magazine can describe one as echoing the other, which is either evidence of a real shared project or evidence of how well a slogan can absorb other people's hopes.
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MIT News also traces where that confidence went: with the start of the first Trump administration, some tech employees began questioning whether their employers really intended to support policies for a more democratic world.
Mottos are cheap. What stays interesting is that employees treated one as a standard they could hold an employer to, which is different from treating it as decoration.