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I've never even worked at Google, but if my team is working towards something and our announcement is pre-empted, yeah, I'm going to be upset. I would never wish anyone dead over it, but I would definitely be pissed at them.

There's a lot of work that goes into those announcements. It's not just advertising the product that is the goal, it's presenting it their way.

Similarly, when someone is telling a joke and someone else tells the punchline, they get upset about it. According to your logic, they shouldn't. The joke was told, and the audience heard it. But I've yet to meet anyone who wouldn't be upset about someone else telling the punchline to their joke.

They were not brainwashed. You were incredibly insensitive to their feelings.

If you are an engineer working on the software, the announcement really has little interest. You just want it to be wide and sure not being done in a way that put a bad light on your product.

This kind of things happened in my case, and I was more happy to see the interest of the potential users than knowing who disclosed it as it would not be me anyway in all cases.

It might not be true in a small company/team/product. But in a big tech corps, the guy that will do the official announcement is usually quite far and unrelated to the engineers that did the feature.

Also, maybe a piece that was missing from my story is that the Googlers were not even in a team working or related to the disclosed thing. For example they were in the chrome team and it was an Android announcement or something like that.

Another point is that, at Google, it looks like that each big product team is firewalled from the other team. For example, people not working on Android core will not know anything about it or it's development and be in separated buildings and co.

This is just completely false - if you're working on a feature, you want a PR splash controlled by you, not a stream of silent leaks. PR begets other PR.

You're being super presumptuous by saying engineers shouldn't care about the PR around the feature they worked on, even if someone else is running the PR

If it was silent leaks, no one would have even cared about it!

As an engineer you should be focused on delivering objective value, not subjective value.

As an engineer my ultimate goal is to help people, not push metrics. The subjective value is the thing that matters.

To some degree, having the work discussed is great. But depending on the way it leaked, it can diminish the focus on the product, and sometimes it can make the official release flop and that's not great.

From what I hear, Google has/had a policy/culture of largely free information flow inside the company while not having information flow outside the company; a leak undermines that culture/policy and leads to more locked down information flow on the inside, and it's reasonable to be upset about that.

> they became hostile to me for the rest of the lunch for even having suggested that their feeling might not be justified.

People don't usually apprechiate it when they're upset and others tell them their feelings aren't justified and they should feel differently. That's simply not a good way to engage people.

Yes, this happened at Google, in a huge way. Ten years ago you would hear interesting things at TGIF, the weekly informational company-wide event people would demo not-yet-launched software and hardware, discuss R&D, etc. After such a lot of cumulative leaks people stopped saying anything interesting at TGIF. You'd get information faster by reading the company press releases than by waiting for Friday.

It's not like the leakers did some kind of noble service, either. They were just assholes who destroyed something nice.

> Google has/had a policy/culture of largely free information flow inside the company

Sadly, this is "had" rather than "has" (it was the latter until a few years ago). As you point out, not least due to leaks.

The reason Googlers get really ticked off about leaks is that they ruined the very candid and open internal culture we used to have. In the 10 years I've been there I've seen us go from TGIF sessions where Larry and Sergey and Eric openly discussed things that every other employer I'd had before would have kept quiet ... to the situation now which is a lot less like that. And it has a lot to do with leaks from those very TGIFs.

Now I certainly wouldn't be talking about "punching people" or "wanting them dead"... But I am not happy when my coworkers violate trust by leaking. Unless we're talking about gross ethics violations, harassment, etc. leaking internal stuff doesn't improve anything for anybody except maybe the ego of the leaker.

On the contrary, the leaker is sharing with the public, often things people deserve to know. It's the height of selfishness to be upset that Larry and Sergey stopped telling you about their dirty laundry, because the public was finding out.

Sounds like you're comfortable with having all of your conversations transcribed directly to twitter! Let us know where we can read that.

I think that is an extremely false equivalence. While there's an inherent irony about Sergey and Larry's woeful desire for privacy, whilst buying yachts bought by stripping everyone else of their own... I think it's fair to say that a public company affecting the lives of billions has drastically less right to privacy than a private individual. ;)

I'll leave you with a quote: "If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place." - Eric Schmidt, former CEO and chairman.

The fact that Google locked down communication in response to the leaks, is a tacit confirmation that they are doing things they probably shouldn't be doing in the first place.

I don’t follow this reasoning. The leaks were of internal but not secret as in “scandal” information.

> So then I realized that they were brain washed by the company internal communication to feel that anything annoying for Google was bad for them personally!

I think your interpretation of this experience is incorrect. Their visceral reaction was against leaking specifically, not negative information generally. Part of the propaganda behind TGIF, the internal newsletters, and so on is the idea that this inside information is part of what makes you special as a Googler.

> "...we hate so much the person that did that, that we would have like to have him dead."

While I'm sure you caught a big fish that day, I'm also sure it wasn't that big (come on: the retelling of this anecdote does not need quite that much exaggeration).

> While I'm sure you caught a big fish that day, I'm also sure it wasn't that big (come on: the retelling of this anecdote does not need quite that much exaggeration).

I don't exaggerate that point, the sentence was not exactly that but something very excessive and very close to that.

This is the intensity and violence of their feeling that shocked me to the point that I still remember this case after around 5/6 years or more.

During my tenure, just about every leak was accompanied by howling about the people who dared leak the information. Termination? Yes. Blackballing? Yes. Summary execution? No.