This is a source of great frustration to me as someone who previously worked at Google X. So many promising projects thrown in the trash, when all of society would have benefitted if Google had open sourced their defunct projects. You know how some economists joked that you could stimulate the economy by paying people to dig holes and fill them back up again? Doing a bunch of development and then abandoning it seems just as wasteful to me. They trashed a lot of valuable off the shelf hardware that could have been donated to schools too. It’s all such a waste to me.
I tried. They were throwing away thousands of dollars worth of brushless motors. I asked in writing if I could donate them to schools and hobbyists. I was told no by a mid level manager. That rubbed me the wrong way, so I went to Astro Teller’s office hours. He said “this is our trash? We obviously don’t need it then.” He gave me tentative approval, and asked me to email him to check with legal. I did, and ultimately got approval from the head of intellectual property at X. I saved the motors from the trash, but apparently going to Astro was seen as “going over somebody’s head” so I pissed off upper management (the head of the team did not respond to my email and was on vacation while all this happened). So I parked the motors under my desk for a while while things calmed down, eventually got a few more approvals, and took the motors home. I’ve been donating them to hacker spaces and local robotics groups.
But the thing is, schools can’t use brushless motors by themselves. They need power supplies and motor controllers too. So when my team was throwing away fifty 600 watt power supplies, I wanted those too.
The whole time, I was not just asking for one item from the scrap bin, I was asking for an approval process. We threw away perhaps tens of thousands of dollars of valuable off the shelf parts a year. I couldn’t be talking to the head of X every time I needed approval. But management in my team didn’t care. Instead of responding to my request, they complained about my methods, saying I need to go through “proper channels”. I drafted a document describing a process for saving items from scrap that had documentation and oversight without requiring much bandwidth from the higher ups. It went nowhere.
So Google X still scraps thousands of dollars of stuff on the regular. Many people inside X want to help donate that stuff to schools. But the management on my team didn’t care one bit. I guess when you’re paid a million bucks a year, you just can’t relate to the local school kids who can’t afford motors for their robot. But I was once that kid, and to see these people dismiss what help we could give them was too much for me.
It’s still upsetting. Google X talks about changing the world and moonshots but you know what would change the world? Giving valuable supplies to local schools. I offered to do all the work on my own time, but they couldn’t be bothered to give me the time of day.
I understand your feelings about taking things that are waste for a corporation (R&D is a very wasteful process) and giving them to local schools.
As a contrast, the team I was on (Making and Science) purchased an enormous number of safety glasses, which we gave away at Maker Faire. We often gave whole boxes to teachers who asked (like, 144 glasses). You see them all over the place, and the teachers were always thrilled to get them.
But throwing away valuable stuff is still waste. If you can help someone a great deal for next to nothing, that’s worth doing. Forgoing that help and then making donations elsewhere is nice I guess, but it’s still wasteful.
