"hey, why are you leaving?"

"imo the company makes its money in some really shady ways."

"what's next for you?"

"oh, I'm retiring.. made a lot of money here."

???

There's no doubt that working at Google + frugal living can give a rank-and-file engineer enough "fuck-you money" to make their own calls.

I don't see that as a bad thing though. Just because it's not a liberty everyone has to stop working for a firm they find morally repugnant doesn't imply one shouldn't take the liberty if one has it.

Except they were there for 14 years. Unless it became instantly diametrically opposed to their belief system in the past couple of months, the author has put up with the changing environment for a long time. They're not some skill-less laborer; after all, they worked at google! they could get another job pretty easily, no, one with a company that shared their personal values?

The company has pivoted significantly in the past approximately three to five years (first with the founding of Alphabet, which resulted in Larry and Sergey stepping back from the helm, then with the appointment of Sundar as CEO). Some extremely unsavory things about the way the company operated at the top-tier management level during Larry and Sergey's years also came to light in that time period.

My wild guess is the author stuck around long enough to see if things would turn around and has become convinced they will not, and this is Alphabet's new trajectory as a compnay.

When you say SJW-ish in this context, do you mean you disagree with their assessment (i.e. helping oil companies do their job cheaper is bad, improving the technology underpinning combat drones is bad when the country that uses them demonstrates irresponsible use of them, supporting with labor a company that fires labor organizers is bad)?

I mean that they (the author) appears to hold politically and social positions, which trend towards a common cultural subgroup, colloquially known as SJW's, or "progressives". I'm not ascribing approval or disapproval to that group, and I'm not trying to drag any positive or negative connotations from the title.

I'm just pointing out that its rare to read an article where someone complains about the company they work for, and then stops working there. It was a refreshing change of pace.

I think this comment feels like trying blatantly to pin OP into a bad position, honestly this is quite disingenuous.

The op put themselves there, when you call something "SJWish" without actually talking about the positions, then you're being disingenuous yourself.