I thought the AI boom was producing a new level of bad behavior, what with MongoDB CEO CJ Desai peacing out, not to mention Google’s earlier controversial “acquihire” of Windsurf’s executive team. But I was wrong: Money has a long history of hollowing out our ethical norms.
I thought the AI boom was producing a new level of bad behavior, what with MongoDB CEO CJ Desai peacing out, not to mention Google’s earlier controversial “acquihire” of Windsurf’s executive team. But I was wrong: Money has a long history of hollowing out our ethical norms.
The problem in these and other AI moves isn’t really about the money, but rather about the trust, or lack thereof, left in the wake of the moves. My former MongoDB colleague Meghan Gill brought this into focus after Desai’s departure. In a post following her sharply critical tweet about the exit, she put the business case plainly: “A leader’s word is a business asset.” Otherwise stated, investing in employees and planning leadership transitions help build a company that people can trust.
That sounds almost embarrassingly obvious. Yet some responses to Gill’s thoughts treat integrity as an unreasonable expectation in a capitalist economy. Take the money, their logic says, because everybody else would.
Perhaps. But even if you don’t think ethics matter in some absolute sense, Gill’s point doesn’t require you to have Leave It to Beaver (look it up) sensibilities. After all, enterprise software companies succeed largely by fostering trust, which manifests in long time horizons for supported products and more. If AI companies want to cash in on the enterprise, they’re going to need to start acting in ways that earn trust, rather than burn it.
MongoDB’s September 28 filing records Desai giving notice on September 24, with his resignation effective four days later, the day Meta announced him as its chief enterprise platform officer. The filing doesn’t tell us everything discussed privately, and neither announcement establishes that a bigger paycheck drove the decision. What it does establish is a remarkably short interval between the formal notice and the departure of the person running the company. A rank-and-file employee would normally give at least two weeks’ notice.
In context
- Topic: Estrategia y Gobierno de TI — Decisiones de portafolio, costo total, gobierno y marcos de referencia.
- Source: InfoWorld
- Published: 06/10/2026
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Why it matters
IT governance rarely fails for lack of technology. It fails for lack of clarity about who decides what. A story like this one is usually the visible symptom of an operating model that no longer fits the size of the organisation, and those models get changed before the pressure arrives, not after.
I read it looking for coordination cost. Every technology decision splits work across areas that do not report to each other, and that is where the return leaks out. If nobody defined who resolves it when two areas disagree, the project already has its grounding date set.
What usually goes wrong
What usually goes wrong is the part never discussed with the areas that will carry the work. It gets decided at the top, communicated downward, and the resistance shows up not as opposition but as slowness. Nobody says no; everything simply takes twice as long and nobody can explain why.
What to watch
- What gets switched off to fund the new thing; if nothing does, the budget will hurt in six months.
- How the relationship with current vendors is left, which is usually where the dependency nobody measured is sitting.
- Who ends up owning the decision, and with what budget of their own rather than borrowed.
How I read this entry
The way I would bring this down to earth is in three moves: name an owner with their own budget, define two metrics reviewed in committee every month, and set a date on which somebody decides to continue or stop. It is unglamorous, and it is what separates programmes that land from programmes that get discussed.
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Living through this in your own team?
Open the chat and tell me how you're handling it. I'm interested in comparing notes.
