One Google Staffer Fired, Two Others Put on Leave Amid Tensions
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Googled created a bubble from which its employees can socialize without ever needing to do so with the outside world. Why talk politics with the outside world? Stay with us, where it is safe, people are intelligent, and share your values (we swear).
This is a root problem at the company. It is coming at a great cost.
James Damore shared his views with his social group. These other activists do the same. This is what people do among their own.
Being fired from Google amounts to not just losing a job but "friends" and the only people who the company encouraged socializing with.
Google has a major lawsuit on its hands, regardless of whatever arbitration agreement it makes new-hires sign. Google is causing harm by capturing employees hearts and minds.
Your colleagues are not an authentic social network who you can organise with and pursue activism. You aren't hired to do that. While you are naive for thinking you could, it's not entirely your fault. Google brainwashed you.
They go out in the pub around the corner after work with their company badge on display, they leverage having worked at Google in later jobs as if it has blessed them with infinite wisdom and knowledge.
It's quite cringe worthy to see people fall into that trap. And yes, it's not every single one of them but not exactly a fringe group either.
I don't understand why this phrase itself has such a negative connotation. I bowl alone frequently (three times a week after work), often as a form of personal practice, so I can concentrate on getting better. Doing so has never meant that it was difficult to join a league or find people to socialize with - often by being at the alley I was able to get updates about leagues and clubs starting and I would run into and chat with people (individuals and groups) at the bar or in the lounge.
It was a great way to get outside of my CS/STEM bubble in college.
what's wrong with these employees? Keep your political opinions to yourself. So they propose that my company lose money because of your activism. Don't agree! What if some employees asked that Google cancel any deals with climate change NGOs? How would these employees feel about it?
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
Does it? Because the metrics it reported just this year says it's made up of mostly still white males. https://www.forbes.com/sites/janicegassam/2019/04/07/googles...
As an example of what is in there, for their tech workforce, whites have declined from 57.8% to 43.5% in four years. (see page 33) You can decide for yourself whether this suggests racial bias in hiring.
Download the PDF here: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/diversity.google/...
edit: I was mistaken about the intersectional part. The corresponding stat for white males is a decline from 47.5% to 33.3% in four years. Stunning.
All roles: Asian, 43.9% Black, 4.8% Latin, 6.8% Native American, 1.1% White 48.5%
Women: 33.2% Men: 66.8%
Tech Roles: Asian, 51.8% Black, 2.8% Latin, 5.3% Native American, 0.8% White, 43.5%
Women: 25.7% Men: 74.3%
I've never worked for Google so I have no basis for comparison but it's very common across white collar jobs for employees social circles to very closely if not entirely overlap with work.
Unless you participated in extracurricular activities that weren't school sponsored, you probably never learned to make friends outside of school. Work, like school, is how you develop your social circle.
The growing epidemic of loneliness is probably in part due to the rise of teleworking. No longer do people grab a drink after work.
The growing epidemic of loneliness is probably
in part due to the rise of teleworking. No
longer do people grab a drink after work.
Now that I'm a teleworker, I've got about 10 extra hours of time each week that I don't have to spend commuting. So that actually has benefits for my social life, since I never really hung out with my coworkers anyway!
Of course, I'm a best-case scenario. I have a wife. I have pets. I've lived in this area my whole life and have friends here. I don't need workplace friends. If you don't have those things then you might depend on your workplace for your social connections a little bit more.
To be honest I think workplace friends can really suck anyway. I have made great friends at various jobs, but these days I sort of like to keep "work" and "friends" separate. Having workplace friends can be healthy, but depending on your workplace for friends seems extremely unhealthy. I mean, what happens when you're no longer with the company? It's like you've left a cult and now all your connections have been severed.
When I was in my early 20's, my social life was all about where I worked but now that I'm an adult, I've started to build a solid social network within my town and its various groups. I would hate to socialise with people purely from my office now.
That's something I experienced. I was laid off after 15 years and really I was laid off from my friends too. The company even monitored social media accounts which at the time seemed bizarre but now it's common. I was told by someone still working there HR declared unfriending a fellow employee was considered bullying.
I'm trying my best not to put all my eggs in one basket. I'm trying to make friends outside of work. Everyone knows you shouldn't date a coworker but really we should also not base our entire social life around coworkers either.
But as mentioned above you are in that bubble. Apple even went so far as to encircle everyone with their new building.
This culture of being friends with your coworkers is odd to me. My coworkers suck as friends, the vast majority of the time. And heaven forbid you don't want to be friends anymore, because now you're stuck with them. I have much better luck making friends by joining and participating in clubs dedicated to my hobbies.
It's even more the case I assume to people at Google or other big multinational s. People there are much more likely not to be locals, and a lot of their colleagues are going to be in the same situation. That's the perfect context for friendships.
From personal experience, clubs can be difficult if it is a tightly knit community and you're an outsider; especially so if you don't speak the language. It's not that they are not nice, it's just that you need 2 people to form a friendship.
That said, I'm friendly at work, I've made many friends at work. Some jobs have been a lot friendlier than others. But the idea that you need a job to make friends or you'll lose your friends when you lose a job is alien to me. If they don't want to spend time with you outside of work, they're not your friend.
Would not go into detail but in my past I've encountered some peculiar things that HR was trying to impose on employees. I just told them to sod off and keep me away from their kindergarten. The HR person I talked to was sort of shocked but they did leave me alone. No actions were taken. They just asked me not to promote my view among other employees which I was not interested with anyways.
Teleworking is a major benefactor to breaking that imbalance. Typical IT workers out of every 24 hours you spend about 9 working, 8 sleeping, 2 on commuting and 3 on grooming, meals and chores. That leaves just 2 hours of uncommitted time in which to fit me-time, sports, hobbies and friends. So some things will have to give.
Teleworking doubles the amount of time you have uncommitted. That is not just a 100% quantitative increase. 4 hours can fit things that 2 hours just can not, as any outhouse activity (gym/evening class/pub/cinema/theater/...) has setup/travel/wind-down time as well.
Teleworking, or more general, the absence of the typical commute is what enables you to have a social life.
I spent 7 years teleworking and had no problem grabbing a drink after work. Now that I have to physically co-locate with cow orkers I can't do that because (a) I'm driving and (2) they want to join me.
Drinking alone is the best kind of drinking.
Drinking alone? I dunno about that.
This is absolutely, 100% false. This is exactly what you SHOULD do, and this is what unions are for.
Always organise with coworkers. Otherwise you are giving employers more power over you than you should.
I don't want to be in a union. I don't want to join some club. I don't want to pay dues. I don't want to read newsletters or listen to speeches or be involved at all in the grubby, underhanded manuevering for power that would come with a union. And I'm tired of people condescendingly telling me that I'm wrong for feeling this way. I'm not wrong. Power corrupts and labor is no more pure than mangement. If labor gets the upper hand it will abuse its position.
The solution is a balance of power between labor and management. In my case, I feel I have plenty of power. In the case of Google employees, I feel they have plenty of power. Broadly speaking, programmers (in the US) have plenty of power.
If you want to do good, volunteer at a soup kitchen. Of course that would be hard and would involve looking at things you'd rather not see.
Your employer doesn't have power over you, but you have power over them. Organization is about choosing not to exercise that power by leaving for greener pastures and letting the company rinse and repeat with the next cycle of college graduates, but by staying and choosing to influence the direction of the company in a positive way. You can choose to do your 8 hours every day and devote a full one-third of your life - the only life you get - to someone else's work that you don't have a stake in. But that just seems like the stupid, easy way out.
If I thought that the company was doing something deeply unethical then I'd quit. I'm comfortable saying "I don't want to work for a company that is complicit in X bad thing". But we have to understand that "complicit" and "bad" are not easy to define. Each individual should decide what those words mean and collectivizing these decisions is a massive mistake.
> Your employer doesn't have power over you, but you have power over them. Organization is about choosing not to exercise that power by leaving for greener pastures and letting the company rinse and repeat with the next cycle of college graduates, but by staying and choosing to influence the direction of the company in a positive way.
I don't want to "influence the direction of the company" in the way that you mean. I want to influence its culture by speaking and writing precisely and being nice. But I don't want to make the kinds of decisions you're talking about. I don't know what a "positive direction" is (I don't think you do either). We are constantly acting into an uncertain future and the idea that "the laborers are the good guys who know what's positive" is infantile. I already said what I think about that: if labor gets too much power to "influence the direction of the company," labor will abuse that power (less work, more pay). If management has all the power, management will abuse its power (more work, less pay). The answer is a balance of power and I don't think we, in software, are doing too bad.
> You can choose to do your 8 hours every day and devote a full one-third of your life - the only life you get - to someone else's work that you don't have a stake in. But that just seems like the stupid, easy way out.
If I want to take the plunge and choose what I do with 8 hours a day, I'm sure as hell not going to choose "working for someone else". By "working for someone else" I am making a very clear decision to avoid risk. I'm fine with this decision. You're trying to have it both ways. You want the control without the risk and, sorry, but you don't get to do that.
And the deeply unethical behavior would continue to happen.
>Each individual should decide what those words mean and collectivizing these decisions is a massive mistake.
You have to make a compromise here. As an individual you don't have much power to stop those unethical behaviors, and as a group you do.
>You want the control without the risk and, sorry, but you don't get to do that.
No, you can have this. By collectivizing.
The employer has a workforce and resources at their disposal, you bring to the table only your time. You can eschew unions all you want, but it's simply untrue to state that "a union is no more pure than management."
I'm sorry you feel condescended to to be told this, presumably yet again. Perhaps we can find a way to preserve your feelings, because condescension isn't my intent; I'm just trying to address a century's worth of anti-union propaganda.
By the way, labor organizing is significantly harder than volunteering at a soup kitchen. In the past, employers have hired private armies (the Pinkertons, etc) to attack and kill labor organizers; these days, despite it being illegal, employers often fire workers for legally-protected labor organizing activity. No one's being fired from a soup kitchen.
"Balance of power between labor and management" doesn't mean 50:50. It means the employee has some leverage.
The employer should have more power than the employee. Just like the president should have more power than the citizen, the general should have more power than the private, and the parent should have more power than the child. Power differentials are necessary.
> The employer has a workforce and resources at their disposal, you bring to the table only your time. You can eschew unions all you want, but it's simply untrue to state that "a union is no more pure than management."
Unions are pure when they are correcting an imbalance of power. They're corrupt when they're are accumulating power for its own sake.
> I'm sorry you feel condescended to to be told this, presumably yet again. Perhaps we can find a way to preserve your feelings, because condescension isn't my intent; I'm just trying to address a century's worth of anti-union propaganda.
After reading this paragraph, I have a really hard time believing that condescension isn't your intent. I don't think "unions are bad," I think they are a valid tool to correct power imbalances but they're just a tool, sometimes there is no power imbalance, and a union for programmers is a terrible idea.
> By the way, labor organizing is significantly harder than volunteering at a soup kitchen. In the past, employers have hired private armies (the Pinkertons, etc) to attack and kill labor organizers; these days, despite it being illegal, employers often fire workers for legally-protected labor organizing activity. No one's being fired from a soup kitchen.
Yeah, we've all heard the stories about Google putting out hits on dissident employees.
A unionized workplace doesn't mean you 1) need to join the union (closed shops are illegal in the US) or 2) be involved in the "grubby underhanded maneuvering for power" -- in a pragmatic sense because you can't be compelled to join a union, but more importantly because that is not what union activity is.
What I would find far more convincing is an explanation of how a workplace like Google would be worse if it were a union shop. Lower pay? Nope, union shops consistently draw larger salaries for their workers. Less workplace safety? Nope, union shops consistently have fewer injuries than non-union shops. Fixed salary schedule? Nope, a technical union could easily be structured like SAG -- e.g. Tom Cruise doesn't have a salary cap. Can't fire a bad apple? That seems like a bad idea until someone decides you're the bad apple.
I bet that Damore guy would've appreciated having a union rep sitting at the table with him in those HR meetings where they were going over his blog posts or whatever.
Really? My argument is very straightforward:
> The solution is a balance of power between labor and management. In my case, I feel I have plenty of power. In the case of Google employees, I feel they have plenty of power. Broadly speaking, programmers (in the US) have plenty of power.
> I don't think "unions are bad," I think they are a valid tool to correct power imbalances but they're just a tool, sometimes there is no power imbalance, and a union for programmers is a terrible idea.
I'm not a cog in a machine. I have a significant amount of control over what I'm working on and who I'm working for and how that work gets done.
> What I would find far more convincing is an explanation of how a workplace like Google would be worse if it were a union shop. Lower pay? Nope, union shops consistently draw larger salaries for their workers. Less workplace safety? Nope, union shops consistently have fewer injuries than non-union shops. Fixed salary schedule? Nope, a technical union could easily be structured like SAG -- e.g. Tom Cruise doesn't have a salary cap. Can't fire a bad apple? That seems like a bad idea until someone decides you're the bad apple.
This is exactly my point. Unionization for programmers is about MORE money, LESS work, and LESS accountability. It's an employee cartel. The idea that agitating for a union is a moral endeavor is laughable. It's a moral endeavor when you're a serf or a coal miner.
Correct, and it is certainly your right to wish for less money and more work, even if that is an unorthodox position to take. Perhaps unfair to advocate on behalf of your coworkers for, in your own words, less money and more work, however.
I'm under the impression that once a union takes hold of a company, you're required to join the union to work there. That was certainly the case when my spouse was a teacher.
So, then, isn't fighting for a union shop also unfairly advocating on behalf of your coworkers?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_shop#United_States
As for advocating for organizing at your workplace being unfair to your coworkers: they are not required to join, but as union shops consistently pay better, are safer, and provide better protections against arbitrary firing, I would still be comfortable advocating for those conditions for my coworkers.
Respectfully - were you a programmer during the last recession? I only ask because this power dynamic you imply is inherent in being a programmer can change (and has changed) in a matter of weeks and you'll find the entire industry is not hiring, not seeking consultants, and not looking to buy your *aaS product.
There were a lot of desperate programmers during the great recession (and before that, the dotcom bust)
edit: removed age from what should have been a more general question.
Hardness of an activity or it involving things you don't want to see have no bearing to its goodness.
It's like suggesting that everyone should give gifts of 100 dollars to each other for Christmas. No one wants that. People aren't rational agents with utility functions or, if they are, the utility functions are unknown, vary from person to person, and are not solely based on material well-being (my guess is that they're mostly based on the esteem we estimate that we have in the eyes of our peers).
Pick a problem in your community, directly contribute to its solution, and you will be happier plus the people around you will respect you more. If you give money, that won't be the case. You can insist on a strict utilitarian perspective but you're fighting reality and you can't rewire your brain.
Surely this is an exaggeration? I mean, being friends with co-workers is great, but surely people at google also have friends outside Google, right? Right?
I'm not aggressive or even obvious about this disposition, I just gently steer clear of violating it. I feel the same should apply to companies, fine if you want to make a stand on some political issue, but don't make a show of it, because it implies that all your employees should agree with your position.
People in the world have different opinions on things, we need to be able to work with eachother on shared interests without making every place and occasion a battleground. If not in the workplace, then where?
On a somewhat related note, I don't consider my colleagues my friends, or, God forbid, the workplace a 'family'. My relationship to my employer is a professional one, trying to disguise this by intermingling personal feelings can only end in tears, when one day you discover that it was such all along, only you deluded yourself (or let yourself be led) into thinking differently.
I, too, old this belief, but it's kind of hard when the "new culture" is overwhelmed with a sense of entitlement to "be heard". Everyone thinks their individual opinions should be able to be shared whenever they feel the need to be validated, and that everyone must hear their opinion in that moment, regardless of how controversial it may be. And if you try to stifle their attempt or even mildly disagree, then you are the bad person. Couth and tactfulness have given way to entitlement and postmodernism in the modern work culture.
If you want to disagree about, say, LGBT rights, then I will probably deem that you are the bad person. That's how strong, deeply held beliefs work. I'm sure if I tried hard I could come up with an example of a belief that would make you consider me a bad person if I stated it as a coworker.
What you're describing is just that your values differ greatly from "new culture" values, not some new entitlement among young people.
What is "right to be heard" mean? For me it usually means employees speak their concerns with management, and management is receptive enough (ie they care about employee retention) that if something is really bad they hold a Q&A session. Maybe act on it.
I'm an empowered, high-demand employee in a high demand industry. If management doesn't want to hear about my concerns, that's fine and they can say so. I'll find another employer in less than a week.
Edit: to give a more concrete example, my employer was in talks to write software for client X, a corporation well known for being Bad People™️. A bunch of employees came forward that they didn't want to do business with client X. Management discussed it thoroughly with these employees, hosted public roundtables, etc. I wasn't part of this discussion so I can't say the outcome, but yes the employees who cared demanded a right to be heard, because often that's why we work for progressive employers in the first place.
People in the younger generation (myself somewhat included in that) do feel extra entitlement toward saying what they want, when they want, in whatever forum they want. But it's a lot harder nowadays to keep one's personal and professional lives completely separate. I'd lean toward considering this trend a good thing; we don't work in a vacuum. Activism absolutely does have a place in a professional setting when so many social and political issues contribute to discrimination in the workplace.
At the same time, making judgments about the parent's values is a bit out of line. Some people really do just want to go to the office, put in a full day of work, and go home where their "real" life happens. I personally think that's a limiting attitude, but don't begrudge people their need or desire to go that route.
My impression, from working in one of these progressive workplaces, is that nobody is forced to interject or defend their personal opinions, or be a part of those discussions at all. Indeed, just as we have employees bringing the latest from the social justice circus to work, we also have employees who sit it out entirely. We even have a dedicated #activism slack channel, which is obviously opt-in.
So when I see complaints like the parents, my impression is the true feelings are "I want to disagree and say X but my coworkers will think I'm a bad person." Obviously, the coworkers will only think you're a bad person if you're disagreeing with them on a strongly held, deeply personal value, hence my example of LGBT rights.
There are a such thing as bad opinions. If I share bad opinions, people will think I'm a bad person. Every person's conception of bad opinions is a little different - For example, most people here agree that mass surveillance and censorship is bad, but only some people here feel that deporting DACA immigrants is bad.
Thus, I concluded the parent probably just holds vastly different values from his or her more vocal coworkers. There's nothing wrong with having different values, in fact it's quite normal. I don't know why else parent would be concerned with being labelled a bad person.
People holding the majority view are publicly cheered by the company, but people holding minority views are (at best) tolerated.
This frustrates me on several levels:
- There's no room for debate on these topics. The official company position is treated as so obviously correct that a reasoned debate on the matters is treated as unnecessary, or even worse, immoral. I find this insulting.
- The company / majority position seems to be self-contradictory. E.g., they promote LGBTQ behavior as praiseworthy, which implies that certain religions' teachings about sexual ethics are factually incorrect. But the company also claims to respect people's religious choices.
These leave me with the impression that the employer is hypocritical and/or disingenuous.
May I have a specific example?
There appears to be a lot of negative opinions about this kind of workplace based on the comments (and my downvotes on some of my comments haha). I'm just trying to understand it.
If you're curious, you can see a specific example from my workplace in the edit region here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21524930
I've never personally had a bad experience from being in a "progressive" workplace. I don't agree with them on everything, but in general I've never had a bad experience. The "social justice" aspect is pretty opt-in, so I don't know what could lead to a negative experience such as being less than tolerated.
> The company / majority position seems to be self-contradictory. E.g., they promote LGBTQ behavior as praiseworthy, which implies that certain religions' teachings about sexual ethics are factually incorrect. But the company also claims to respect people's religious choices.
I don't really see the contradiction. My work celebrates employees by giving us catered lunches that often include pork but nobody perceives that as being anti-muslim, as long as there are non-pork choices. The vegetarians and vegans don't mind meat on the table as long as there are vegetarian and vegan choices.
A subset of teachings from a subset of Christian faiths will say something like "[homosexuality] is an abomination". It would be disrespectful to employee's religion (and common sense) for the employer to tell their employees they must be homosexual. It is not disrespectful for the employer to celebrate other employees who are homosexual. Am I misunderstanding?
> May I have a specific example?
I can't without giving out too much detail. I shouldn't have stated that without being able to provide substance, sorry.
> It is not disrespectful for the employer to celebrate other employees who are homosexual. Am I misunderstanding?
I think we're getting close to the fundamental issue here. Let me unpack my logic a bit:
1) Celebrating behavior X implies that X is in some way virtuous.
2) To claim that X is virtuous, is to claim that any belief system S which states X is not virtuous is in error.
So I see the current discussion as having the structure shown above, with:
X = partaking in a homosexual relationship, and
S = the theologies of various Christian, Muslim, and Jewish sects.
So in short, it seems to me that employers are logically implying that certain employees have false religious beliefs, but the employers are hiding behind the fact that the their implication isn't clearly stated.
I think that's inconsistent with the employers' claims to respect employees' religious views.
3) an employer can respect employees religious views only if they will not imply the religious view is in error
It's clearly (from your logic) the case that employers description of "respects" violates axiom (3). If you belong to one of the sects in question I can understand being upset, but I would argue that (given the breadth of beliefs in the world) it is impossible to not imply some employees "respected" belief is wrong.
So perhaps this is the point, that employers should not claim to respect beliefs because they necessarily must act inconsistently while doing so. Thus, one might conclude, a workplace should stand for nothing in particular and thus allow employees to believe anything without celebrating or respecting it.
However, I wouldn't agree with this conclusion. I would rather that my employers tries the best possible at the (futile) task of being respectful and celebratory to all, and if problems are raised they try to be concluded with minimal conflict and maximum respect.
In fact, I'd claim this the common sense approach. This is how I resolve having friends with non-identical belief sets, for example.
(An example: one coworker made a joke to the expense of astrology. A different coworker chimed in that she and others adhered to astrology and found this joke offensive. The original coworker offered an apology and all was well.)
> I would rather that my employers tries the best possible at the (futile) task of being respectful and celebratory to all, and if problems are raised they try to be concluded with minimal conflict and maximum respect.
I think we agree that employers ought to take positions somewhere on the Pereto curve [0] of that tradeoff-space.
At one level, it seems to be a question of how happy various employee groups would feel for the different policy options. I don't have a principled reason for my own preference in that trade-space, so I try to not put my own views on a pedestal for this topic.
If nobody has a convincing argument for the proper balance in that tradeoff-space, though, it makes me wonder if it's simply a matter of personal preference / opinion for everyone involved.
> If nobody has a convincing argument for the proper balance in that tradeoff-space, though, it makes me wonder if it's simply a matter of personal preference / opinion for everyone involved.
I would suspect that it is, so I guess we've gone a bit meta because the "accepted" way for large organizations of humans to make these trade-offs is politics
So then is it right to say the solution to "too much politics at work" is office politics to decide the right amount of politics at work?
I have the feeling I'm a few philosophy-degrees short of being confident in any particular answer to that question :(
I hate it when discussions about potentially important topics end with a muddle of uncertainty about metaphysical matters. It seems to end this way just about every time.
They can probably avoid the more metaphysical questions but as soon as they have a canteen there's going to be issues if any group assumes their religious rules must be applied to everyone's food (and indeed what they're eating outside of work).
It's in vogue to use the ideas from the Nonviolent Communication book to make this work better. But those ideas are of course politocal.. as is the debate on whether to allow political discussions.
Also it's pretty hard to separate political discussions from work if you're doing something that impacts people's lives. (I'm leaving out jobs where the societal impact is clearly negative, there discouraging discussion might be rational for the employer)
Let’s say one of your colleagues or managers occasionally makes decisions that would be frowned upon by some people. Maybe you’re recruiting, and they let slip that they passed over a female candidate because they thought she might have a child soon. Or maybe they passed on a gay man because they didn’t think he should be working in a role where he’d interact with children.
This is a political act. Deciding to respond to it, or to ignore it, is also a political act. If this culture is widespread, it would seem reasonable to object to it at a company-wise level. It seems infeasible to separate politics from employment in that sense.
The big political fights we are seeing in USA are not local reality. It is like me being in Sweden saying that we aren't progressive enough since Poland has a lot of conservative views, and that therefore we need to add even more protections for women and minorities in Sweden until they are properly accepted in Poland. If someone told me that I have to be engaged in their rights in Poland or I am a misogynist and homophobic then I'd just sigh and ignore them.
The point is that expecting the law to be upholded is hardly a political act. It's basic rule of law.
Maybe you’re recruiting, and they let slip that they passed over a white male candidate because they're working on a new diversity initiative. Or maybe, after being trained constantly on gender bias and seeing vigorous workplace political debates on the subject, you investigate the issue and find no evidence to support anything other than the fact that men and women have different preferences, and you present this evidence to the debate and get fired.
Even acknowledging such cases seems to be political.
I don't really believe that people should be expected to respect inane illogical arguments just because they have a political side to it.
In fact, doing knowledge work, being unable to form a coherent argument or inability to distinguish faulty logical arguing, would in fact make you a lot less qualified for it.
When the pet cause is something that affects working conditions at the company, then that "issue" you describe is simply expecting the company to follow labor laws.
Workers have the right to organize with other workers and advocate for change in their working conditions without retribution from the company.
You're misrepresenting the facts. The newspiece states that the activists were fired for tracking and doxxing colleagues that they seemed reactionaries. This sort of abuse is hardly defensible.
the issue is practicing political activism
for your own pet cause in the workplace on
company time
EG as per a sibling comment, if an HR Rep is not convinced regarding trans-rights, they should absolutely not let that impact their treatment of a trans person that comes to them.
Or, more famously, (and not that it did him any good) Brendan Eich made a political donation to candidates opposing gay marriage, but (afaik) there were never any reports of him mistreating any LGBTQ+ employees.
From the company's PoV you're correct. From the employee's PoV I'm not convinced.
To be less glib, the level of acceptable discourse tends to be built into a companies culture. I've never seen a workplace with zero discourse on the outside world, and I doubt it exists. Companies like google clearly push the concept to its breaking point, though.
For example, a CEO might not want someone who is anti-LGBT representing their company in any way. On the flip side of that, I wouldn't want to work for a company where the leadership was anti-LGBT. Even if these people are otherwise good at their jobs, a person's morality does matter when deciding who to work with/for.
You might make the argument that no one at work should even know if anyone else is anti-LGBT or not, or argue that people should put those cares aside in the interests of a harmonious workplace, but I just don't think that's how (all) humans work.
There are practical considerations to this, too: say a trans employee has to deal with an anti-LGBT HR person regarding trans healthcare and the company's health plans. The HR person is going to be uncomfortable about that conversation, and the trans person isn't going to feel like their concerns are being taken seriously, or even feel safe having that conversation in the first place. That's... not okay.
> On a somewhat related note, I don't consider my colleagues my friends, or, God forbid, the workplace a 'family'.
Just like any other random group of people in the world, some of my colleagues are my friends who I socialize with outside work, and some (most) aren't.
(Agreed, though, the whole "company is family" nonsense needs to stop.)
Your example of the HR person who has to make decisions about medical issues obviously falls in a different category, but even in this case discretion could be assumed to be the default.
What would be the expected reaction in this case? We'd want (or require) those people to keep their desires to themselves and choose their employees/employers professionally without discrimination, right?
Thing is, you can't both have your cake and eat it; if we argue that companies should be allowed to act on political/social opinions, then that applies also if you don't like them; and if we argue that it should keep their nose out of what position their employees take on various political/social issues and just focus on their work, then again this will apply to both positions that we like and those we hate.
If employers are allowed to fire (or not hire) someone for pushing anti-LGBT agenda, they'd be allowed to fire (or not hire) someone for pushing a pro-LGBT agenda. Either employees have the right to freely express their political positions or they do not - but that right doesn't depend on which of opposing positions they hold.
I have friends who work in LA and in SF and they constantly bombard me with stories of how employees of all levels (even recent hires) just spew the most extremist political diatribes at all times and some just do it to troll other employees of the different faction. It has gotten so bad that there are several "secret" slack channels for these cliques dedicated to continue gossiping and sharing memes that are pretty distasteful.
Whenever I ask about them reporting it to HR they just tell me that HR doesn't really exist and they pretty much exist just to make sure payroll is distributed.
Just my 2 cents but I prefer just clocking in and talking about the weather than have to put up with that kind of toxicity.
Do you allow colleagues to become friends?
I don't really like Google very much, but I'm with them on this one, these people sound nuts.
What's next, suing a woman because she breaks your heart?
Well, this is exactly the question at stake. And it's not Google that makes some of us believe that it is indeed possible to not be estranged from our labor, but the history of human cooperation related to sharing our labor and other resources.
We dream of sharing labor and governance of said labor. To say Google did not hire their employees to do that is resorting to one level of rules (legal or operational). But these employees are implicitly contesting a deeper level of rules (constitutional). The question of _who we are_ is deeper than any contracts or protocols that Google explicitly defines.
>Damore said that those differences include women generally having a stronger interest in people rather than things, and tending to be more social, artistic, and prone to neuroticism (a higher-order personality trait)
Imagine thinking that you can literally publish and circulate several revisions of an internal company memo telling 50% of your coworkers that they should be paid less because they're genetically inferior to you in regards to the job and then when people tell you that you're kind of a dick and they want nothing to do with you, getting outraged and making a grandstand about being unfairly and terribly oppressed, while bemoaning of course that people nowadays are "too sensitive".
Sadly, you can find many examples of this amazing exercise in woke coherence right here on HN.
#Edit, since I've been accused of "being ignorant" and not having read the memo by people who clearly haven't read the thing themselves. In a section titled "Possible non-bias causes of the gender gap in tech", wholly dedicated to justifying, among other phenomena, gender pay gap for reasons other than sexist bias, in James Damore's own words:
> Extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness. Also, higher agreeableness. This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading.
>Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance).This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs.
>Note, I’m not saying that all men differ from women in the following ways or that these differences are “just.” I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.
I've not cherry-picked these quotes. There are no omissions, they're whole, untouched paragraphs.
And regardless of the correctness of firing him, him getting fired is a little stronger than "people tell[ing him] that [he's] kind of a dick".
People make these leaps of fiction on their own from usually well meaning but confused stances.
>Extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness. Also, higher agreeableness. This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading.
Do you see it? The part where he says women are genetically worse leaders, and have worse salaries because they're genetically worse negotiators? Remember, the section is titled "Possible non-bias causes of the gender gap in tech", implying that women are paid less because it's natural, not because of sexist bias.
At any rate, I appreciate the patronizing "making well meaning but confused leaps of logic" pat in the head.
Yes, your are making an unsubstantiated leap from what was actually written to claiming that Damore write that his female coworkers should be paid less than men for the same work.
Statistics are all we have to go on in this regard, and they are in Damore's favor.
The truth is not bigoted.
"White men can't jump" is generally true.
Personality traits are like most things on a spectrum, and women tend to have less of the traits which have until now been perceived to be necessary for "negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading"
There are leaders that are women, see AMD.
On a section dedicated to offering alternative explanations to sexism for the gender gap in tech, James writes:
>Extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness. Also, higher agreeableness. This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading.
>Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance).This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs.
The implication is that it's partly natural that women do worse and get lower salaries at tech. In case there's any adoubt, the section it's written in is titled "Possible non-bias causes of the gender gap in tech", in the subsection "Personality differences".
Dunning/Kruger etc
> Extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness. Also, higher agreeableness. This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading.
Yes, that does say that women are genetically worse leaders and implies that their lower salaries are at least in part because they are naturally worse negotiators.
The whole section it's written on is focused on explaining how sexism is mostly a exaggeration and that sex differences can instead be explained by genetic factors. Any more questions?
No it does not. It says that women are more agreeable and less assertive, on average. And because Google rewards assertiveness, this means women have a harder time negotiating salaries at Google. In a workplace the prioritizes agreeableness over assertiveness, women would be at an advantage. And later in the memo he says Google should better reward agreeableness.
It does not claim "women are genetically worse leaders". This is a fabrication.
Please, PLEASE look up the definition of 'discrimination' in any dictionary you like, and tell me if you really believe that saying 'women are more agreeable and less assertive, on average' does not fit the definition, or that James Damore's many characterizations of women on his memo ("higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance", "women generally have a harder time leading") don't, either. If that's the case, we are simply not going to agree with each other, so we shouldn't waste our time trying.
So for example "I want to hire people who don't have trait X. I give an objective test for this. More men than women pass it. Studies have shown that more men than women pass this globally, so it is as expected. Therefore, due to this test, the people I hire tend to be more men than women." is not discrimination.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sexism
>Definition of sexism
>1. prejudice or discrimination based on sex
Enough. Just believe what you want, I give up. There's no sexism on the tech industry or schools. James Damore is right and is an oppressed victim of his own bravery. Whatever.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/discrimination
>1. prejudiced or prejudicial outlook, action, or treatment
Hm. Let's check out the definition of sexism again.
>1. prejudice or discrimination based on sex
Prejudice or discrimination. And discrimination also means prejudiced or prejudicial...since I'm not a tech person like yourself I wouldn't know what 'or' means, it's too complicated for me, but I think I do know what 'and' means: for example, you are wrong about your definition of sexism, and about your definition of discrimination, and about your use of 'or'.
This is great, I love learning new tech concepts on tech forums from tech experts.
In order to be discriminatory, they would have to be broad, ignorant statements based on personal anecdote and prejudice that he pulled out of his ass right before adding 'on average' at the end of the phrase; since they are not that in any way, but carefully researched, unbiased observations, they do not fit the definition of discriminatory.
Now that you've explained to me what facts are, I finally understand James' logic, so please consider this argument won.
What happened to James, who simply circulated a fact-based memo telling half of his coworkers that they need special rules to make things fair since they're at least partly genetically inferior when it comes to the job, was yet another gratuitous act of SJW, PC, fact-censoring repression against one of society's most silenced and powerless collectives: top-salaried, Ivy League educated young white males working at the top companies of male-dominated high growth industries in the largest economy on the planet, like so many others we sadly see so often here on HN.
It's time we finally took a stand on these issues.
If you think that there is no difference between saying people who belong to a certain group are more or less X on average, and saying that individual members of that group are X then I really cannot help you. This is just patently wrong. There's nothing sexist about saying "men on average commit rape 50 times more than women". That's fact. If you told a man, "you're a rapist" because of mere fact that he is a man, then yes that is prejudice.
He didn't just add the word "on average" at the end. He explicitly pointed out that conflating population wide averages and individual characteristics is wrong:
> Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.
If you think his presentation of this data is ineffective, then the productive thing to do is offer a reasoned refutation. Not exaggerate (to be generous, I'm more inclined to call these fabrications) and write that he claimed "women are genetically worse leaders" and "naturally worse negotiators."
This is an outright fabrication. Nowhere did Damore write that women should be paid less, or that they were genetically inferior at tech. He said that gender differences can explain, in part, difference in preferences between men and women.
Is it sexist to say "hey, maybe 95% of kindergarten teachers are women not because men are discriminated against, but because men don't prefer to work with young kids at the same rate as women due to innate biological reasons."
Oh no, he simply stated that women get paid less not because of sexism, but because it's natural, since they genetically lack assertiveness and are worse at leadership positions and negotiating:
>Extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness. Also, higher agreeableness. This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading.
And certainly he didn't say that women were genetically inferior in high-powered tech jobs! He simply said that they're genetically predisposed to dislike jobs that involve systematizing (such as...tech jobs), and that they're genetically inferior when it comes to handling stressful jobs (which, by pure chance, he happens to exemplify with Googlegeist, a...tech job), since they can't handle stress as well as men do because they're genetically predisposed to anxiety and neuroticism:
>Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men (also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing). (...) More men may like coding because it requires systemizing. >Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance). This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist
I don't even know why I bother. I regret getting into this argument. Believe what you like; as long as you see movements for social improvement as some kind of personal accusation, it's what you'll do anyway. Yes, women in tech are not discriminated against, or if they are, it's either exaggerated or there's a reasonable explanation for it. Whatever, downvote away.
Closer to reality, but you're still injecting your own narrative here. He did not say that women are worse at negotiating. He said that Google rewards assertiveness rather than agreeableness in it's negotiations, and because women are on average more agreeable this disadvantages women. And later, he suggested that Google should make it's environment more rewarding of agreeableness to make things fairer for women.
How people made the jump from this to, "women are genetically inferior at tech" is astounding to me.
This is not my experience at all. Work-life balance there was way ahead of other tech companies I’ve worked for. Most people show up, work reasonable hours, and go home. Evenings and weekends are yours.
In my experience, Bay Area startups are way more guilty of trying to exploit young people with a sense of that the startup is your family. Eat, work, play, and socialize with your team, 24/7. Some people enjoy that, and sometimes these same startups go belly up, and your social network is lost.
I have no idea where your rhetoric comes from, though.
From a technical viewpoint, I don't get this. Why create a Chrome extension to monitor usage of Google Calendar? Doesn't Google Calendar have an API they could use to do this on the server-side instead? (And if it doesn't, maybe they should add the necessary features to their API to enable this, and doing that might then benefit their customers and their partner ecosystem.)
Tracking activity in activity planning software isn't quite as nefarious as looking at peoples emails. Pulling up the meeting bookers boss and sending an email to them & legal is pretty bog standard integration work.
As stated, I can't see any requirement for a client-side footprint...
Making a single use extension takes an hour or three by a contractor who won't object. Its trivial enough that the whole thing could be built using a bottom of the barrel freelancer site with a high success rate.
If the Google calendar is for a personal gmail account, then accessing the calendar details server side is a huge privacy breach.
Legal and generally accepted in US jurisdiction. In Germany that would require approval by employee representatives, unlikely to happen in any bigger company. In Finland a somewhat related and highly controversive law was introduced many years ago that it would be legal if registered with data protection authorities. Something like 3 companies registered in a decade. Maybe some did it without registering, but generally this is not deemed clearly acceptable practice.
Google has a big data center in Finland. IIRC they stopped their plans for a Berlin lab after visible anti-Google protests in the neighborhood, but I'm sure they have employees somewhere in Germany. International companies just follow local legislation and practices and there is no problem (most of the time at least, there are examples of failure like Walmart trying to expand to Germany with too much of an American management style and eventually giving up).
Surely, Googlers have separate work and personal Google accounts, and only the former would be used with the Google corporate calendar? Article says that one of the things which triggers a report is booking more than 10 meeting rooms for a single meeting – surely, a Googler's personal account would lack permission to book meeting rooms in their corporate offices, and only their work account would have permission to do that?
After all, the rooms belong to Google.
The fact that Google employees, in this case, may not be considering forming a union at this time is irrelevant. The meetings they are having may prompt them to form one at a later time. Either way, their freedom of association is protected.
Google also has a clause in their employment agreement that says you agree to them putting surveillance software on your devices, company supplied and personal, as a condition of your employment. I asked about that one, got the HR response "Well I suppose you could interpret it that way, but that isn't what we mean." and I said, "Okay, lets change it to say what you mean." and got the "Well we really aren't in a position to change these documents, it would be a mess trying to track a zillion individual agreements." etc etc. That rabbit hole of pushing back and forth leads to "perhaps Google isn't the right place for you." :-)
How would Google even know about your personal devices? That seems to only make sense if you intend to use your personal device for work.
I think it is a good incentive to disconnect from the workplace.
It's definitely a slippery slope though.
"If we already have a privileged app running on people's devices... {insert management-centric ask}"
Lots of people at tech companies use personal devices for work. This includes things like having your work calendar, email, or corporate applications on your personal phone. In my company's case there is some kind of enterprise iOS policy that gets installed as part of onboarding a device to access company systems. This has the ability to enforce a password policy, monitor installed software and software versions, to lock out devices that are running known vulnerable apps or iOS versions, as well as the technical ability to remotely wipe the entire device (never heard of that being exercised). Company data resides on the device (via email, documents, and other means) so it's reasonable for them to want to have some oversight. An attacker could attempt to get into company systems via the device, after all, since it has (some limited) access to my corporate account.
I use my personal phone for work because it's extremely handy to have work email and calendar on my phone, and I don't want to carry two phones.
I invite my personal calendar to any work events that I need to be aware of when I'm not at work.
Otherwise, when I leave the office, I leave work there too. I'm extremely fortunate to be able to do that.
It's tragic that my good fortune isn't an option for many.
Didn't a whistleblower at a car company suggest this...
https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/13/18263757/tesla-elon-musk-...
And if such a a company had that technology then we can only speculate its use is more widespread than imagined.
Maybe this is the only reason remote jobs are not available at these companies... Nothing to do with being onsite just more of a precaution to vet employees before even allowing them to be remote.
So if a company could capture your personal text messages and personal cell phone calls while within an office campus (and no BYOD app installed)... would they use that knowledge to prevent poaching as well?
Be careful.
As for how? It was left unspecified but we speculated they could drop a keylogger or other bit of surveillance kit if you logged into your corporate gmail account from a device where it wasn't already installed. Clearly crooks can do this, it has to be easier when you can sign your downloads and are a 'trusted' vendor.
> So if you read your corp email on your home computer, or access employee only services from your phone or laptop etc
I know literally no Google employees that use Google corp resources from personal computers. Phones are common, but as you're hopefully aware, the security considerations are different.
> As for how? It was left unspecified but we speculated they could drop a keylogger or other bit of surveillance kit if you logged into your corporate gmail account from a device where it wasn't already installed.
Who theorized this? Because it's certainly not a thing that's ever happened. It would be trivial to detect, either as a client, or by looking at the source of Gmail.
No. It is a necessary thing to do and what a legal system ostensibly exists to do.
A slippery slope in what direction? In the direction of too many rules being illegal or too many things that could impede organizing being allowed?
That doesn't mean it's enforceable or that it wouldn't run into statutory limits. Many workplace relations laws are written on a strict liability basis, intent isn't necessary for infringement. So if it has a chilling effect on organising, it's potentially infringing.
Mind you, there's something very rich in Google employees complaining about Chrome being used as a monitoring tool. Look around you, folks. What do you think pays for the fancy cafeteria? It's not hugs and smiles.
I'm generally of the view that knowingly adding unenforceable provisions to a contract should be a crime and/or professional malpractice worthy of being disbarred. It's obtaining advantage through unconscionable deception. Or, less fancily: fraud.
Entirely too much of this kind of thing is allowed to slide by legislatures.
Before employee leaves the company, its manager is responsible to get all the company data stored (by leaving employee) on another computer, then IT takes the computer and wipes all the drives, with at least two persons present.
A big portion of one of my information security jobs involved looking at employees' browsing history and emails daily. Sometimes to investigate potential misconduct (something dumb like a manager wanting to see if someone's slacking off, or something serious like suspicion of stealing information), but usually to investigate potential security issues (like if we believed a computer visited a malware-associated web page, we wanted to see how the computer ended up there).
In the US, pretty much no one bats an eye that this is considered necessary and normal. Employees who don't want to be snooped on are free to use their personal devices at work, like their phones, which of course we have no access to. But it's considered very normal that if an employer gives you a computer to use for work, that they can inspect that computer and data to and from it. No one has a feeling of their privacy being violated, because there's no expectation of privacy when using someone else's (the company's) property.
For infosec operations people in European countries, how are these things handled? How do you investigate potential breaches which originate from endpoints? Do you have to ask the employee if you can look at their browsing history? What if it's a potential misconduct investigation, where tipping someone off may result in destruction of evidence?
Excellent. Now you only have to remove the expectation of privacy in any situation from the social norms, and another big problem will be solved. You will be able to live under total surveillance without anyone feeling that their privacy is being violated, because there was no expectation of privacy to begin with.
An alternative hypothesis (crazy, I know...), is that the power imbalance in favor of the rich went very far in the US, which means that the poor have no safety net or ability to organize, so they are completely at the mercy of the whims of corporations for survival. And so, they will accept many indignities without bating an eye.
Do people in EU countries expect to use any other of their employer’s equipment for personal reasons?
It's a weird idea that you have to be a complete robot at work and only ever do work things.
But the official position of the company can’t be “everyone use the company’s resources as they see it for personal use”. So it’s best to just say company resources are for company. What if someone gets hurt using company machinery for personal use? In the US, that would be cause for the company’s workman’s compensation insurance premiums to increase. Why would an employer want that kind of headache?
In practice, from doing many of these investigations, no one bats an eye or gives a single shit about what kind of non-work activities you're doing. The visit to the ticket website would just be a few entries in a long list of other web visit entries, which we'd quickly scroll past while trying to find the thing we're actually looking for (usually malware-related traffic).
Every single second that you are working, you know that your employer might be looking over your shoulder. It's like living under a microscope. For me, this is an indignity. Having to work in such circumstances would probably drive me to deep depression.
> Do people in EU countries expect to use any other of their employer’s equipment for personal reasons?
Within reason, sure. I would say that the main value that underlies all EU countries (not that we realize it perfectly, or even get close to it, of course!) is that human beings are the most important thing.
I find mainstream American values increasingly inhumane.
In addition, everyone has a personal computer in their pocket they can use if they want privacy.
I do agree that there should be more requirements to look at data, though. Managers requesting bullshit fishing expeditions to see if an employee is slacking off should be required to submit some sort of evidence before making the request. That never sat right with me, or anyone on my team. But for security issues, there was no question that there was an absolute necessity and justified reason to look at that information.
I'm asking because my concern is maybe European corporate infosec people really aren't managing, here, and are blind to some ongoing major security issues.
Within reason, sure. I would say that the main value that
underlies all EU countries (not that we realize it
perfectly, or even get close to it, of course!) is that
human beings are the most important thing.
Still, I just... would never feel "entitled" to use my employer's property for personal uses. And I wouldn't have an expectation of privacy. When I care about privacy, I simply use my own device.
Now, let me be clear. The reality of working in America is that people use their work computers for personal uses all day long. Generally nobody cares, as long as you're getting your work done.
And if somebody really needs to do something personal, they can always just whip our their phones. If I was printing out some concert tickets at work, I'd use my employer's printer. Everybody does this. But if I was going to send some sexy messages I wouldn't do it with work equipment.
So, I don't know. I just don't see the problem. There are many many problems with America, and many ways in which Europe does things better IMO. I just don't see this as one of them.
I'm not saying this is always the case in the EU, though. Obviously there is equipment where for many reasons it's absolutely vital that you don't use it for anything personal. I'm not supposed to run a torrent client on the company server, for example. You can't just "borrow" a company car for a personal trip. But when I happen to use the laptop that the company has assigned to me to work on, to do a bank payment, my boss has absolutely no business knowing the details of that transaction.
I would be okay with them knowing I visited the banking site on company time (if I used their equipment, their DNS, etc) but not with decrypting the SSL encrypted data I'm exchanging with the bank or obtaining it in some other way such as a keylogger.
Though again, I'd probably avoid the issue entirely by using my own device and data connection if I didn't trust my employer. (I'm a bit spoiled, working in IT: I'd probably know if my employer was doing shady things with the data)
How did this work? I presume they had a whitelist of Internet banking sites. But, do you really think their whitelist would include every Internet banking site in the world? I doubt it.
Ah, but it's not someone else's device now is it? It's a corporation's device and corporation's have lobbied for laws that specifically prevent individuals for being liable for the colorations actions. If they aren't liable for the actions of said corporation, why should this be treated as two people's opposing rights of property vs privacy rather than a non human entity's property rights vs a humans privacy rights?
This is not an EU-wide regulation. The UK is currently a member of the EU, and this practice is legal in the UK. Employees do not have the expectation of privacy on employer owned equipment.
(Please, lets not devolve into a conversation about Brexit, it's an unrelated tangent)
If it's not, what in the flipping hell are you doing using company property and resources to organize it? I understand that people mix their personal and corporate identities together shamelessly, but that just seems like shockingly poor opsec.
Obviously for the “chilling effect”. Really rubbing it in the employee’s faces that they’re being surveilled.
oh wait...
What if the network is up, but the server is down.
If the network were the issue, Chrome could log the attempts to a local store then send the report when the network is up again.
Note that Google didn’t need an extension to know which employees were tracking other employee’s calendars.
My guess is that the increased closing off of various documents is to do with the increased amount of confidential partner-related information as Google scales its cloud business.
But, as is often the case with Google, much of the disillusionment here seems to be due to unrealistic expectations and nostalgia. There have always been secretive projects at Google. Chrome was super-secret; you needed special authorization to get into the Google+ area; you needed special authorization to get into areas where new Android hardware was being worked with; you needed special authorization to get into the X area; etc.
Basically thinking "Don't do evil" and being a profitable competitive corporation are compatible.
So Google+'s IP could have been very valuable
For a glimpse of the future if course is not changed, take a look at ABC/Disney, where the whole org has bought into partisanship so much that they are now tearing the whole company apart trying to find a the person responsible for leaking the video talking about their Epstein cover up.
> The source added ABC investigators have been rifling through staff emails, news logs and grilling staffers. The company has been isolating certain employees and putting them under pressure to turn on their colleagues in a bid to find the culprit, the source also claimed, adding the investigation reports back up to the very highest levels at HR at ABC’s parent company Disney.
https://pagesix.com/2019/11/12/abc-scrambles-to-figure-out-i...
Aren't things like this governed by local laws? In Canada we have private insurance for things above and beyond basic health care, but only the government gets to decide who is a partner, dependant, etc...
> prayer rooms
Are they going to build chapels for every religion? Who decides which religions get chapels or prayer rooms? Or does only 1 religion get a prayer room because 2019 politics?
Christians and Jews should be able to use them if they choose. I googled around and could only find statements that Muslim employees of a security contractor for amazon were not allowed to use the rooms for a while, but after protests and NLRB intervention now are.
It's like a millionaire eating at a restaurant, and instead of tipping the waitress he expects to be tipped by the waitress. The extra demands only leave a bad taste in everyone else's mouths.
I’ve worked at a (US) company with a prayer room that was used by some Muslim employees. As a Christian myself, I don’t think it would have been considered a problem if I used it when it was vacant to say a prayer, although my religious tradition doesn’t have the 5x/day prayer requirement like Islam does so I never did.
Consider going to a Muslim majority country where the religion controls the laws (like Indonesia) and /demand/ your Christian religious needs be accommodated.
From my studying, you would either be summarily dismissed or even possibly punished.
If not, this is just whataboutism. Just because other countries do something badly doesn't mean we shouldn't try to do better.
That they are /importing/ that tyranny, and most people seem to be unaware of it.
Imagine if Buddists at Amazon had protested and demanded their own space for shrines? Or any other religion that has observational requirements?
The US is being blind to oppression of religious freedom under a false ideal of what that freedom really is.
How is a room available to everyone tyranny?
You can't demand anything in the US right now from an employer on the basis of religion unless you are of one religion. All the others are ignored, or wouldn't even dare to make demands.
And this is done under the threat of violence from that religion.
Like... a prayer room? I'm imagining it now and... seems fine? It's hard to read your complaints as anything other than xenophobic, but maybe I'm misunderstanding the point you are trying to make?
No religion at school and no religion at work, it's a balance that makes sure one doesn't oppress the others.
When a group of people are given a pass because everyone is afraid of them, then we have the start of tyranny.
In reality most people just want to be allowed to do their own private thing and be treated well by others. Going into a room in private to practice your religion isn’t tyranny, it’s reasonable accommodation. They are no more going to enact a tyranny by doing this, than I do by making the sign of the cross when I eat my lunch at work, or that a Sikh coworker does by following his beliefs and wearing his turban, or a Jew his kippah, or so on...
Employers aren’t offering the prayer room because they fear violence, it’s because they want to appeal to their employees by giving them a comfortable and welcoming place to work.
Sharia law will be considered a religious right in the future in the US. And because we were hypocrites before, we will be hypocrites again. And if you don't think Sharia law will bring violence with it, I can provide links for you to study.
“ Amazon (for example) provided only space for Muslims to have prayer rooms, but no one else.”
I understood this to be a statement that Muslims, but no one else, where provided space for prayer rooms. It appears you meant something very different, so my criticism doesn’t apply.
You are correct that there are some very intolerant Muslim-majority countries out there in the world. It’s here in the United States that anyone, no matter their religion, can find freedom and accommodation. Land of the free and home of the brave, and all that.
The only reason Muslims get what they want is under the threat of violence. And US employers are scared of this, so they give in.
In the US this is governed by a patchwork of federal, state and local laws as well as employer policies.
Nope. In many places in the states you have little to no protections. (You can be fired for being trans, for example.)
> Are they going to build chapels for every religion?
Most workplaces I've worked have had a 'quiet room' or similar that was designed to be a private space for personal prayer if needed. It had a chair and clean carpet, but was otherwise unadorned. It just couldn't be booked as a conference room. There are folks whose religions require them to pray during the day, and having a space to quietly do so seems (to me) to be reasonable?
What’s definitely optional is for a company to take a stance on a political issue just because a vocal minority of their employees demands that.
On the flip side, where do you draw the line? It's one thing not to work someplace, it's another to protest your own employer because they are not accommodating you with prayer rooms onsite.
Just like a cashier at Chick-fil-a doesn’t necessarily condone the company’s religious and political beliefs.
From personal experience, I work for a big tech company which very publicly says it stands for certain things and the CEO recently has been going around saying a lot of political things. It’s unrelated to the job although it feels like an explicit part of the “company culture”. It doesn’t really affect my day to day work but the whole situation just feels weird. I didn’t sign up for a political party or to espose certain beliefs, I signed up to write code build a tech platform.
Metoo movement in tech caused expulsions of many heads. Even if unrelated to the job.
Connections to Jeff Epstein is causing people to lose positions.
Political positions of support for Trump is causing customers to take stand against heads.
Where do we draw the line between association and belief and job?
Line: one's university has constraints in place to prevent donations from Epstein, and one does an end run around them in order to take donations from Epstein.
If your employer is out there making political statements or doing political things that you disagree with you should feel empowered to leave and find a new job. If you don't want employers making political statements or taking controversial political stances then vote for policies that encourage labor mobility so that the labor market can be free.
Unfortunately there are lots of policies and laws in place that prevent this kind of labor mobility and give the employer a huge amount of power.
What are those policies and laws? AFAIK employees can leave with at most 2 week notice and lot of places with just a days' notice.
Seems like that has more to do with the things you find weird than some kind of politics.
If you're a"normal" person and like"normal" things you can do just fine with an attitude like that.
Some people are different.
It's easy to say this if your coworker likes football and you think sports are dumb.
But what if your coworker likes attending KKK rallies and you're African-American? Or your co-worker is out there on the weekend holding signs that say "Death to Gays" and you just happen to be gay?
At the extreme end your "interests" might be "preservation of my basic human rights." But once we agree that that's a valid political stance to bring to the office then the discussion shifts from "don't bring politics to work" to "where is the line?" and it forces the conversation to become more nuanced.
Yes yes, we can all dream up the very worst case scenario and other outliers. As someone else pointed out, companies generally have contract clauses that even govern social media whereby if you represent the company poorly you'll be fired. I'm sure that easily extends to your proposed sign waving homophobe.
The point the GP made was that most people have a lot more in common than they differ on, but in this hyper-politicized era those differences have been magnified to become an issue of pure division and likely shouldn't be brought into work with you.
People are still largely extremely de-politized. The fact that people are starting to have opinions that they care about again, and this is immediately viewed as extremism is very telling.
See TikTok's banning LGBT content and Facebook's banning HIV drug awareness ads.
China owns TikTok
At this point, the co-worker's discomfort of working with an African-American or an openly gay person pretty much helps bring these issues out in the open rather quickly.
(And yes, I've been in a similar situation when a co-worker freaked out that I don't believe in Jesus, that I see the Bible as literature instead of factual, that I fully accept evolution as scientific fact, and yet I somehow see "Jesus" as a good role model for life.)
Spying is a very poor way to handle situations like this.
Instead, include some basic diversity training in all onboarding, and periodically renew it. It tends to scare away racists and homophobes.
OFC, this doesn't work in all circumstances, but, perhaps, it should be applied in all circumstances in which it _could_.
It's a complicated subject.
IMO, I don't see how someone can be a racist / homophobe in secret; thus I don't see a justification for spying on a co-worker just to find out things like this.
I don't follow? Maybe try rephrasing?
> can be a racist / homophobe in secret
I can kind of see that, but, the KKK wears hoods?
> I don't see a justification for spying on a co-worker
Hmm. I don't have an examined opinion on this, outside of general hesitation to go looking for problems for reasons such as confirmation bias and whatever the name is for what self-fulfilling-prophecies looks like this in kind of situation. Well, and maybe that if you're looking for justification you've already messed up. Just because you can somehow find a consolation prize doesn't mean you should have done something in the first pace.
Edit: You don't need to tolerate bad behavior, but it goes both ways: You can't justify bad behavior in the name of policing other peoples' dumb actions.
Or: Two wrongs don't make a right.
How do you differentiate between "biases" and "legitimate disagreement"?
I do it by exploring how much attention someone's paid to they path they took to where they are. Biases generally present as short, unexamined paths.
> Or: Two wrongs don't make a right.
I would agree. Too much of justice is about negative incentives.
If you have the time, I suggest reading "They Thought they Were Free," by Milton Meyer. It's a well-known book that tries to answer why generally "good" people joined or supported the Nazi party in pre-WWII Germany.
It's been about a decade since I last read it, but I keep it on my shelf. What I remember, though, is that the reasons why Germans joined or supported the Nazi party vary quite greatly. I remember one passage about a man who basically liked dressing up in Nazi uniforms because he loved pageantry of Nazi rallies. Another was about some Jewish children who saw a Hitler Youth parade in a movie theater newsreel, and really wanted to join.
It's well worth the read if you need to understand why hate groups are so attractive to some people. (Or, to basically "examine your biases" towards people who you have "legitimate disagreement")
That said, as legit as your recommendations are, I don't see how this answers my question:
How do you differentiate between biased and legitimate disagreement?
Neutral 3rd party?
But then how do you know the party is neutral?
For example, do you think that we should force Muslim Imams to wed gay couples? I believe that it would be a fairly controversial topic even in left-wing circles.
That might be the culture I come from, but it is not my culture, and I do not subscribe to it, claim responsibility for it, or claim ownership of it.
Then again, there's not a lot of people in my culture, they're pretty spread out, and it's hard to get them together in one place to do our thing, soooo.
America is a lot of different cultures. Most places are. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlanetOfHats
The point of tolerance is to tolerate.
Just because you have managed to find an intolerant viewpoint that survives our current memetic filter, does not change the reality that you're the one preaching intolerance, right here.
Hate movements throughout history have been supported by logical-sounding arguments for marginalizing some outgroup. I don't think that stoking rage against backwards political ideas is virulent enough to end in killing fields per se, but even the current increased polarization is not good.
I... don't think I agree? I would count un-inhibited self-expression if I were looking for a success metric of tolerance, not tolerance itself. (note: you'd need some other metrics lest THAT go off the rails, to be clear)
The idea that you have to tolerate the intelorant makes the original concept self-defeating; if you instead treat tolerance as a treaty, it's self-reinforcing.
You can interpret "tolerance" differently. I will continue to practice the version where I tolerate you until you are intolerant, at which point we'll have a conversation, and at which point I am morally allowed to no longer tolerate you.
This is rescinding a "right", not requiring action.
> Hate movements throughout history have been supported by logical-sounding arguments for dehumanizing some outgroup
This is a good point and I'll watch out for it. Rescinding tolerance does not have to equate with dehumanization... but yeah, I can see how that often leads there. Seems like an easy way to avoid it is, I could just stop tolerating bigotry, but still extend the compassion and tolerance that I am able to to bigots. Judge behavior rather than people. Which is... well, it's just good practice anyway.
Not op, but curious what actions or behavior you think becomes fair game.
In answering your question, it's more about reciprocation: if you make it comfortable for people to be who they are, we'll make it comfortable for you to be who you are; or the inverse. Which does have a strong element of "who did it first", but that's resolvable by risking the other person defecting while you cooperate and if they do that, well, doesn't really matter who did it first because it's clear who wasn't up for trying.
Picking out specific actions... I honestly don't know. We had a guy in one my communities get kicked out for doing this thing where he'd hear about someone's story about being a victim, and then retell that story in such a way that a) he was now that kind of victim and b) the original person now wasn't.
No, it is actually not. It is self defeating.
The problem with giving "exceptions" for why you are now allowed to treat another person, in a horrible manner, is that humans are great at trying to take advantage of those exceptions.
Basically nobody who is doing horrible things to other people, believes that they are in the wrong. If you give people an excuse, then they will trick themselves into believing that their actions are not wrong, then they will gladly accept this excuse.
The only way to put a stop to this, is to just unilaterally reject certain behaviors, and say that you will not engage in it, even if you believe the other person "deserves" it.
Because if you let people decide that it is ok to do certain things, if the other person "deserves" it, well you are going to see that people will just find people who "deserve" it a whole lot of the time.
Seems to me the issue is poor self-examination.
If you feel like you're doing something because someone "deserves" it, you're doing it wrong; examine the what led yourself here to find out what it's really about.
Including the cost of, say, being intolerant of intolerance of intolerance?
AFAIK, one of the major reasons to be intolerant of intolerance is to prevent lynchings.
Even if you think the other person deserves it, because of whatever excuse that you can think of, you still shouldn't act horribly, no matter the nice sounding justification that you can trick yourself into believing.
Humans are really good at tricking themselves into believing that their horrible behavior is justified.
In this specific situation, calling someone else intolerant is just an excuse that people will use to justify their horrible behavior to others.
I was giving a description of how "intolerance of intolerance" works out in practice.
It doesn't matter if you think these people are doing it wrong.
I do not believe that humans can be trusted to be given such an easy to abuse loophole, that gives them carte-blanche moral authority to act terrible to other human beings (because the the target of the abuse is "intolerant", and therefore deserve it).
It is safer to just say "no. You should not treat people poorly, even if you believe that they are intolerant, or deserve it because of some other quality".
I'm reminded of a description of "conservative" vs "liberal" wherein it's about risk management versus experimentation.
Right now, if I'm faced with a choice between accommodating people who are doing it wrong, or challenging those people to become more, I'm going with the second option. Then again, this might not result in a viable society; or perhaps just a viable large-scale society.
To put it another way: You can view the loophole as the problem, or you can view the attitude that finds loopholes acceptable to use the problem.
> You should not treat people poorly, even if you believe that they are intolerant,
I can treat people well whom I also do not tolerate. It's just that yeah, usually, those acting intolerant are also acting like assholes.
> I will continue to practice the version where I tolerate you until you are intolerant, at which point we'll have a conversation, and at which point I am morally allowed to no longer tolerate you
Now apply that to my perspective here. I've judged that you're being intolerant. We're having that conversion, yet you're sticking to your intolerant viewpoint. So this means I no longer need to tolerate you, personally?
> if you instead treat tolerance as a treaty, it's self-reinforcing
Sure, but not in a good way. Framing it as a "treaty" implies a forceful ultimatum if it is broken. What you've actually created is a focal point of going after people that don't conform to your definition of tolerance.
> stop tolerating bigotry, but still extend the compassion and tolerance that I am able to to bigots.
This is another way of looking at it, closer to what I'm saying. Talking about "intolerance" in a vacuum doesn't really account for whether the magnitude is growing or diminishing - some tendency of de-escalation is required for things to settle out
The general consensus, at least around these parts, is that bigoted behavior is unacceptable. What's really under debate is when views (or even more tenuously, associations) are brought up by critics and reacted to as if they were actions. That tendency seems more akin to escalating aggression than resolving differences.
> getting a tattoo of a swastika
You can totally go get it. I won't welcome you back. You are no longer celebrating other people's self-expression, and so lose our celebration of yours.
> So this means I no longer need to tolerate you, personally?
Hmm... Yeah, seems reasonable. Here's a different approach:
It seems clear that most people are able to mostly tell when something intolerant is happening. So, look up the event chain: is this intolerance in response to intolerance, or is it response to something else?
> some tendency of de-escalation is required for things to settle out
Yes! Pretty sure the answer here is "forgiving tit-for-tat".
> are brought up by critics and reacted to as if they were actions
Which is (generally) really unfortunate :( I'd (generally) like to have tolerant discussions on views, but it's rare that people can do that. Where this generality can break is when the view is extreme enough that it undergoes a state change; as a friend puts it, "advocating genocide is not expressing an opinion"; although for me there's a step before that break that is "are you willing and able to discuss this as if you could be wrong."
Sorry, no, that is not tolerance. Rather it is political violence. Political violence may be justifiable, but needs to be argued for on its own merits - not couched as an exception to "tolerance".
> You can totally go get [a swastika tattoo]. I won't welcome you back.
I was examining your adherence to your statement that "un-inhibited self-expression if I were looking for a success metric of tolerance". You are now saying that you will discourage people from expressing themselves in ways you do not agree with. You can't have it both ways.
Apparently that lofty generality was just serving as a dog whistle, to be ignored for those whom you disagree with. Furthermore, you took my hypothetical and responded directly in terms of me, as if I am some "other" that is personally interested in getting a racist tattoo.
> It seems clear that most people are able to mostly tell when something intolerant is happening
Much of what one political team considers "activism" is perceived as intolerance by the other team, so where does that end up? Setting subjective feelings as a standard practically guarantees herd behavior.
> Yes! Pretty sure the answer here is "forgiving tit-for-tat".
And yet you have continued phrasing things in terms of ultimatums, where your judgment of someone's actions is justification to write them off in a larger way. Even if you yourself deescalate in your own personal interactions, what you've written directly supports escalation.
I stand by my original comment. You, right here, are fanning the flames of intolerance.
Person A says "Let's kill all of Group B"
Person B says "I won't tolerate Person A"
Person C says "I won't tolerate Person B"
Person A is being intolerant. They are breaking the terms of the notional peace treaty; the consequence of that is losing the right to be tolerated.
Person B is OK because Person A has lost the right to be tolerated. They are not breaking the notional treaty.
Person B is not OK because Person B has not lost the right to be tolerated. They are breaking the notional treaty.
As for the rest of what you're saying...
Yeah, I can see how that bat picture is off-putting. I don't always notice those kinds of undercurrents. Thanks for pointing it out!
> discourage people from expressing themselves in ways you do not agree with
You can, if your differentiator is along different axis. See the Person A/B/C example above.
> Furthermore
Thanks for expressing that you're picking this up. That's not something I'm putting down, so I'm not sure where that's coming from.
> perceived as intolerance
Yep. I don't yet have a way to address this en masse, although talking to individuals seems to work.
> Setting subjective feelings as a measure
...That seems appropriate? But you're right about the failure mode. I'd then say the issue isn't using this sensor we've all got, but in directly reacting to the results of that sensor. If your box is showing high CPU usage, and all you do is up the CPU...
> I stand by my original comment.
You do you, and I value that you're expressing what you're picking up. It's not what I'm putting down.
Person A: B raped a girl, so B doesn't tolerate women!
Person B: I did not!
Person C: I don't tolerate person B.
Person B's Friends: I don't tolerate person C since they broke the tolerance contract, B hasn't done anything.
Person C's friends: I don't tolerate B's friends since they broke the tolerance contract by not tolerating A.
Does this sound familiar? It was the start of the Tulsa massacre. If you say that "intolerance of intolerance" is a good thing then I take it that you think that the Tulsa massacre was warranted, since they were just intolerant of intolerant people right?
Edit: Or in the case of for example Damore:
Person A: There are inherent differences between group A and group B, so likely not all differences we see between them are due to discrimination.
Person B: I don't tolerate A's intolerance, he is clearly bigoted and thus broke the contract!
Person C: I don't tolerate B's intolerance, A might be misguided but didn't really show intolerance.
A, B and C now starts a verbal war causing several people to get fired on both sides before it calms down.
The Damore example is much better. I spent a long time going down that rabbit hole, and my conclusion is that he had a number of things that should have been considered and were not, in themselves, problematic, and he also had a number of things to say that were problematic, and he said many (but not all) of those things in ways that were problematic. The ensuing cultural conversation did the usual unfortunate thing, and devolve into black/white tribalism.
This is why I go first for a conversation with the Person As before deciding on courses of action.
Rather what "Person A" is likely to have said is something civil that clashes with the dominant political team's reality distortion field. Rather than having to address the substance, those who disagree feign highly personal reactions as if a minority viewpoint is that "kill all" mortal threat, effectively resorting to the age old monkey status games for silencing dissent.
If you allow intolerant views, you normalise intolerance. If you normalise intolerance, you ALSO normalise intolerant acts, and they WILL follow naturally.
You most certainly can draw a line between actions and views, and fortunately most laws do.
Don't be friends with a racist. Make sure they understand their views are not acceptable. Do your part today.
In my experience, people are seldom racist for the sake of being hateful. Rather than applying an arbitrary label to someone so that you can lazily dismiss them as evil (which is just as bigoted as the bigotry you claim to oppose), it's better to find the underlying cause of the apparent racism, and addressing that concretely instead.
If you normalize cracking down on views on the basis that they're intolerant, the people who make that determination end up with a lot of unchecked power. In France, for example, you can be jailed for wearing a t-shirt that says "boycott Israel" today - it's hate speech. In Germany, many flags used in Rojava are banned as extremist symbols. And note that despite all these laws, RN and AfD still exist and thrive.
If you allow intolerance to spread, it WILL, without fail, hurt people. Sometime, immense number of people. This is not theoretical. It happens, again and again, and the only way to prevent it is to oppose intolerance at every stage.
Your abstract ideology of absolutely free speech is not in any way worth the immense pain and suffering that will, inevitably, follow.
On the other hand, policing actions is much easier, because the more consequential ones are also the more prominent - you don't need a surveillance state to deal with them, you just need a reaction force.
In the early social media days, I worked in a small team with a man and a woman for a couple of years. When FB came around we friended each other, and I found out that she was a very leftist lesbian and he was a conservative church leader. I was a libertarian-leaning atheist, so we made quite the trifecta.
It was never an issue, before or after, because we didn't bring any of the potentially contentious parts of ourselves into the work environment.
We can, and should, be able to present different personas depending on the company we are in. The inability to do so, rather than being a moral failing, is a sign of fanaticism.
What's the solution for the people in your country who are attending these rallies and holding up these signs?
This boycott model of employment will eventually have them fired from minimum wage jobs too. So where would these people work? They have a responsibility to contribute to society, make money, support themselves, pay taxes.
I would not like to see such people as my coworkers but I'm at a loss as to what should be done with them. As the years go by, robots will do more repetitive and manual jobs. Where would such people be exiled to work?
To a large extent, if we both showed up to work, accepted each other's pull requests, acted professionally and respectfully and went home, I'd be ok with it as a compromise.
Broadly though I'm finding it difficult to reconcile the prospect of someone exceptional who is working at a top tech company, with someone whose intelligence is low enough to advocate outright racism or bigotry. It seems like the example is very far fetched, and doesn't do much to advance whatever point you're trying to make.
I think it's probably best to use a more realistic example, wherein the prospect of working side by side with someone would honestly not be so daunting.
It's simple if the threshold for racism and bigotry is driven low enough that it ends up including the private beliefs of most of the country and even more of the world.
If you go back to 9/11 we saw this same type of reasoning where instead of "KKK", "terrorist" was used as a fringe stand-in to justify the draconian structure where crazy things like spying, witch-hunting / denial of due process etc. became the norm.
I remember watching Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 in which they interview these sweet old people running a book club where they eat cookies and discuss books. A few weeks into it, the club members read an article in the paper that showed that one of their book club members was there under a fake name and was actually an undercover anti-terrorism police detective, which was confirmed by his department. Thereafter he explores the case of a retired old man who said critical things about President Bush at the gym and the FBI showed up to ask questions about him. (Around this timestamp: https://youtu.be/Q6lcP2f6Nvs?t=3515)
1) We have plenty of examples from the not-too-distant past of people who were very intelligent and yet definitely racists or bigots by anything resembling modern standards. I'm 99% sure Woodrow Wilson would do fine at a top tech company in terms of carrying out his work duties if he decided to work at one, for example. And he was racist by the standards of his own time, not just ours.
2) The boundaries of what constitutes "outright racism or bigotry" are not fixed, and have been changing quite rapidly in some demographics. My general impression is that 20-something graduates of the top 50 schools in the US have, on average, a very different definition of those boundaries from most 45-year-olds, or from 20-something non-college-graduates.
What about "weird" things like not being comfortable with taking on a new project with the military that ultimately helps kill people, or amassing as much personal data on the entire population as the NSA?
I mostly agree with your sentiment on the surface. Dont talk politics or religion at work, do your job, and things usually go just fine. But life is way too complex to label individuals' moral objections to employers crossing into controversial territory as weird.
Don't you think that civilians who die due to the military project think the same thing about the people who worked on it?
There's more to the world than you losing your job because people protested a military project. You participating in the project also has ramifications on other people's lives.
In fact, to demonstrate with an extreme, if you go all the way to building gas Chambers (just as an illustration), I'm totally okay having you be unemployed because I have a personal ethical issue with this.
This perspective is antithetical to democracy.
That's funny, since that is all the military does. I think what you meant to say was: "Don't force the view that you shouldn't force your view on others onto others"
And yet, Google is still evil.
This was literally a selling point at Google:
> Larry Page and Sergey Brin ... had designed their company's famously open culture to facilitate free thinking. Employees were “obligated to dissent” if they saw something they disagreed with, and they were encouraged to “bring their whole selves” to work rather than check their politics and personal lives at the door.[1]
Lots of companies have figured out that "having a worthwhile mission", in addition to just a paycheck, is one way to distinguish themselves from other potential employers.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/inside-google-three-years-misery...
Seems like James Damore took their advice.
I think that "bring your whole self" assumed that the politics everyone would talk about would be politics in the general, diffuse, societal sense. The proper scope of government, the merits of particular policies and candidates, how to solve problems X and Y.
Politics in the sense of judging on who deserves to work at Google, or who is underserving, which directly implies that certain Googlers would be unfit to be there under different regimes, isn't outward-facing. It directly hurts peers. A policy which evicts someone for introducing the notion that some Googlers are unfit to be Googlers will also selectively hurt some folks at Google for speaking their mind.
Google can't have it both ways. I think they made the better choice. I'd rather treat my coworkers compassionately, think of them as humans with complex natures, than to be "right" and "meritocratic" and make them feel threatened and unworthy.
Politics in America runs about 50-50. Religion is similarly every person's preference.
Taking either of those to work is a formula for disaster. I'm just amazed that companies haven't done a better job of enforcing "Leave that at home" 'till now. It really wasn't a thing until a decade or so ago.
As a minion, you're discouraged from holding an opinion on company time, and even more strongly discouraged from doing anything that might affect the natural corporate power balance.
Active political engagement is a privilege reserved for upper management, who certainly won't be leaving their opinions at home.
politics "at work" is not the same as a company being involved in politics (or pushing for a particular political party).
Work time is time the employer paid you to do a job. Unless said job involves activism, engaging in such activism is not a productive use of your time.
The new dimension these days is how many people you can rally to your cause and how fast you can do it. Social media and news media amplification gives anyone that power. It can be used and misused and managers are learning how to deal. It's all new so expect good and bad outcomes.
But don't expect people to stop pushing their agendas.
People go to work in big important companies like Google so that they can have more political influence. If you are techie interested in influencing future and politics, working inside tech companies might be a new avenue to influence the world. You believe X and you go to Google to push that X.
I don't know if this is effective way to influence. I'm just responding to the tone of your suggestion "people should know their place and use proper channels".
As corporations are increasingly using political power and influencing governments and the society why should workers keep politics outside workplace?
I believe you, but the fact that they weren't working there creates a statistical bias in the sample, don't you think?
However there are a lot of beliefs that make this kind of approach unworkable.
If XYZ wants to believe that the earth is flat, sure, that can just be a personal belief and won't interfere with his work duties... well, unless he is launching satellites for NASA.
If XYZ is a furry and thinks anime girls in cat outfits are hot, sure, that's cool too. Also a personal belief that probably won't interfere with work.
If XYZ is an anti-vaxxer... well, probably won't interfere with their job unless they work in medicine. A dumb personal belief but this can probably stay personal.
But suppose employee XYZ runs a newsletter (in his own time) and publishes views about how Jews or women or black people or whatever are inferior. Can you really trust this employee to do his job at your company, where he might have to interact with people from those groups?
So, I don't think a naive approach of "just keep work and personal beliefs separate" covers 100% of situations.
I understand the arguments from a structural racism/sexism standpoint for treating those situations differently from the ones you describe, but the specific test you propose seems to fail just as much: can you trust someone who thinks men are inferior in a job where they might have to interact with men?
(I will note that your use of the male pronoun in describing the untrustworthy employee is itself interesting; not sure whether that's meant to be a gender-neutral "he" or whether you actually believe that only males can hold "undesirable" views.)
Evolution has created the rules that one doesn't mix politics with business. Google has skirted this rule for some time but now it's not going to be pretty.
It also feels like many tech companies actively advertise "to millennials" by advertising that their culture is the kind of place at which "you want to work". When that company/mission starts to lose its polish[1], it becomes harder to recruit for that talent[2].
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/inside-google-three-years-misery...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/16/facebook-has-struggled-to-re...
This 'rule' is a purely artificial construct encouraged to ensure the common employees keep their heads down and let those in charge continue screwing over them and/or society. The history of organized labor involves no less than straight murder of labor activists by company owners.
There is a lot of tension in labour relations but no-politics-in-the-workplace philosophies cover a lot more than that.
Saying "oh we should keep the office apolitical by not having a union" is a political act. Saying "oh we shouldn't complain about the kind of customers our emplyoer has" is a political act.
Acting in opposition to political acts is in itself a political act. The apolitical thing to do would be to _not intervene in others' political processes_. If mgmt let its employees organize labor actions with the same willingness as a movie night, then they would be acting apolitically.
> Saying "oh we should keep the office apolitical by not having a union" is a political act. Saying "oh we shouldn't complain about the kind of customers our emplyoer has" is a political act.
That isn't keeping politics out of the workplace - it's the exact opposite. That's explicitly bringing politics into the workplace by trying to tell coworkers what views they should have. Curbing this behavior is exactly what keeping politics out of the workplace is about.
> Acting in opposition to political acts is in itself a political act. The apolitical thing to do would be to _not intervene in others' political processes_. If mgmt let its employees organize labor actions with the same willingness as a movie night, then they would be acting apolitically.
For the third time, Keeping politics out of the workplace does not oppose any view. It's about making clear that the office is not a space for political activity. Yes, the apolitical thing is to not intervene in others' political process.
The reality is, bringing politics into the workplace is a very significant intervention in people's political lives. In the politically active offices I've worked in, plenty of employees feigned support for things they didn't support because they felt it was expected of them. Co workers whose views were part of the company majority dominated the conversation, because co-workers with minority viewpoints didn't want to risk repercussions for voicing unpopular views.
So if you want a company that does not intervene in others' political lives, keeping politics out of the workplace is the most effective approach.
Look, functionally you're defining an "apolitical" office as unquestioning obedience. Which is fine, just own it instead of trying to dress it up.
An apolitical office is one where political activity isn't held in the office. That's it. I'm really not sure what is confusing about this.
I've worked in apolitical offices before, and people do feel comfortable to question business decision and technical choices. In fact, I'd say people were more comfortable in questioning those decisions than in political offices, because in political offices people are loath to be perceived as political enemies.
"Politics is a set of activities associated with the governance of a country or an area. It involves making decisions that apply to group of members" - Wikipedia
> An apolitical office is political in the same sense that secularism is a religious stance.
This sentence doesn't make any sense as Secularism is a political concept and not a "religious stance".
An office can never be an apolitical entity, given that it involves the organisation of people and decision making about their activities, AND that office necessarily interacts with wider society which is unavoidably a political area.
When you think about it, it's really quite baffling that people can think they can spend almost 30% of their waking life within some system that is devoid of political relevance. Life is political. Society is political. What you do in your work and career is one of the most politically impactful parts of a persons life.
To be generous, treating the workplace as devoid of politics is just support of the status-quo.
Not sure whether I should belabour this point...
> Yes, the apolitical thing is to not intervene in others' political process.
Given that many people are socialists and want to live in a society where say, Education, is a public good and managed by public institutions, then simply maintaining private educational institutions is intervening in the "political process" of others.
And thus, an office in which this "set of activities" is not permitted is an apolitical office.
> An office can never be an apolitical entity, given that it involves the organisation of people and decision making about their activities, AND that office necessarily interacts with wider society which is unavoidably a political area.
I think you're failing to distinguish between an apolitical office, and the company being an "apolitical entity". A company of any significant size is going to end up interacting with politicians. But this does not mean that its offices cannot be apolitical spaces. I do not know why you seem to insist that this is the case. All that is necessary for an office to be an apolitical space is to make political activity off limits in the office.
> When you think about it, it's really quite baffling that people can think they can spend almost 30% of their waking life within some system that is devoid of political relevance. Life is political. Society is political. What you do in your work and career is one of the most politically impactful parts of a persons life.
Life and society are indeed political. Sure, some people may want to bring politics into the 30% of their lives that they spend in the office. But plenty of other people are happier when a company has employees use the 70% that is spent outside of the office.
> To be generous, treating the workplace as devoid of politics is just support of the status-quo.
For the fourth time, absence of a political view is not the support of any view. This is a toxic "you're with us or you're against us" mentality and it's exactly this kind of thing that people are sick of hearing from their co-workers.
> Given that many people are socialists and want to live in a society where say, Education, is a public good and managed by public institutions, then simply maintaining private educational institutions is intervening in the "political process" of others.
And in an apolitical office they are free to organize activism to push politicians towards achieving those ends - during the 70% of the time they spend outside of work.
Maintaining an apolitical office is not an endorsement of the status quo or any other viewpoint. It prevents people who want to change the status quo from bringing their politics into the office, but also prevents those people who want to defend the status quo. The only thing is does is it makes people carry out their political activity in a space other than the office.
Organization of people involves power dynamics. Maybe you can make an argument that something like holocracy generates an apolitical environment, though I think that doesn't hold up experimentally.
Management deciding whether or not to increase vacation days is a political act. Employees deciding whether they want to stand together in negotations with management or handle stuff individually is a political decision. Hell, trying to push for more/less meetings in day to day work is a political act.
It's pretty hard to have any sort of organization without the political aspect coming into play immediately.
No, it's a company policy. There is a contingent of people who believe everything is a political act, and perhaps you are among them. But know that this view is not as widely held as you might think.
> Employees deciding whether they want to stand together in negotations with management or handle stuff individually is a political
Interestingly, unions actually try to argue that they are not political. That is the cornerstone of their arguments as to why union dues are not compelled speech.
> Hell, trying to push for more/less meetings in day to day work is a political act.
Again, not for the overwhelming majority of people who consider this an apolitical change.
Yes, if you believe everything is political then everything in the workplace is political. But most people don't subscribe to this view.
This works both ways: what data do you have that workers consider adjustments to things like meetings political acts?
Well no, you made an unsubstantiated claim. I'm just noting it was unsubstantiated. Given when I work, I suspect a survey of my co-workers would reach a different conclusion than you would.
As for why it might be political: encouraging certain working styles is political, is it not? Pushing people to work independently as opposed to collaboratively is a highly political choice.
You don't have to defend the status quo, if no one is allowed to challenge it. In other words your ideal office is set in favor of the status quo. And a century ago, would likely not have hired women or blacks. Since that would have been "political".
Thing is, I'm actually in favor of this. Most companies should probably stick to avoiding politics as good as possible and give their employees freedom to do whatever they want outside of work. At the same time, "X employee does [bad thing]" headlines make this damn hard, and thus the company will have to distance itself from what such employees do... worst case by terminating the relationship.
Long story short, having a highly divided society will lead to a lot of pain. No way around it. Finding ways to work against those divisions before they get even worse, even if that means conflict, seem more important than to just bury one's head in the sand.
That isn't keeping sex out of the workplace - it's the exact opposite. That's explicitly bringing sex into the workplace by trying to tell coworkers what preferences they should have. Curbing this behavior is exactly what keeping sex out of the workplace is about.
> Acting in opposition to sexual acts is in itself a sexual act. The asexual thing to do would be to _not intervene in others' sexual engagements_. If mgmt let its employees organize relationships with the same willingness as a movie night, then they would be acting asexually.
For the third time, Keeping sex out of the workplace does not oppose any preference. It's about making clear that the office is not a space for sexual activity. Yes, the asexual thing is to not intervene in others' sexual relationships.
The reality is, bringing sex into the workplace is a very significant intervention in people's sexual lives. In the sexually active offices I've worked in, plenty of employees feigned support for things they didn't support because they felt it was expected of them. Co workers whose preferences were part of the company majority dominated the conversation, because co-workers with minority preferences didn't want to risk repercussions for voicing unpopular preferences.
So if you want a company that does not intervene in others' sexual lives, keeping sex out of the workplace is the most effective approach.
---
It was fun, but it didn't _quite_ work...
If an office instituted a policy where sex was allowed in the office, and now you have co workers having sex in the cubicle next door and making sexual advances towards you, then that absolutely is intervening in employees' sexual lives.
No.
> Or, if you are not discussing politics, _are you being political?_
No.
History is history. Comparing Google to murderers are just false. They are not. In fact Google got where it is today, is mainly due to the fact they previously intentionally obfuscated the ownership between management/employees. Apparently, it no longer works for it now. Time to move on. Learn to act like MSFT/IBM or maybe even Amazon.
But I don't see how anyone can reasonably make the case that (much of) the recent political activism at Google has been an example of defending general workers rights against abuses. It seems more like an attempt to push group politics (the group in question not representing the viewpoint or interests of all employees) onto an institution.
As a rule of thumb, if the idea of the opposite side of your stance doing the same thing, with the same tactics, makes you feel uneasy - you might think twice about setting the precedence.
I agree that censorship of political discourse is a problem. Or religious, or of any subject. The "let's not talk politics amongst friends" (or at work) line of thought is a form of censorship that is in many ways self-imposed. I think that we're so bent on being right that we become blind to others' incentives, interests and other elements of subjectivity and lose the ability to resolve conflicts. Then the obvious option is to evade situations where we might have conflicts. A culture-wide communication problem. I'd like to see people comfortable discussing anything anytime with anyone.
And yes, I'd agree that in this case it could likely be considered a general workplace issue where most employees would be on the same side against the corporation. I think the original comment was talking more about the recent instances of protests however (don't do business with X, Y, Z because it conflicts with my politics etc).
They are not discussing the power imbalance between workers and the owners of capital. They are not discussing Google's abuse of private information at large. Just as many Americans watch Fox News or CNN every night and yell at the TV, Googlers are getting upset at tips of the iceberg.
This works until you must, by necessity, either mix work and politics or suffer some indignity.
Advocating for parental leave? Politics. Mothers rooms? Politics. Prayer rooms? Politics. Trans inclusive health care? Politics. Domestic partner benefits? Politics.
Unfortunately, for many folks politics at work is a reality whether they want them to be or not, just because of who they are.
Yep all politics. As political issues they should be dealt with in the political arena of whichever branch of government is responsible. If you strongly believe in these rights and priveleges you'd be spending your time advocating for universal access to them. Doing it on a per company basis is ineffective and selfish, there will always be a race to the bottom and it gives your competitors an advantage.
I disagree, you are making perfect the enemy of good. The only solution is not "make the government mandate the solution".
Whether they should or not is irrelevant, it's what they do. Companies com and go, companies that spend more than they have to tend to go faster, employers change even more frequently. Do you want to put up this fight every time you change employers? Do you want to be stuck at one employer because changing jobs means losing benefits?
> We only win if everyone gets the benefit?
I don't consider getting these benefits for the privileged few with job mobility to be much of a win. Even for them it's probably not a long term win.
> The only solution is not "make the government mandate the solution".
It's not the only solution just the best solution, more unionization would be another solution that's way better than a piecemeal company by company approach though. The government solution also offers up some much better alternatives in cases like healthcare.
Google goes to extensive lengths to pay the minimum taxes required by law, exploiting every loophole they can find. Just saying.
Naturally if many people band together that constitutes a better bargaining strategy. (Sounds familiar?)
But unions and all the formal groupings are problematic, because they quickly regress to representing only the very common issues and/or smaller issues themselves become bargaining chips.
Solidarity organically grows these flocks of people banded together, and thus pragmatically these kinds of ad-hoc organizations have the same bargaining power as formal unions. (And the fact that Google fears this so much that they are willing to risk breaking the law because of it shows this.)
You are simply saying to your employer (or potential employer) that I have this need (disabled toilets, minimum wage, safe working conditions, whatever), and that were they willing to provide that you are going to work there.
Should we end government disability regulations and let workers negotiate it for themselves? Is it really too much too ask governments to provide a base regulation for prayer rooms like they do disabled toilets? Minimum working conditions have always been set by government, especially for people who lack job mobility, which is why I consider a privileged few campaigning to do it at there tech corp to be selfish.
The lack of diversity of workplaces and work structures is a very big problem. (It results in dumb congestion problems, like rush hours, high tuition and student debt because of the super popular signals, peer pressure for uniformization and conforming, etc.)
Unions would just provide another very big hammer instead of incentivizing meaningful dialogue and custom agreements.
I'm not saying they would be worse than the status quo though.
I don't know anything about what's happening at Google, but this either involves some talented mental gymnastics or it's obviously false.
Places of business have politics. Always have, always will. Internal politics and very frequently most companies involve themselves in local/state/national/international politics.
- Joining a chamber of commerce or a trade organization is participating in politics.
- Having a PR campaign or a lobbyist which affects public attitudes or legislation is politics.
- Sponsored an ice rink in the middle of small town Texas[1] (hint: it's a symbol that the company, even though it is based in South Korea, depends very much on the good will of jurors and judges in that smallish town).
- high quality talent is scarce (hence all of the famous Yahoo/Google/Facebook/etc perks for engineers),
- the transparency of associations[2][3],
- the political climate of associations (eg. [4][5]), and
- boycotts (of many forms) can hurt the bottom dollar[6]. Sometimes it has the opposite effect[7].
[1] https://ipcloseup.com/2015/02/25/for-samsung-charity-begins-...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/04/facebook-employees-reportedl...
[3] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignat...
[4] https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/14/us/harvard-professor-ron-sull...
[5] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/food/wp/2017/08/14/charl...
[6] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/insi...
[7] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/business/nike-reports-dou...
"Evolution has"? Are you invoking evo-psych to say politics and business don't mix.
It's really quite amazing how the dominant corporate ideology has become so invisible that people think that by going to work and doing whatever your boss says to do is somehow devoid of political involvement.
Pretending "business" has nothing to do with politics is absurd. You can only believe it if you think corporate capitalism is apolitical.
You mean, the power of the ruling class has created the rules that ruled class doesn't mix challenging their masters in with their service that is required for their survival.
Because politics and business are deeply mixed when you look at the ruling (capitalist) class, your “evolution” rule doesn't apply there. And politics that involve bootlicking for their particular masters is also rewarded in the working class, your “evolution” rule.dorsnt apply there, either. It's only politics that challenges one’s capitalist masters (usually embodied in a corporate employer) that is discouraged.
...said the largest worldwide private spy agency the world has ever known.
This sounds like actual harassment of individual employees who happen to work in a department that is seen as "the enemy".
>Earlier this year, following a series of leaks to the media, Google executives tightened their grip. They shut down thousands of contractors’ access to company documents, citing security concerns. Google’s senior managers, meanwhile, warned employees not to access or share certain documents.
Can someone explain what the controversy is here?
It reads like two people exfiltrated documents and shared them with the media to further their political (?) ends, after being part of a larger group that was warned not to do so.
Google had some rather controversial projects that officially got shutdown over employees being rightfully concerned. An example would be the highly censored Chinese dragonfly search engine. Google clamping down on project information on a "need to know" basis could be seen as rather problematic when you consider that management considers that kind of project acceptable.
it's daft, but upper management/owners can choose to do the most profitable project, and the employee's choices are to quit or comply (or give reasons why the project is not profitable, and offer an alternative).
An employee cannot really complain/shutdown the project on moral/political-ideology grounds, at the cost of shareholder profit, while they themselves suffer no ill consequence (since they get paid a salary regardless).
I disagree - there are certainly things which would justifiably get shut down and cause them to not have an employee base if they went through with it. They are just so unnormalized that it is not only implicit but they don't even have names for it. It is perfectly legitimate that the untoward would face demands because it isn't what they signed up for. There are all sorts of depraved things which could be done for profit which anyone remotely moral and reasonable would nope out of - often because it is already stupidly illegal. In a healthy system this aspect goes unnoticed because nobody even tries for it because it would be foregone disaster in the same way attempting a coup in a healthy democracy would just end with the instigator in jail very quickly.
The alternative logical result of the logic would be that when every cannery workers quits when the management decides to sell canned human flesh would hold the workers at fault and not the depraved cannibal manager. An extreme example but it demonstrates that the principle would have its limits.
The reverse principle doesn't hold entirely either. Sailors thinking they signed up for timber shipping and finding they would be engaged in privateering with a letter of marquee or transporting slaves would be very within their rights to demand sticking to the enterprise. However objecting to hauling finished lumber instead of timber would be unreasonable of the workers unless there was say a safety issue from load distribution and vessel design.
Comply with what? How would you quit over a project that you aren't even told about? This "employee's choice" makes no sense when the employer creates an intentional information blackout to hide its questionable activities from scrutiny.
That's not what he's talking about. He's talking about doing so despite negative ethical ramifications.
This is (arguably) greedy behavior.
This is a very HN comment, but I'm not sure how you can't see why someone would want to work for bigcorp...
Impact: The company seems more interested in restricting our landscape rather than innovating on top of it, what makes you think it's a company that accepts disruption anymore?
Resources: All the resources in the world doesn't mean squat if you can't disrupt the existing system.
Does the rank and file really have much impact at one of the FAANG companies? I've talked to some ex-Google employees who left so they could have an impact somewhere.
The FAANGs do have effectively infinite resources, but compute has been for the most part democratized. Resources are very inexpensive now.
I have a friend who moved to the Utah/Idaho region, giving up a FAANG job, in order to escape the spiraling cost of living where the FAANG jobs are. I respect that.
I'm at my third FAANG living in one of the high-cost-of-living areas of the U.S. In the meantime I'm planning my escape. So long as income vastly outstrips my cost of living, I'm going to keep my FAANG and save like there's no tomorrow, and as soon as the math works out that I can maintain my current quality of life with a combination of a lower-paying job combined with interest on my savings (the proverbial 4% withdrawal rate) in a lower-cost-of-living area of the U.S., I'm out.
Er, yeah, less effective application of that figure of speech. You know what I mean.
> Some of the smartest and diligent people work here.
Yikes. Y’all are not as special as you think you are.
99% of people will join Google on HN. So will most of Amazon. Don't kid yourself.
Anyway I won't engage further. And I won't get personal. I still think it's a great company to grow as an engineer. You should definitely explore if you ever want to move on.
> Not too mention the combative attitude HN has toward Googlers anyway.
This feels like projection of some sort
> I still think it's a great company to grow as an engineer.
I don’t even know which company you’re talking about anymore
I don't really understand what your point here is. Do you have any evidence that it's higher? I thought interviewing was supposed to be "random".
> Look around you...very few people make the opposite move.
I work with a handful of people that did, actually
> But everyone knows that this is the truth.
You're, uh..really not helping the brand here dude..
I know at least 20 that made the opposite move. All vow to never go back to Amazon.
I can't hurt the brand any more than it is on HN :) Thankfully, the Google name is respected way more in the real world.
Just go to r/cscareerquestions and grep for "Amazon vs Google" and see what most new grads and senior engineers say.
To what extent do the involved parties agree on the facts as presented in this article? It seems incredible that any Google employees would be upset that somebody was fired for what amounts to stalking other employees. I assume they don't believe that's what actually happened, or they're just being totally unreasonable..
I don't know which is the case. Those are the two likely possibilities that I perceive, and I lean towards the former being more likely than the later. Part of my motivation for leaving this comment was to give others the opportunity to put forth other possibilities, or perhaps to shine some light on what the other side believes the facts of the case are.
For many years the narrative of this organization has been one of openness; more recent events have proved that narrative false. As in many large organizations that consume vast resources, secrets are vitally important, but of equally vital importance is that most people have little access to those secrets. Google was in a bit of an odd spot with respect to this topic, however. If googlers had realized that they were excluded from important organizational information, they might have felt empathy for the rest of humanity. If that had happened, they'd have been much less effective at building all those spy tools. Instead, upper management pretended that humanity wouldn't need secrets anymore, and Google would show them the way to the future. People in their twenties who hadn't read much history and were being paid vast sums could believe that. Hell, lots of people outside the organization, many of whom were neither ignorant of history nor paid vast sums, believed that. People who believed in that openness would just expect that everyone's work schedule, and lots of other information besides, would be online so that all their coworkers could effectively coordinate. If a problem arose in the midst of all that openness, well, it would just be solved with more openness.
Now we remember that knowledge is not a symmetric relation. Just because Bob might be stalking Alice in HR, that doesn't mean she has any idea who Bob is. Just because Google knows what I think and do all day long, doesn't mean I know what Google is thinking and doing. Having built the microscope, the engineers have realized they're also on the slide. Eventually they'll either resign themselves to the arrangement, or they'll quit. Either way, Google will soon be the sort of organization in which traditional norms of workplace privacy dominate. (Hint: they'll stop Bob the programmer from stalking you. Larry, though? He's exempt from that.)
If that's an accurate characterization of what the employee doing the calendar tracking was doing, then I agree that it was reasonable in the context of Google employment. However that would mean the article is very misleading as I suspected. The article says the subjects of the tracking felt unsafe, which says to me the tracked employees weren't sympathetic to the cause and believed motive for the tracking to be intimidation or harassment.
I have never and would never work for google so I can't say for sure, but I doubt openness as espoused by the company ever meant using openness to intimidate or harass others. IF that is what the employee in question was in fact doing, then it seems plainly unreasonable to me that anybody would defend it. I find it hard to believe such behavior was ever part of [official] company culture.
People disagree about whether it was reasonable to expect Google management to be anything like the public image it tried to cultivate.
I, personally, expected this reaction from management and I wouldn't have put my own career at risk. But I also never thought Google was an unconventional company.
Unfortunately soliciting anonymous comments is often ineffective at combating preference falsification because when a boss tells their workers that comments are anonymous, the workers simply don't believe it (and often they're right not to.)
A manager of a handful of employees generally knows what their employees sound like, what issues are important to them, and knows which ones tend to go against the grain.
Microsoft has been here for some time.
Apple is still trying to get comfortable, but has picked out a favorite chaise lounge.
Facebook should be showing up, any day, now.
It's very strange how often this idea of 'feeling unsafe' is coming up in the media now. It seems that either:
- People have become more fragile/sensitive; or
- People have become more aggressive.
I think it may be both. I think corporations create extremely unnatural, oppressive and coercive environments which makes people more outwardly sensitive but inwardly more aggressive.
So for example, if you want to get someone fired in order to take their position, and that person is already in a difficult position for whatever reason, you can just say "That person makes me feel unsafe" as a way to break the camel's back and finally get your promotion.
That is not a sufficient reason to abandon social norms and accommodations.
So political activists realised they can brainwash or pressure idiots by claiming that any opinion, person or class of people they don't like creates "lack of safety". It's a kneejerk reaction: safety first.
The worst case I saw of this so far was an event organised by my workplace, for teaching programming. But straight white men were banned. If you were a white man you had to show photos from Facebook to prove you were gay. The justification for sexism and racism was stated as creating a "safe" and "collaborative" environment. Implication: straight white men are unsafe. Except when they're teaching, of course. Then they're needed, so stop being unsafe.
There's nothing new about this sort of abuse. Orwell focused on the way leftists constantly manipulate language in 1984 with the idea of Newspeak. Consider the contradictory term "dictatorship of the proletariat" or how every communist country calls itself a People's Republic despite not being a republic, nor run by/for the people.
Wow I never experienced anything like that.
I do find some things in popular media offensive though nowadays.
For example, I saw on Netflix there was a show called "Dear white people" and I find the title kind of racist. I'm white, I work ridiculously hard (I have no life) but at this stage in my life, I'm basically a loser (and I'm still working very hard to try to change this) so I feel hurt when other people insinuate that white people like me have it easy and don't understand real life. It's rubbing salt into the wound.
I think if there was a show called "Dear black people" or "Dear working single moms", there would rightfully be a massive backlash.
People didn't just suddenly start killing jews in nazi germany. It starts with a shift in sentiment and you probably want to stop that before it gains momentum. That makes me understand how e.g. the "there are good people on both sides" comment made people feel unsafe.
> workplace example
That seems so much like a right wing caricature of "the left" that I'd like to read a source to make sure it isn't just exactly that. Not that I'd expect this to never happen... stupid people can be found everywhere in society. A more plausible scenario leading to this might be affirmative action (something I'd expect you to vehemently disagree with anyway) having its budged cut and someone still trying to go through with it by combining multiple things into one, even if this subverts pretty much the entire purpose. I'd expect reasonable lefties to have a similar stance on gayness checks as they have for sex checks on bathrooms... people will generally do the right thing and abusers should suffer consequences.
No reasonable lefties spoke up against this. Indeed they defended it as necessary and proportionate, as they did when the company started discriminating against men in other ways.
People didn't just suddenly start killing jews in nazi germany
Comparisons to the Nazis are especially stupid in this context because you're right, they didn't just start killing Jews. They started by banning them from various high-status roles and jobs, describing them as the source of problems, hypothesising a Zionist Conspiracy to explain why so many Jews were running rich companies etc.
And that's exactly what we see happening today against ordinary white guys. These days if we're CEOs/on company boards/in high earning jobs it's a problem that needs a "solution" (sound familiar?), it's the result of a conspiracy of the patriarchy, and the solutions start with banning white men from educational opportunities, speaking opportunities, replacing them on boards and so on.
No reasonable lefties spoke up about any of this in Germany either, because the left is fundamentally built on narratives about oppression by one identity group of another. It always has been. It gives people easy excuses for their situation in life. Whether it's the proles vs the capitalists, Jews vs the Aryans, women vs men, blacks vs whites, LGTBQ vs straight white men, if there's a way to treat people as lumpen groups and pit them against each other then you'll find the left doing so as much as they can. The 21st century is no different.
It is an emotional lever which has always been exploited essentially even if they called it something different.
I do pay for sites I read on a regular basis. Can't justify a subscription for a once a month read, however. Maybe we need 99 cents per article model, kind of like buying songs on the old iTunes.
It was "OK" when activism was directed at the competition or randos on social media or GitHub or "conservatives", and they encouraged it, not realizing these activists were extremists or had ties to ideologues.
But one can be certain "Google 2020" will look more like "IBM 2010" than "Google 2010".
This will be US election year soon, it's going to get nasty on all fronts.
There's no single social media administrative privilege across platforms that I'm aware of.
Private social media accounts don’t have virality or reach.
I keep my own twitter and facebook private because I have no interest in accidentally igniting a feeding frenzy if I post something wrong on social media. But it’s equally true that if I wanted to make a fuss about something at my employer or elsewhere, my posts will go nowhere since only a small number of people can see or access them.
How do you figure that? I keep most of my social media stuff private but I would happily participate in, for instance, a unionization campaign and I will vocally support the sorts of folks that people like Damore seek to condemn.
I think there are plenty of people who might sign onto a union election or unionization at work who aren’t social media bomb throwers. I’d consider it myself if it came up and were convinced it would be good for me as an employee. I don’t think an employer looking through public social feeds would be very effective in screening that out, especially in technology where the majority of employees are openly liberal and Democrat in my experience.
Relevant EconTalk podcast episode[1] about companies with "loose cultures" and others with "tight cultures". Some people and some industries tend to lean towards a "loose" or "tight" culture and it's interesting to hear about M&As where one type swallows the other and the inevitable indigestion happens.
I'm not sure why you are being downvoted. I read your comment simply as a statement of fact, not a preference for/against that policy.
[1] https://www.econtalk.org/michele-gelfand-on-rule-makers-rule...
I work with a group of the most talented people in the world at what they do and 0 of them would want to work in an environment you describe. In fact they won’t even consider a company remotely like what you describe.
Talented people with social activism fantasies are overrated. They can’t always be trusted to simply do what you tell them. They think their talents give them leverage, and that if they see anything they deem improper, they have a responsibility to resist it.
But also your firm engages in practices that could be viewed as morally dubious that HR activily screens out people that might have any kind of social media presence. Which sounds like a fear of whistleblowers more than anything.
"They can’t always be trusted to simply do what you tell them."
Such a telling phrase.
I don’t want to work with mediocre people who end up stuck in jobs they hate.
Real talent does give people leverage.
What you’re describing is not talent - it’s dubious/ exploitative/desperate management practices combined with a funnel of people who don’t know better.
Literally no genuinely talented engineer would stay in a job like the one you describe - it just wouldn’t make sense. Skills especially are very fungible. I can apply to work at Google tomorrow without knowing their tech stack at all, get an offer, and pull down $500k+ a year.
Does your company’s ARR even touch $50m?
Did you read what he wrote?
Their HR is combing through private social media profiles and rejecting everyone who shows any signs of dissent towards anything. What kind of employees do you think are being filtered out in that process? Exactly. The best and brightest.
There is a certain type of person who thinks because they are smart and good at one thing, e.g. software development, their powers of reason allow them to come to the right conclusions about everything. They are super vocal about this on social media, e.g. typical Twitter mob warriors. Because they think they are intelligent and their views are logical to them, everyone intelligent will agree with them ("the best and brightest will want to work with people like me").
Conversely, people disagreeing must either be dumb or have outright malicious intent (e.g. James Damore). This type of person has difficulty accepting that there can be highly intelligent people who come to entirely different conclusions about various issues. They can be intelligent, but they are also often toxic because they are loud and vocal and lead other people to just withdraw from the work environment, lest to provoke them. I am reading the original comment as the HR trying to avoid hiring such people, not that they don't hire someone who expresses dislike about Burger King's offerings or the latest Marvel movie.
That sounds completely reasonable to me. In particular, this says nothing about the morals of the people you do end up hiring. I am not aware of any research investigating the correlation between doing good and virtue signalling on Twitter, but my guess is that you can do one without the other, and that in fact participating in vocal outrage is a distraction to serving your community in more productive ways (e.g. getting people to vote, or otherwise getting anything done to change what you believe must be changed).
https://www.wired.com/story/inside-google-three-years-misery...
1. Soon after, on the plane ride back from a work trip to China, Damore wrote a 10-page memo arguing that biological differences could help explain why there were fewer female engineers at Google, and therefore the company's attempts to reach gender parity were misguided and discriminatory toward men.
On Wednesday, August 2, Damore posted his memo to an internal mailing list called Skeptics. The next day he shared it with Liberty, an internal list for libertarians—one Damore hadn't known existed. By Friday, the tech blog Motherboard was reporting that an “anti-diversity manifesto” had gone viral inside Google.
Pichai was on vacation when his deputies told him that Google had better deal with the Damore situation quickly. Pichai agreed and asked to corral his full management team for a meeting. By Saturday, a full copy of Damore's document had leaked to Gizmodo.
2. Google was reportedly in the process of bidding for a project. It was called the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team, otherwise known as Project Maven. The project would involve labeling past drone footage to train a computer vision algorithm so that, once everything was in the cloud, new drone footage could be analyzed automatically.
There was no consensus on Maven inside Google's fractious workforce, which includes former Defense Department researchers, military veterans, and immigrants from countries under US drone surveillance. Even the employee group for veterans was split on the project. But Maven's opponents were organized in a way that Google hadn't really seen before. Employees fanned out into different groups.
3. More leaks from inside Google fed the frenzy. Screenshots of conversations among Google employees on internal social networks, some dating back to 2015, appeared on Breitbart. Meanwhile, on a pro-Trump subreddit, a collage appeared that showed the full names, profile pictures, and Twitter bios of eight Google employees, most of them queer, transgender, or people of color.
For the employees who were being targeted, the leaks were terrifying. How many of their coworkers were feeding material to the alt-right? How many more leaks were coming? And what was their employer going to do to protect them?
4. Late this June, Project Veritas, a right-wing outlet specializing in stings and exposés, published a slew of leaked documents and snippets of hidden-camera footage from inside Google.
Perhaps Googlers will finally become sapient and learn the value of privacy...
They're long gone, enjoying their billions, and left poor Sundar holding the bag like a deer in the headlights.
https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/
it's at the bottom.