Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
Second. Many googlers read HN. In some sense, HN is the extension of the internal forums.
CNBC made a good summary and I can comment on each bullet point.
Larry and Brin probably stopped attending because nothing important is said on TGIFs. More people -> more leaks -> less interesting information -> less attendence. Nothing surprising here. Sundar's solution seems to be resorting to boring once a quarter all-hands about business strategy. I wonder what the attendance will be.
It's a hypocrisy to complain about troubles with trust and at the same time ban political or whatever discussions. Googlers are generally very smart folks and understand that whatever they say may be used against them in the future, when policies change once again. Today you post a memegen where you state that triangles are better than squares, tomorrow you get fired because squares have become the symbol of some protected class. You have to apply a form of forward self-censorship and be very careful about what you say to whom.
I don't think there is a tension between execs and workers, but only because the two classes live in different worlds.
Don't get me wrong. Google is still the best workplace with top notch pay, but as it's got big, it's also morphed into a typical big corporation with typical corporate politics.
Just my 2c.
Sorry but I cannot stand that level of internal koolaid. I guess you also think that Google got the "smartest" people? There are literally thousands of companies working on problems way more interesting and with more stakes and upsides for humanity than Google and the adtech industry. I would qualify all of those companies as "better place to work" than Google. It is maybe the best place to work if you have no sense of ethics, want to take it easy, work 9 to 5 and maximize your money.
You can say, well, those don't count, because Google isn't making money from them! But if you take that route, you also have to exclude all the startups working on "interesting" problems that don't and won't make money. You're left with a very small set of companies. I wouldn't be surprised if it's the null set.
I'd say a fair assessment is a random team at Google is as likely to be doing something interesting and beneficial as a team at a random startup (which is to say, unlikely but possible). At Google, though, you're going to have both better average financial outcomes and lower risk.
It's nothing more, until it finds a way to turn a profit on its other ventures. (Just like those startups - realistically, until they turn a profit, they're just in the exploratory stage.)
Calling google just an ad company is ignoring a large amount of reality.
this is a classic misaligned incentive problem though. getting more pay for lower risk just makes the google workers risk-averse, so their success rate will be lower than startup founders who put more on the line (and who are therefore incentivized to make tougher decisions faster/earlier). a former founder-turned-googler friend admitted as much to me in casual conversation.
Probably if Google were broken up we'd see many more and more successful startups, for reasons of funding and talent (and the end of the tendency for Google to make some halting inroad into a niche only to abandon it because of internal politics). That doesn't translate into a better experience for workers though.
Hey, that's me to a t. Google is not actually that great for that. The pay is average and they make too much of a song and dance about helping people, even if you're working on ML used to ferret out dissidents in China.
The good companies for 9 to 5 casual evil are small >50 man shops which require security clearance to work at.
Depends on what you mean by average. When I talked to google I was looking at L5 for just over 300k with stock and bonus. In Evil Inc I was making well over over 500k all cash for the same job description.
Where do I sign up?
(Edit: this is a serious question.)
(Second edit: Mencius.)
Sure there are great people and projects but anybody claiming any of them would exist without the drudgery and 90% revenue stream of “adtech” have their blinders on. And fwiw, if all one cares about us pay, Facebook pays MUCH much more.
Creature comforts: I have an actual cubicle with >2x the space. Excellent meals are still provided, but now lines are <1 min. I can always find a parking space. I can always find a bathroom stall.
Engineering culture: No more promo or perf review nonsense. There's none of the internal competition / pressure that I felt every day at Google. The org and leadership has vastly less churn. The place is dead at 5:15pm. And the people I work with are incredibly smart.
In terms of company: my new employer is not creepy. My grandmother understands what I work on.
Do follow your heart, but I'm so happy I left.
It's great that you like working for Google and have found a good fit.
Some features I like in workplace culture:
- Empowering the "builders" and developers to have autonomy and guide how product development cycles are defined.
- Top cover provided by managers - managing expectations from stake holders
- Overall non-toxic environment
- Quality work and product vision
Your qualification of what makes a company's problems more interesting or beneficial to humanity is certainly debatable, but if you think people at Google are "taking it easy" talentless slobs you are quite objectively wrong
There is a lot of overlap, because both are about gaining power and influence, but there are big differences in needs, resources and routes taken. It's easy to misunderstand them.
Google, thanks to the amount of info they sit on and decisions they make about how it flows, is stuck bang in the middle of those two worlds. Other corps sit in that intersection too such as oil/energy, defense, banking, media etc but none of them have achieved info scale that Google has.
This is still early days where traditional Politicians/Parties (other than the Chinese) haven't fully processed what those info flows can do to them.
They recognize now, how important corps sitting on top of mountain ranges of data are. But the moment they loose power and influence because of those info flow is when real awakening happens. It's safe to assume Real World Politics will dominate Org Politics within such corps. Things will break apart just as they did with Newspapers and TV/Radio News.
At an individual level it's always good to think about what your needs are and be conscious of them. People who aren't, just get dragged by whatever chaos is unfolding thinking they have no role to play or choice. Those that are in touch with their needs and values experience the whole story very differently.
The level of self-censorship my friends from Goog exercise and how carefully they choose their words on everyday topics is unlike anything I've seen from people working at any other big corps. They've also become more flexible on moral stances that once used to be clear cut lines for them.
Google is a borderline cult. It has fallen far below the bar that most people would set for 'best workplace'. This is just something that Goog employees don't become aware of until they leave the bubble.
Seems like it's time to remind folk of Joy's Law: "no matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else,”[0].
I don't know why this would surprise anyone. People are people and politics are politics in any large organization. There is no reason to think Google would be exempt.
Except that it did seem to be exempt, for much longer and while becoming much larger than I think most people would have imagined.
I guess around the time Sundar became ascendant.
It can be controlled in some way. If you only hire people from the same political pool, for example. Or getting them early enough (young enough) to shape them in a way that will lower internal tensions. Not every large company is burning in political fires.
That’s not possible. In fact, one of the best ways to stoke internal political fires is to make the mistake of convincing those holding the majority political viewpoint that they represent the viewpoint of the whole company.
The minefield about trying to predict what's going to be politically correct in the future is so true--you nailed it. You might carefully self-censor your discussions to things that are politically allowed today but everything lives forever, so something you say may fall out of fashion and years from now it could get you in hot HR water. The only solution is to just stick to work topics, really. The need for both current and forward self-censorship is very real.
The "bring your whole self to work" thing is actually kind of a trap. If you're politically aligned the correct way, then sure, you're welcome to bring your whole self to work and participate in political discussions. If you're a Trump supporter, for example, or don't buy in to the whole pronouns thing, then [it's kind of unspoken that] you're expected to please leave that whole self at home thankyouverymuch. Kind of a one way street.
I just come in to work and don't seek out political drama. It's totally optional. Besides the above future-PC worry, you really have to go out and look for trouble. For me, memegen is a place to read silly lighthearted memes and nothing more.
What is there to buy into about pronouns? If my first name is Stan, named after my dad also named Stan, and my middle name is Jason, and my dad abandoned my family when I was young so I prefer people to call me Jason, you'd have no problem calling me Jason and be understanding that calling me Stan is a sore point, right?
What if I don't want to explain my personal issues with my father and childhood family situation to coworkers? If I just say that I really strongly prefer Jason and that it genuinely upsets me if you call me Stan, would you demand an explanation?
So if I claim, without explaining, that I strongly dislike being addressed as "she" and strongly prefer "he", isn't that the same amount of work? What is there to buy into, an explanation about personal struggles with gender dysphoria? That seems like a pretty personal thing to expect from a coworker, does it not?
What am I missing?
And then there’s the the third side that can perhaps see that both sides have valid points, except that none of it matters in the long run. If words are so empty that they can be bent to call a woman a man, a man a woman, blue as red, 50 as 1,000, depending on a person’s internal emotional state, then whatever we choose to say is as valid as anything else.
And if one person refuses to comply with social niceties, it doesn’t necessarily indicate anything other than, at worst, said person is a dick.
So I think right now, it’s a social crusade for both parties, and not everyone wants to get sucked into feeling passionate about everyone else's fights. And that doesn’t mean you’re choosing sides.
But somehow, less than 100% virtue signaling in either direction means you’re implicitly supporting “them”.
But, my approach is, when dealing with people, I’m not going to be a dick, and I’ll happily call them a preferred pronoun, within reason, even though it’s really not that important to me. But I’m also not going to go out of my way to try to fix everyone who is a dick either, even when it is something important to me.
Based on this statement, I don't quite think you understand what being transgender actually is. It's not people asking to be called the opposite gender, it's people asking to be called the gender that they actually are, and have been their entire lives, but who had the vast misfortune of being born into the wrong body. There is not a 1:1 correlation between the body's sex and the mind's sex; usually they match up, but sometimes they don't. Gender dysphoria has severely negative outcomes for mental health and well-being, and no one chooses it willingly.
So if you look like and behave like a man then people will call you a man, if you look like and behave like a woman then people will call you a woman. Of course there are cases where the person looks like and behaves like the other gender but some assholes still calls them by their old pronoun, but in most cases I see someone who is obviously male wanting to be called female or vice versa. In those cases it hurts a bit because it goes against the meaning of the words, and given how our language is structured it is very hard to avoid the subject like most people do with other attributes.
What is the issue, that you are claiming grave consequences exist for making an innocent mistake, and that's happened to you enough times to generalize?
...or are you saying you are unwilling to behave in an expected manner once you understand the expectations?
...in the latter case, do you find yourself frequently disagreeing with other people about who looks and behaves like a man/woman? Or are you just disagreeing about whether to honor their preferences?
Edit/addition: There was a time when people claimed a man with long hair or a woman with short hair was indistinguishable from the opposite sex.[1] Which pronoun do you use in that situation?
I'm a very busy person at work. The amount of daily cognitive load I dedicate to pronouns there is essentially zero because it never comes up. The only time it becomes nonzero is when someone else who thinks it's vitally important brings it up, which is pretty much always memegen or some other internal forum where political advocacy creeps in. If someone were to ever ask me, "Hey, can you call me 'she' instead" I'd have no problem doing so. It's just common courtesy and most of my job at Google involves building and maintaining relationships. But I don't go out of my way to list people's pronouns next to their userids in design docs, or have a section in every presentation on pronouns in order to signal that I'm woke. Just like if someone pointed out that he goes by a middle name, I'd call them that because that's what they prefer, but I'm not going to ask everyone I meet if they go by a middle name or some other name.
As engineers we consider rare edge cases in our designs but typically do not build our solutions around them.
The difference between pronouns and first-names is that nobody is out there searching for instances where I inadvertently called someone by their first name so that they can go into outrage mode, call me out and shame me for it.
When I say some people don't "buy into the whole pronouns thing", I mean they are indifferent to it--they don't think about it every day, they don't consider it some vitally important cause that the company must urgently dedicate resources and collective cognitive load to.
I don't know how fair it is to suggest that people who have a section in their presentations on pronouns are just trying to "signal that they're woke". It makes sense to me that someone who is personally sensitive about them or has a close personal connection with someone who is personally sensitive about them would do so out of conscientiousness, not disingenuousness.
Thanks for your perspective, I totally agree that it doesn't deserve much cognitive load. Adding pronouns to a slide that had people's names on it would take up less space than most surnames, and while shaming someone if it doesn't occur to them to do so is undeserved, it baffles me when people vehemently resist and spend incredible cognitive resources arguing that it's an enormous burden they can't possibly bear.
I'm not sure why becoming a political issue is relevant—if Alice is generally kind to people but refuses to be kind to Bob not because of something Bob did wrong, but because the particular instance of kindness is a political issue, I don't think Alice is a kind person.
The point about grammar doesn't make much sense to me. Someone says "actually I'm not John, I'm Mary", you think it would be more grammatical to start referring to them as Mary, but continue to use he/him?
Such comments is what changed at Google. There are other excellent places to work at these days, like Microsoft (also Amazon) if you are interested in large scale cloud services and not advertisement.
Amazon seems to be very focused on squeezing out most out of its employees. The curious vesting schedule means you instantly lose 10% of your stock grant value. The company expects you to pull more hours and do some real oncall duties: this means less free time for you and less pay/hour rate. Good and gym are out if question. And don't forget to pay for your parking spot. IMHO, if you aren't big enough to demand a custom contract, you don't go to Amazon unless you have no better choices.
My question is still open: what are those better places?
By the best place I just meant best in terms of getting knowledge, status and pay with the least effort in the least stressful conditions.
This is not how anything works.
What actually happens is, today you post something insensitive and disparaging because you can get away with it as a "joke", tomorrow, people will actually stand up for themselves and tell you it's not ok to say that, and it never was, and you were too much of an asshole to even consider that that might be the case.
People who see it the way you do are pitiable, to say the least. The perfect joke is forever a shifting target and us being the humans we are can only approach it by trying repeatedly and through different tacks. One of those is being an asshole which can be funny and is funny to pretty much everyone under different circumstances and environments - but it is offensive and will always be offensive. You can look at nearly any stand up comic and see that's the case. I think you and your ilk need to lay off and relax.
Just give it some thought. You take one joke but change the audience, the time, the place, the delivery, the intonation, possibly the surrounding comments around the joke itself and everything changes. As an example If I make a joke about drowning and some person's brother who's in the same group I'm in died five years ago because a random orca dragged him under suddenly I'm the asshole. Maybe you're laughing because you didn't know either. But maybe next year there's a rash of orca attacks and someone finds a youtube recording of me making a joke about people drowning. I'm screwed now. I'm never becoming a CEO. Sounds pretty outlandish right? I bet all of those people who did blackface probably thought the same thing back in the 60s or whenever.
I think you guys need to have some empathy for people who just want to make a joke. Attempts at humor are ok but Statutes of limitations should be applicable.
I'm not going to put my ethnicity or sexual orientation on here right now but I feel no distaste for those people who wore black face or made jokes about people with different sexual orientations or whatever you might think is super bad because I know that they were acting within the boundaries of acceptability back then yet trying to have fun. If they're still doing those things at a time and place when it's not acceptable it's a different story but copping some 'Holier Than Thou' attitude over things that happen in the past when IT REALLY WAS OK TO SAY THOSE THINGS really rubs me the wrong way. It's as if they'd never said anything at the wrong time to the wrong person or in the wrong company. You might as well not say anything at all and give up all attempts at humor.
We are human. We try to laugh. Try not to hold it against us in the future.
I don't know why HN wants to hide behind this strawman so bad. Noone is getting fired for posting about geometric shapes, unless you're trying to say something insensitive or disparaging.
The line of what is acceptable to stay has changed, but turns out if you wern't being an asshole in the first place, people are very forgiving.
Also, Twitter is not an example. People are constantly unforgiving assholes on Twitter for short-term Internet fame; your workplace isn't Twitter.
> TGIF's transformation from candid conversation to press conference was pretty much complete.
As a Googler I'm totally not surprised this is happening. The writing has been on the wall for a very long time.
[0]: https://www.wired.com/story/inside-google-three-years-misery...
It's hard to be candid and open if what you say might end up distorted in the media and without you having an ability to defend yourself.
There have certainly been consequences for some of them.
Distorted by the media? That's the point of "leaks": to make transparent leaderships' opinions verbatim.
The firms that control our lives should not be allowed to confer behind closed doors.
I don’t see how that is helpful to society.
I’m not against whistleblowing but I completely understand why someone would choose not to engage in that, since they are basically volunteering information knowing it may very well be taken very seriously when it was done throw away off hand comment or shared without underlying meanings being properly attached.
It sounds like you're against whistleblowing.
Time constraints alone had already put pressure on the whole concept. Humans don't scale that way.
I don't think the number is a major factor but the media environment getting hostile against the tech sector in general. Sundar also mentioned about "a coordinated effort to share our conversations", which aligns with my observation.
I'm one of those people who go work at Google once every few years.
The transformation of culture from about 2013 onwards has been somewhat sad to experience.
Interestingly, most people who have been continuously employed there have not felt the very slight gradient. However, the changes in culture, freedom, food quality, etc are fairly obvious when one returns after ..say.. 18 months.
Here are some semi-concrete metrics: Decreasing TGIF frequency (now gone..), 'micro kitchen' snack variety and quality, which doors in buildings you are allowed to enter from(:facepalm:), badging in for meals(also :facepalm:), weird restrictions on business flights, attempt to make everything look uniform (no candies in receptions! No decorations..), defense contracts(much publicized here), any other discretionary spending by teams.
Anything I forgot?
We were once an engineering and product team that used Google's unique reach, resources, infrastructure, and technology to create tools and services purely for good. We reunited survivors of disasters, helped them find shelter, alerted people to keep them safe, built technology to help MSF fight Ebola, and predicted flu epidemics. We worked to lift the most vulnerable among us. Teams all over the company and around the world helped us do things only Google could.
That Google.org no longer exists. The "Google.org" label has been reassigned to Google's donation programs. Google donates money to many meaningful efforts, and that's great; but anyone can donate money. Google used to donate money and build things for good, and it does the latter no more.
It was the weirdest Christmas present that I got in my life, and believe me I got some very weird clothes from my mum when I was young.
I remember google.org - seen from the perspective of an engineer in a far away land it was frankly just kind of weird/creepy/slightly sinister. Yeah the flu epidemic predictor thing was kinda cool, except I never heard anything about it since and I'm not sure it's ever actually been useful for much.
Not sure what office you work or worked in, but where I'm at they regularly go over the top with decorations during celebrations. It's pretty awesome.
badging in for meals is for IRS tax purposes...
The two things you facepalmed are absolutely easily explainable.
Where does this apply? Just reception, or more?
Can I have a poster or art? A plant?
That went away this year (and partly restored as a result of memegen-driven protests, after I left as I hear.)
The trust is reduced, but it is both way, between employer and employees. Without that, any conversation is meaningless.
There are a lot of things here that not only give someone confidence but also conviction. As you rise up the social hierarchy, and a Google engineer is very high on the social hierarchy, you begin to question your beliefs less and less and have more conviction that you are right - you must be enlightened. Because if you're so awesome as to be an in-demand engineer (at Google!), clearly your opinions are more informed and enlightened than people below you on the social hierarchy. This conviction is going to grant you confidence to not only openly proclaim positions on topics most people find private, but use this newfound social power to leverage dominance over those subordinate to your leadership position in society.
How could you be wrong? Just look at how awesome you are - your expensive house, nice car, rare foods, and luxury recreation activities validate this. Lift your hammer of justice (it's a heavy burden you carry with the privilege's you were born to have) and smash any who your in-group find problematic. After all, it's only collateral damage if some honest, humble, and hard working people are destroyed in your wrath to feed your new, insatiable appetite for further social conquest.
Microsoft had a reputation from very early for ruthlessness and infighting; it's not the sort of thing that particularly attracts idealists, or encourages them to speak up if they do get hired.
At Apple, the boss (Steve Jobs) was in charge and most employees feared him. Also they were very compartmentalized and secretive. Not the same thing at all. (I'm going by press reports over the years.)
Amazon has a strong leader who sets the culture, and it's all about business rather than idealism.
I don't know about Netflix.
Facebook seems to be leaking quite a lot and has some similar problems to Google?
I think a lot of this has to do with what you think you're signing up for when you get hired. It's not like employees at a defense contractor are going to complain about military contracts. For years, many people joining Google thought they were joining an idealistic organization where they would be able to contribute to "changing the world" in some positive, non-ironic way. That's what they signed up to do. But I doubt new hires think that way anymore?
The notion that engineers are shitty people because they weren't made to take enough liberal arts classes falls flat for me. Learning about ethics doesn't make people more ethical[0][1]. And I'd say the number one problem with this industry, and the root of its increasingly poor reputation among the general public, is a lack ethics.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19529374
[1]https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2013/01/07/168650666/new-y...
Correction: The number one problem with every industry is lack of ethics. The root of its increasingly poor reputation is that the richest companies in the world will always face extra scrutiny. Few people cared for them 10 years ago when they were small fries and conventional companies topped the charts, but today when the majority of the 10 most valuable companies are tech companies the world will naturally start focusing on them more so than any other industry.
Maybe google was a tad myopic to the realities of what it takes to be a high growth public company with a single revenue generating product of any significance which they didn’t really create in the first place.
People are extremely tribal as it is. Of course only a subset of people are prone to this extremist and highly emotional/vindictive group think. But we’re seeing what this means on a large scale as the hysterical 1% of the population in each region bands together nationally and starts recruiting other with a unified FUD campaign. People see a tweet with 50k retweet’s and assumes it’s a popular, established, and credible opinion.
I still have hope for the vast majority of people but I think society and our culture needs to become more resilient and less overly receptive to the loudest voices in the room.
The bad is far too low to what is called “controversial” today. Society simply yet hasn’t adapted to national scale outrage machines IMO. We’re starting to see people start questioning what the right way to handle them and manage the never ending radical activism campaigns.
To be fair, a lot of people who don’t find a career success also have strong opinions and ideologies. People can always have their opinions to themselves if nothing else.
I might agree but I'm not sure that this is news. Ever since Sundar became CEO there, there's been a somewhat widespread perception that he would focus on beancounting and running Google as a "mature" firm, with little or no innovation to speak of. (For that matter, you could even view this as a very reasonable response to increased challenges in the Internet advertising market, which is of course where Google makes most of their money.)
If I were Google, I would also be alarmed by the "Google vs Bing" meme format. It's a silly meme, but it's pointing out that consumers are realizing that Google's filtering and groupthink shape results. If you want the approved marketer-friendly result, you use Google. If you want the truth you use Bing.
Surprising that folks would think along those lines given Sundar's background as head of product with Chrome browser, Chrome OS, and Android before he took over as CEO in 2015.
That was the product credited with getting him noticed for better or worse. A strategically vital and utterly boring piece of software which aligns well with how the company has changed.
Dont fix what ain't broke.
When I was there, TGIF was watered down, but we still asked uncomfortable questions of management. I remember asking a question of Sundar when he was head of Android when the Nexus 6 came out questioning our chasing Apple into the high end market, rather than making affordable devices.
A lot of people blamed this on leaks, but that already came to a head in the 2013-2015 era, where I saw announcements go from being made a week ahead of time at TGIF, to a day, to hours, to a few hours after the fact, to not at all. I'd attribute more to new executives who were more hostile to being asked hard questions.
I work for a company that holds similar "town halls" where employees are able to ask anonymous questions of management and they can get pretty brutal sometimes ("why is turnover so high?", "why is upper management's compensation so much higher than others?", etc).
Due to the great PR that an employer create via their branding (for HR and recruiting).
It is wise to always remember that if you earn a wage/salary, the relationship between an employer and employee is going to remain as such - the business's interests supersedes your own.
I would like to see a future world where there is no such employer/employee relationship, because everyone works for themselves (but also cannot hire anyone).
Some of the questions are genuinely things that everyone is thinking but too afraid to ask, and some are complaints from employees to management that are as old as time.
But with both types, it at least gives people the feeling that they can be heard.
It sounds like they might even need more transparency rather than less of it. If some of the conversations were being leaked, well why not just open it up?
Management will always attract its share of assholes, and enablers of assholes. And while I don't mean to excuse behaviors in management that are inexcusable, I think the sense of entitlement and overinflated egos of the rank and file did much to improve company culture.
(Not sure why I can't edit the comment)
It's our right to speak up about our experiences, even if that means "leaking" our bosses words. In a sense, it's our duty–Google's actions impact us all, and we're owed transparency with which management's not forthcoming.
Google is a company, not a collective. Companies typically have various controlled ways of disseminating information, both internally and externally.
Internal transparency (at a company of Google’s size) effectively means public transparency... ie all of the inner workings are known to everyone. I’m not aware of any for-profit organization that can function effectively that way.
I am subjected to negative externalities of Google's Surveillance Capitalist practices. I consider their business practices to be abusive, coercive, manipulative, and exploitative. I resent them.
I recognize that I, as an individual, have very little leverage over firms such as Google. I am not, however, an original thinker: if I am pushed to this perspective by forms in the zeitgeist, I am not alone.
> I’m not aware of any for-profit organization that can function effectively that way.
Neither, frankly, am I. Even those firms which claim to be "radically transparent" are, in my esteem, doing so largely as a PR front. If "the client owns the interface," then transparency should be implemented not a curated blog posts, but as something akin to FOIA requests. I should like to see enormous innovation in terms of corporate transparency in my lifetime, or else I–and many others–will be defecting from our collusion with such firms.
If you find my perspective difficult to sympathize with, perhaps I have done a poor job of communicating it. Hopefully, you will recognize it as codified by better writers:
1. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26195941-the-age-of-surv... 2. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37830765-ten-arguments-f... 3. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41963432-ghost-work 4. https://crimethinc.com/books/no-wall-they-can-build
"The purpose of a system is what it does."
(Hold my Beer.)
Were I working there, this would have made sense to me.
I didn't work there to be an activist. I worked there to go work on products.
I don't get other comments that say "courted activists". The recruiting pitch is about impact, a good work environment, compensation and interesting products.
My guess is there will certainly be a shift away from other companies trying to do this in the future. Rightfully so imho.
The part that's biting them is that now that they're 100,000 people, creativity is wasted anyway, because any brilliant new product idea will get killed long before launch and if it doesn't it'll probably catastrophically damage Google's brand. So the upside of this cultural decision is worthless to them, and the downside is incredibly chaotic and difficult to manage.
I think we'll see a shift away from this at Google, but I think other startups will still consciously embrace it. When you're 10 people and are about to go out of business if you don't come up with a brilliant idea, your incentives are dramatically different from when you're 100,000 and make tens of billions from your existing business lines every quarter.
One example is advertising agencies, which in the last century (in spite of what you see on popular television) were very button-up places but created cultural touchstones we still know today.
(Edited to clarity I'm referencing ad agencies in the 20th century, not the SV-wannabe agencies a few have evolved into today.)
Your point about emotions is also good. Here is another way to put it.
The issue IMO is that they told people they were changing the world and by making information universally available etc etc. The people who went to work for them early really believed it and those people seeded their culture.
The people who just wanted to make a bunch of money went into other fields (like Wall Street or law). Those people also talk about politics and undoubtedly have political activists. But the politics of someone who just wants to make a ton of money are aligned with a company whose stated goal is to just make a ton of money.
This political alignment doesn't happen for free at Google. And since they seeded their culture with people who cared about improving the world, they have a higher than average rate of influencial employees who don't want to make money in traditionally "dirty" fields like arms dealing and private prisons.
Google has to solve this problem because their cloud division can't survive if they can't take government contracts. I see no way of solving it except that they just have to kill the old culture while attempting to minimize attrition.
This was the same logic that allowed talented men to turn their workplaces into a very unwelcoming place for women by allowing them to make sexual jokes, proposition their coworkers, and have business meetings in strip clubs. If you are going with the “take your whole self to work” spiel you can argue that sexuality is a bigger part of most people’s lives than politics. So if we can ask for co-workers to not discuss their latest bedroom exploits, surely we can ask for people to not talk about politics at work.
I don't believe this. I can tune out whatever random BS my coworkers a few desks over are talking about and still be engaged in technical discussions about what we're building.
It just requires some discipline and an expectation of that discipline.
Google used to be just that, and they made untold billions from it, so it's not surprising that they held on to remnants of that spirit for too long.
Now they're a gigantic megacorp, and need to act the part.
...and life goes on, everything is different but also the same...
It’s possible to both be funny and be conscious :: It’s possible to be creative and not fixated on political activism.
I don't have any problem keeping my non-work related opinions to myself at work, and I don't see any corresponding repression of my professional creativity.
Is that something that companies do on purpose? Because such an environment sounds like absolute hell.
I want to spend my time dealing with technical problems not arguing with people's egos.
What they're now learning is that this decision is incompatible with certain forms of revenue like military or immigration-enforcement contracts. That doesn't mean that the right answer is that you should accept such forms of revenue and reject the employees who don't support it. That just means you have to choose. What they're regretting is simply that they can't have it both ways.
(Also, GitHub in particular is trying to endorse a particular form of politics at work - they've been defending the practices of ICE in their internal and external communications. If opposition to ICE is political, support of ICE is political too, no?)
Google and GitHub are trying to turn into IBM and Oracle. That's fine, but they should remember that they were originally trying to beat IBM and Oracle. And they shouldn't be surprised if a company that explicitly embraces activist engineers and forswears sources of revenue incompatible with that activism, a company that says "We will talk about politics at the workplace and this is our particular form of politics," one day beats the pants off them.
Google only really became politicized a couple of years ago when certain media publications started making demands for diversity numbers within the organization and publicly shaming them for not meeting some imaginary bar in the area.
Github was the premier hosted SCM solution long before it literally pulled its meritocracy rug from under it [0] and has been living off first-mover advantage since, succeeding in spite of the activists it now employs, not because of.
I personally _would be_ very surprised to see an identity politics focused company beat either, not merely because of their [Google, Github] current status but because those in question haven't shown themselves to be capable of building much at all.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/githubs-ceo-ditches-meritocr...
This is also historically revisionist. Google's been super political since forever, it just wasn't in the news for it.
The best recipe for a company that isn't printing billions of dollars from Advertising to go bankrupt is try to follow their book and culture.
If you remove infinite money and market dominance would it still work out in the end ? My guess is that it wouldn't.
Google feels sometimes very much like startups with VC money just being inefficient and burning other people money, except of course, Google is burning it's own money that is generated from the non sexy / cool stuff (ads and enterprise email / storage )...
None of Google's success it had to do with identity politics. In many ways, you could argue Google was a-political for most of its life.
They should be surprised as it hasn't ever happened before. That's not to say that it won't or shouldn't happen, it just would be surprising.
It was really clear I was giving wrong answers. I told them flat out that I think people should be judged by the quality of their character, not the color of their skin and that the company should just try to be fair and hire the best people.
I mean I get that companies want to do the right thing but you can only really do ONE thing well.
These aren’t really politically charged questions but rather questions about how to manage people and the issues that come with people. While the cause of the complaint may be politically charged, how one would handle the situation should be pretty by the book.
Not the same, differently?
Because the entire point of the law on protected classes is that people should be treated the same regardless of being a member or not of a protected class.
Non discrimination, not discrimination.
They are not necessarily what people would actually do, but they sound like the correct answer in interview-speak.
(We'd need to know more details about the question and the answer to be sure.)
Recordings and videos could get leaked at any time by an employee to the media or on social media, which will further blow it up (ahem, like with Facebook) or perhaps take things out of context or cause more chaos.
Google actually trying to have a serious - and not just PR/HR-bullshit - discussion about highly nuanced, opinionated, divisive topics relevant to the workplace in this type of mass-meeting setting is basically playing with fire out in the open.
(This isn't a take on yes/no politics in the workplace, just an interpretation from Google/Facebook)
Worth clarifying a point. The leakers didn't make Zuck say stupid things.
I can understand that having scrutiny on every single communication is probably pretty hard, but people often neglect that the best PR scandal avoidance mechanism is to not do stupid things.
They serve three meals, but you're not expected to eat all three meals. Some people like to get in early and leave early, others like to get in late and stay late. The food is just a perk, there if you want it.
Also, you're not obligated or expected to work longer if you eat dinner. Not sure where you heard that one. If you're at the office when dinner is served, it's considered that you've already stayed late.
Personally I probably manage to get breakfast once a week on average and stay late enough for dinner 2 or 3 times a year.
You say that like it's a given truth - do you have anything to back up that assertion? FWIW, I don't recall Google courting "activists", though they obviously did court people who were highly invested in their education and careers, and of course there is probably a non-0 correlation with those types of people and "activists". I also wouldn't describe Google as "pro-politics". They certainly were pro-open-communication, but given their size now, and the complete change in the nature and temperature of political discussions over the past decade, it's not surprising at all that hey would be forced to change this.
Google let employees spend company time and resources to do left-wing activism, how is that not "pro-politics"? The things you see coming from Google the past few years are the death throes of these rules being removed and Google becoming a conventional company where you have to work when you are on company time.
Sure, and this is just one of many examples:
They have been very proactive in this space for a long time.
> courted activists are now regretting their decision.
I think it's fair to say that there are a large number of people who are very invested in the answer to this question, hence it will be difficult to get a serious unbiased answer. It's also quite politically hot.
> For a long time it was common knowledge that you would try
> to keep stuff like that out of the workplace.
Activists and unions have brought many a company and Country to its knees. Companies that stay away from politics (or any statements at all) seem to be doing better, but somebody like Google or GitHub have so much financial and structural clout that they can afford to make mistakes.
> My guess is there will certainly be a shift away from
> other companies trying to do this in the future.
> Rightfully so imho.
I agree, but it's hard to fully quantify. I guess the real point is that politically companies and Countries are split approximately 50/50 between two main parties and any polarizing position a company takes will likely upset roughly half of the people. I think the only way to maintain a proper diverse structure is to not take sides.
Employees have been objecting to the hiring of conservative activists into influential positions.
E.g. there were objections about support for the Trump administration's extreme positions on immigration and activist positions opposed to trans people.
I cannot stress enough how bizarre the internal politics truly were now that I left Google. It's interesting to see posts from Xoogler activists in Xoogler boards who try to introduce themselves as some sort of oppressed heroes, only to be stonewalled by the alumni community who couldn't care less about their PC agenda now that their career isn't held siege to PC whims.
This is just descending deeper into “more and more of your life must be dedicated to paid speech.”
Google is basically turning into that big IBM they weren’t going to be.
It’s entirely social pressure to conform to business norm.
There’s no reason things like cloud software and AI must be built by Google. Look at the Linux kernel.
This is kowtowing to financial economics first, cause paid speech is everything to an ad company.
Humanity is still emotionally transitioning away from traditional values belief in top down godhead must rule! hierarchy. We’ve seen literally for a whole now the idea of a God described by Abrahamic religion is not compatible with our physical measure of reality. But human social sensibilities take time to update as the generations of old linger
The finance economy is the last big hurdle.
This sort of logic and villianization just adds to my reasons for not wanting that in my workplace.
Pretty much all of the “pro-politics at the workplace” types would demand that anybody who wore a MAGA hat be fired… so I think that the people who think politics in the workplace are OK are the ones who are actually the ones maintaining the actual status quo: you can have opinions, as long as they’re the same as mine.
1. People who politically disagree with the work the company is doing should just leave. They do not have the right to resist or organize against it.
2. Google should just go along with anything the government does. If there's an opportunity for profit, Google should pursue it. If employees disagree, they should vote. Otherwise, see #1.
3. Google should have some moral tests, but the current situation passes the test. It's not as bad as people are saying.
I honestly don't see how any of these are tenable. Number one is an argument against labor organizing in general, and the cats kind of out the bag there. Number two is just a variant of number one, and number three is inherently political—it's a situation where people see things differently, and the way we resolve those is politics.
There are plenty of other impolite subjects that are inappropriate to discuss at work too.
Not that that's good, necessarily. Just distinct.
If you build tools for ICE to put children in cages, you're building tools to put children in cages.
It can sometimes be acceptable for a broad overview of a subject, but it's so full of opinion, inaccuracy, and misinformation that it should have near zero credibility for anyone who is seeking truth and bias-free knowledge. Appropriately, it has zero credibility in any credible academic environment BTW.
There are no people who actually think it’s ok to bring politics into the workplace. There are only people who don’t think their politics are politics; it’s everybody else’s politics that’s politics.
I am really, really tired of people framing "Hiring (mostly) from the typical tech 22-35 college graduate demographic" as "Actively courting activists."
What were you expecting tech companies to do? Not hire anyone under the age of 40, or anyone who grew up, schooled, or worked in a blue state? If they did that, I suppose they'd get a largely 'activist-free' (But not politics-free!) workforce.
Google's business is inherently political. Its relationship with governments and regulators across the world is inherently political. The employee-employer relationship is inherently political. Of course you're going to get employees acting on their political opinions, in those contexts.
When they are on your side you see them as principled and necessary, if you disagree with them they are antagonistic SJWs.
20-25 years ago, politics was basically off limits in corporate America. Technology people (who were mostly guys) were pro-capitalist libertarians. It was a different time, I guess.
So even if you're 100% cynical about it and thinking the all-hands are just internal PR, it was still a positive change, because you got to see upper management, see them talk about where the company was going and why, and they had to "defend" their direction.
Of course, the flipside to this is that if it seems like upper management doesn't have their shit together, meetings like these make that obvious, which can torpedo morale.
It was 45 minutes of scripted presentations, followed by Q&A (and later, raffles :))
The Q&A part was great. Super-awesome to know the executives will at least try to answer any random question that got enough upvotes during the week. Of course we would sometimes get the canned "we will look into that" answers, which Marissa would tell the exec to come prepared with the real numbers next time.
The PR is there and sometimes the raffles, but the Q&A is non-existent and whenever bad things happen the meeting is skipped for a few weeks. Everyone notices the weeks that get skipped and it sends a huge signal.
These were rarely directly useful, but the practice reinforced a sense of curiosity and mutual respect.
Satya started them at Microsoft (monthly though, IIRC), and I personally loved them and derived a lot of value from them about what was going on company wide and perhaps learning new places I might be able to contribute. It also just made me trust leadership more and more motivated to work there. Was only an ~hour a month and I'm sure led to many unpredicted positive effects.
Also, by letting employees know that their work ties into the bigger picture, you help encourage a bit more innovation at the lower level / on the ground, so to speak.
I've been at companies that did it well, very poorly, not at all, and everywhere in between... So yeah, sometimes really useful, other times the meeting itself can feel like make-work.
Rarely. Most could be summarized in email.
In general, the overall friendliness of people to work together, lend help, and accept or provide “constructive” criticism has been a welcome respite.
At the other companies mentioned, I’ve encountered a mixture of people deliberately backstabbing and sabotaging other groups projects, engineers who scream at or insult others, or just straight up refusing to admit fault.
Granted this is likely to change because Google is hiring too many people too fast which will reduce cultural assimilation.
But at this point I don’t think I could stomach working on a team at another Big company with some “alpha” macho engineer types unless their name happened to be Linus Torvalds, and even then I don’t think I’d want to be in that environment.
Microsoft seems like it has vastly improved after Balmer left.
I’m also not going to work at any company that doesn’t value work/life balance.
Most of the outsiders have seen Google's practice as something that does not belong in a "mature" firm (the zombie corporations they were coming from).
People wanted to go to work for Google to change the world. Now they are joining because it is a comfortable company to work for.
As early employees stared leaving or becoming complacent, more bozos started to be hired and shifting the culture.
They have been wrecking Google's great culture a little bit at the time.
You just outed yourself. I wish I was joking, but anything other than instant condemnation of what he wrote gets you labelled.
You're right though, what we just saw with the linux foundations tone policing and the Lindsay Shepherd situation absolutely confirm this. There is a very effective group of activists that can make life hell for you if you don't hate the same things as them with the same fervor.
Damore, Woods, and that other dude who went on a misogynist Twitter tirade for a full day, were all deliberate assholes in public. There were consequences for that. This is just and correct.
> The two companies with the biggest internal social media platforms for their employees (Google and Facebook) also have massive employee turmoil… Anyone surprised?
Overall, I agree with you, but it isn't that employees there don't care. It just honestly feels like the overall group of employees at Apple/MSFT is truly more diverse (not just in terms of race and such, but in terms of socioeconomic upbringing, culture, and diversity of thought), hence why they are used to being respectful of other people's views (even if they totally disagree with those) and not succumbing to the monoculture kind of thought, because it would be almost impossible to have a monoculture there in the first place.
There are definitely a few small enclaves like that at Google as well, but it feels more like a giant monoculture with some small enclaves, while I get the inverse feeling about Apple/MSFT (a giant diverse non-monoculture group, with a few small enclaves of monoculture).
Anecdotally, I have many friends working at all 3 of those (Apple/MSFT+Google), and they (independently of each other) brought up the same point when conversations got there.
Some is, especially when a company has 100,000 people. I think, perhaps, it is easy for people to forget that when some Googlers fought against the Dragonfly project, it's because they have friends and loved ones who are Chinese expats under threat from China's government (meanwhile, some Googlers are Chinese citizens). When some Googlers fought against project Maven, they were only two or three degrees of separation from people who had lost loved ones as "collateral damage" in US drone strikes during the "war on terror."
I think one of the most interesting questions is whether a 100,000 person multinational can survive without a hard "Don't question leadership" culture in a world with simultaneously this easy flow of communication and people and this much inequality and conflict.
I find odious people in general hold a wide variety of beliefs across the entire political spectrum.
Now that is much less true, ditchng the meetings also makes sense.
Google grows up, ends up like most big companies.
Not a shocker, but the initial, "users really trust us to do good"culture is a major clash. Could be a very painful, enduring one.
It has been a decade since I worked at Google, but this makes me really sad.
To be fair, the Google culture had its fair share of problems with whiny, entitled little shits and "brogrammers". And it has had its some spectacularly bad executives who are probably irredeemable assholes as well as executives who are too weak to keep their colleagues in line.
But even at around 30.000 employees it was a fundamentally good place to work.
Yes, it was competitive as fuck, but that's what happens when you have a high density of talent and ambition in one place. Much of the internal competitiveness was good. At least the way I saw it. I haven't worked many places where you start to work on something, only to discover that someone else is working on the same thing and this becomes a positive. You can collaborate and/or compete. And both can, and did, lead to better outcomes.
Of course, occasionally you'd have deadbeats that would game the system and use the efforts of others to promote themselves unfairly, but largely I think people deserved their success.
A few friends of mine still at Google have told me that the company I worked for is gone. It is a different company now. More corporate. Less open. Less creative. Less fun. Most don't really talk about Google anymore. Be it in positive or negative terms.
TGIF was among the things that set Google apart. That even inspired other companies and led them to understand that it is important to bring the top and bottom of the company in contact with each other on a regular basis.
I don't buy that Google has outgrown TGIF. I think the problem is that top management simply haven't been capable of evolving. I suspect Sundar Pichai simply isn't able to lead the company in a manner that can preserve what was good about Google. If "only" 25% of employees follow TGIF (which would be a great turnout for most companies) that's on Sundar. That is his failure as a leader. It isn't that the company has outgrown it.
And that's sad, because when the soul of a company dies, eventually, so will its ability to attract talent and perform. It'll be a slow decline. But this is nonetheless a clear symptom of decline.
Sundar needs to get his act together or Larry needs to find a more suitable CEO.
> The best way for a man to advance in the Communist hierarchy is to make speeches constantly at party and public meetings. [1]
* Workers' councils * Factory committies
Google in 1930 -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3draTawRFas
[1] https://books.google.pl/books?id=mNexJrn4wmgC&pg=RA4-PA4&lpg...
It's more just than tech startups generally skew younger and newer generations want their companies to reflect their own values. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
And these companies are not in complete chaos. In fact apart from the James Damore incident there hasn't been any significant change in the company cultures.
Yes, actually they did actively court them. Here's one of many examples:
Younger generations are not politically homogeneous, Google picked a political position and pushed it hard.
Yeesh.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/miles-taylor-fa...
Wouldn't that kind of negate your point?
Here's the person in question - they're a white house staffer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/miles-t-65707671/
All seemed great for a while, and then suddenly one day, management found itself the target of the woke cancel culture they fostered.
> encouraged its employees to participate in 'woke' culture.
What I find most interesting is the change that happened in this country, including Google, with Trump being elected. Google had enough closet Trump acolytes and sympathizers who were removed from reality like only a Trump supporter can be (it seems).
You can disagree with policies like immigration, tax breaks for the GOP donor class and so on without thinking that supporter is delusional.
But what changed is that those same Trump supporters suddenly thought reprehensible behaviour was suddenly justifiable, even required. Examples:
- Leaking videos of TGIF because you think the company oppresses your political views (just leave!)
- Worse, you leak personal details of employees who speak up against issues you believe in so they essentially get targeted by alt-right zealots.
In no world can I fathom me taking my personal political disagreement to the point of doxxing someone. How anyone can think this is justifiable is utterly beyond me.
You see this in the US government too. Like we now have too many leaders who are prepared to burn institutions to the ground to further political goals. Look at Mitch McConnell's stonewalling of the Obama administration (more cloture motions than any previous Senate by a huge margin), choosing not to hold hearings on nominees, stuffing the judiciary with underqualified minions and so on. Look at the Justice Department, which is now defending the White House despite any evidence to the contrary.
How can anyone think this is OK? Whatever norms are established by the GOP now will absolutely be used against them in the future (eg a simple majority on Supreme Court nominees). Do these people not realize how dangerous it is to destroy institutions meant to protect all of us?
But that's the Trump era we live in. I've met more than one Trump adherent who simply will not or cannot see fault in anything Trump does. And I'll tell you, that scares the bejesus out of me.
I fully agree with Google employees protesting things like helping the US DoD better identify kill targets (identifying what not to kill is the same as identifying what to kill) and supporting the oppression of a billion people by pandering to Chinese censorship. Gone are the days when Sergey was essentially responsible for pulling Google out of China.
But what Google really needs at this point is a purge of people who are prepared to dox their fellow employees. Those people are utterly destructive to the company and need to be excised.
So anyway I'm not surprised at TGIF being scaled back. It's been on the cards for years and, at this point, it's honestly not much of a loss.
Whatever Google's problems are however I don't think Sundar is the leader they need.
Yet, you bitterly criticize Trump supporters. Trump supporters are the ones getting doxxed and cancelled on social media.
The most famous leaked TGIF was when Pichai announced his opposition to the 2016 election results, and promised to somehow oppose the new President. I have to say, I was appalled to hear such blatant partisanship from the chief executive of such a huge company. Of course, business types have always had political leanings one way or the other, but they were rarely so blatant. That TGIF did irreparable harm to Google's reputation. I've seen hundreds, perhaps thousands, of outraged comments on social media. Google lost a lot of good will that day.