Comment by repolfx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by repolfx | Hacker News Reader

Googlers are overwhelmingly young compared to what they used to be. What these people want most, beyond the usuals of money and perks, is for their employer to give them moral structure in life and the constant reassurance that they are good people - something they've been told since birth is the most important thing to be but with nearly no guidance on what that means, beyond the plots of Disney movies.

In effect they want Google to be a church and executives to be priests, preaching a moral code and equally importantly railing against heretics, sinners and apostates.

This need for a new religion can be seen in many walks of life but it seems strongest amongst those immersed in the university system for longest. They've never been judged by any system that wasn't artificial and based purely on the opinions of superiors - from school to college to promo committees and peer bonuses, very few of them have ever really hunted hard for a job, made a product themselves or taken any risky decisions. They've got nothing to give them self confidence and thus fall back on membership of a group identity defined by a mishmash of whatever ideas they picked up from others just like them. Google struggles with them the most because it has hired so many and because Google internally is such a poor approximation of the real world: absolutely stuffed with "rewrite X in Y" style projects and people that don't have any strong reason to be there.

The best way for Google to solve this is a major reduction in headcount, least experienced first. But I think headcount is rather sacred there as it's used as a proxy for ambition, so instead they will continue struggling to be as holy as their student staff demand.

I strongly disagree with this. In fact, what this criticism boils down to is akin to whining about the younger generation. What is happening at Google is actually the opposite of your first paragraph, the employees aren't looking to Google to give them moral structure, their using their own moral code to judge whether google is behaving morally and holding Google to account for it.

The fact that the employees are speaking out and in many cases actually taking direct action that will effect their career prospects is the antithesis of

>They've got nothing to give them self confidence

People with 0 confidence aren't conducting walk-outs, they aren't whistleblowing on Google's questionable military deals. The problem Google has is exactly the opposite- they market themselves as a morally good company and so they end up with a high number of people who view that as important working for them. When they fail to live up to those actual standards, the employees protest. I think trying to ascribe the protests to a lack of courage is a very strange conclusion.

I think you missed my point, which is quite tricky to put into words so I may have not done it well.

"Google" in that context doesn't mean exclusively its management, but rather, the whole group of people. When Googlers stage walkouts and so on they don't care much about the specific situations at hand. If it wasn't one thing it'd be another thing. This is clear from scratching the surface of their complaints in any detail: it's all built on very brittle foundations.

What they want is the feeling of collective moral action, of clarity of purpose, of being a part of something bigger than building the next chat app, and they're able to get that at Google where it wouldn't be tolerated at most companies. It's exactly because this sort of activity does not affect their career prospects or might even enhance them that is why they do it: remember that their promotions aren't decided by management at Google but rather, by committees of the same sorts of people who are protesting.

People with 0 confidence aren't conducting walk-outs, they aren't whistleblowing on Google's questionable military deals.

This is exactly what people with no self confidence in their own goodness would do.

If they were secure in their own morality, in their own sense of living a right life, they wouldn't be attempting to find it by engaging in constant cultural crusades inside their own place of work. It seems quite clear to me that many of their supposed moral positions aren't well thought through and exist primarily so they can protest. In other words, the protests aren't a means to an end (change of policy by Google's management), the protests are the end, in and of themselves, because it's via noisy displays of moral virtue that they find what they're truly looking for.

If you like I can go through some of the inconsistencies in the various positions their employees have taken.

The university system will implode and there will be a lot of political turbulence when these institutionalized young adults struggle to adjust. Putting children for half the population into the education system with the expectation of higher wages through knowledge work when they came out the other side was delusional. Our middle class still believes in a kind of information perpetual motion machine.

That was the nicest, most vicious attack on the pathos and ethos of Googlers I've read in a while. Ouch.

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