Google Culture War Escalates as Era of Transparency Wanes

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-13/google-culture-war-escalates-as-era-of-transparency-wanes

by pseudolus • 7 years ago

348 424 7 years ago

mc325• 7 years ago

If you make big changes, just do it. Don’t explain it at length. If you explain it, you give people room to argue and hem and haw and ends up being counterproductive. It’s an invitation to bikeshedding.

ethbro3• 7 years ago

Well said, comrade!

mc325• 7 years ago

True!

But these are places of work not town hall. Get on with your work.

All I’m saying is it’s like getting into an argument with a kid and you try to explain every ensuing “why”? At some point it’s “because!”

chipgap98• 7 years ago

That seems like it be worse. Making unilateral changes without any rational would likely anger people more.

mc325• 7 years ago

Sometimes a straight directive is more efficient than nuanced measures. Nuance is for intellectual pursuits, not for management.

JoeAltmaier4• 7 years ago

Most folks don't really care what you are doing. Because they don't understand your issues at all. Just say "It was the solution to a problem we were facing. If you want to find another solution, be my guest" and watch their 'anger' disappear quickly.

keiferski2• 7 years ago

“Therefore any cruelty has to be executed at once, so that the less it is tasted, the less it offends; while benefits must be dispensed little by little, so that they will be savored all the more.”

- Machiavelli, The Prince

wesammikhail• 7 years ago

That quote gave me some serious creeping chills down my spine.

pixelrevision• 7 years ago

Much of google’s success is built on trust. People had to trust them a whole lot to sign up for most of their services at one point or another. Most employees I have met felt the company was very open, their ideas mattered and that they were working on something positive.

Maybe that much trust is naive but when your decisions can amount to things like censoring the internet for half the world it’s maybe not the best plan to just pull the trigger and tell everyone who works for you to just deal with it.

dunkelheit2• 7 years ago

Having recently spent some time in a leadership position, I must admit I became disillusioned with "consensus emerging from democratic debate" - everyone tends to argue from their myopic view of the issue and to avoid thinking through the consequences fully (because ultimately they won't be responsible for them).

That said, as a subordinate, I hate it when no rationale is given. And it can be counterproductive too because people will start to speculate about "true reasons" behind the decision. Instead a reasonable thing to do seems to be to publish a rationale but make it clear that the debate is over and everyone has to commit to the decision even if they disagree with it.

mc325• 7 years ago

I agree with your experience. However I disagree with one aspect, in my experience.

Giving a rationale hasn’t engendered trust, and instead has contributed to conspiratorial discussions (they say it’s about x, but it’s really about y!) and often times the conspiratorialists were kind of right. There is no good answer but a straight directive with little food to chew on leads to less counterproductive speculation. And often it is less “dishonest”.

wayoutthere9• 7 years ago

I think Google has finally embraced the fact that they're an advertising company and they're not going to change the world for the better. This means they need to drive off the idealistic hackers that built the company and replace them with corporate drones who aren't focused so much on building an empire as much as protecting it.

This has been happening at both Google and Facebook over the last 5 years. I think the fact that they're driving off their most talented (and expensive!) employees is part of the plan for transitioning from explosive growth to maintenance. The growth mindset has become a liability for them.

tarsinge• 7 years ago

Tangentially related I hope developers will realize that the current stack inherited from them is basically enterprise software made for large teams of interchangeable developers, just with better marketing than J2EE 15 years ago.

For reference: https://martin.kleppmann.com/2008/05/11/ruby-on-rails-vs-jav...

I believe that if there was a full standard distribution for Java EE (e.g. Icefaces+JSF+Seam+EJB3+JPA+Hibernate+Glassfish, to name just one possible API stack out of thousands of different combinations), people would write a lot more good documentation for that particular stack, and it would become a lot easier for more developers to start using it effectively. With the right tools and good documentation, productivity could potentially be about the same for Rails and Java, but at the moment Java is shooting itself in the foot in this regard.

lonelappde3• 7 years ago

Facebook was founded as an amoral version of Google. It never had idealistic hacker culture.

devit3• 7 years ago

Not explaining is a bad idea, since it means that people who disagree have no chance to be convinced or even understand the motives if not convinced, so they are much less likely to effectively cooperate with the new course.

Instead, explain at length and let people discuss, but at some point explain that the decision is final unless some major new elements come up.

mc325• 7 years ago

People who disagree are not going to be convinced by corporate comms. It’s not going to happen. It’s a bigger distraction than what you’d otherwise get.

macspoofing6• 7 years ago

Sometimes you have to stand-up to your employees. Having a small group of activists driving your business decisions is unsustainable. Google is a multinational behemoth, and as much as it likes to think of itself as a small nimble progressive startup, those days are long gone.

Google’s open systems also proved valuable for activists within the company, who have examined its systems for evidence of controversial product developments and then circulated their findings among colleagues. Such investigations have been integral to campaigns against the projects for the Pentagon and China.

Google had the benefit of obscene profits from their ad business that let the rest of the company do whatever, which also enabled internal activists to exert pressure for them to not do business with the American government.

xiphias25• 7 years ago

Google had obscene profits _because_ of the rest of the company. Mano of us were working on weekends because we thought that it's a different company. And it was.

robk• 7 years ago

No. Non ads wasn't making the profits sorry.

SQueeeeeL• 7 years ago

It never was, on August 19, 2004 they went public. That day they became the same as any pharma company/oil company/Nestle. The shareholders will always win

macspoofing6• 7 years ago

we thought that it's a different company. And it was.

What do you mean a 'different company'. You mean different in that it wouldn't do business with the American government? Different in that it would bow to a small pool of activists to drive business decisions?

galangalalgol• 7 years ago

I did not know they had this transparency policy. Did it (hopefully) exclude documents containing personal information? Google has a lot of info ona lot of people, surely every employee can't access all of it?

hknd2• 7 years ago

When they talk about documents it's more about Google docs (sheets, ...) created internally by employees.

Getting access to personal information within Google is very, very difficult - it's not like you can query the user's sql table and get all the PII. Everything PII related is highly protected.

Internal documents though are created on a "public to all" basis - e.g. let's say you create a document with some ideas or issues with the next Pixel phone. This doc would be accessible by anyone in the company by default (you can obv change that).

It's an awesome philosophy if everybody plays by the rules and doesn't leak stuff to the outside world. Sometimes people create "Ideas Docs", "Best practice docs", "Design Docs", "Algo Docs" etc, and then receive feedback from random Googlers which accidentally stumbled upon them. It's also a fantastic way of knowledge transfer as anyone can look up the design doc for problem X of product Y and read about it.

saalweachter2• 7 years ago

Internal documents though are created on a "public to all" basis - e.g. let's say you create a document with some ideas or issues with the next Pixel phone. This doc would be accessible by anyone in the company by default (you can obv change that).

False; Google docs have always[1] been private by default, and must be explicitly shared, either with individuals, groups, or made world-readable.

[1] I mean, I wasn't around for the earliest releases of Google docs, but even before Larry was CEO the sharing was off by default. That's just a sane default, because if you forget to share your document the first person you send it to will let you know, but if you forget to unshare you only find out the hard way.

sandworm101• 7 years ago

Only a subset of Google docs were ever shared like this. The lawyers never shared. The internal security people had private files. HR had its files. The people doing the financial reporting were/are bound by all manner of rules. Google's famed internal openness was only ever for a subset of docs meant for developers, not anything like a free/open data policy.

blackearl• 7 years ago

Isn't that obvious? There are laws against having HR files available to anyone, and some fabled company culture doesn't get to override that.

morpheuskafka• 7 years ago

Personnel files, yes, but one could definitely share hiring practice statements, salary schedules, rules for how requisitions are approved/allocated, how much freedom hiring manages have to negotiate salaries, etc. Whether that is a good idea is another question, but it could be done if the goal was as much openness as possible.

cbanek• 7 years ago

I've also heard (not a Googler myself), that parts of the code are private, like very specific parts of the search algorithm that are very critical IP. So while a vast majority of the code is readable by most, it's not some kind of completely transparent place.

oppositelock2• 7 years ago

Yes, this is true. It's usually code with sensitive IP in it, which is limited to the people working on it. The API around that code and the binaries that result from it are exposed to other teams, but not the original code.

crazygringo• 7 years ago

Yeah this article really seems to confuse the monorepo and files.

The monorepo was always accessible to all. First day on the job, you can literally see all the source code. Which is crazy cool. (With a few exceptions I'm sure, but not many.) I'm assuming that's not changing?

But any time someone creates a Google Doc it defaults to private. People will then share it with other editors and then their team as necessary.

It happens all the time that you follow a link to a deck to try to understand what a team is working on, and you get a "no permission" and have to e-mail them to explain why you want to see it... and you usually get permission within a few hours but sometimes you needed to look something up quick before a meeting and missed the chance.

Most of the time it's not out of any great secrecy, just that teams don't want other teams to misunderstand info out of context, like whether a team is actually pivoting or just exploring it or just brainstorming internally.

vl• 7 years ago

While monorepo is still a thing, they created a feature called “silos” to allow secret projects, to prevent fiascos like Dragonfly (censored search in China) and Maven (DOD drone image recognition) which both were discovered from monorepo.

Ironically, Allo cancelation was discovered by Allo team from a comment in a check in which was made by mistake days/weeks before the announcement.

OneMoreGoogler• 7 years ago

During my time there, the internal Android repo required VP approval to access. Though I understand this was relaxed later.

remarkEon• 7 years ago

From the article:

Many large companies have policies restricting access to sensitive information to a “need-to-know” basis. But in some segments of Google’s workforce, the reaction to Walker’s argument was immediate and harsh. On an internal messaging forum, one employee described the data policy as “a total collapse of Google culture.” An engineering manager posted a lengthy attack on Walker’s note, which he called "arrogant and infantilizing." The need-to-know policy "denies us a form of trust and respect that is again an important part of the intrinsic motivation to work here,” the manager wrote.

I don’t work for Google, and this kind of entitlement mentality confuses me. I’d hate it if everyone had access to the stuff I was working on. That seems weird and kind of creepy. Without proper context lots of stuff could get misinterpreted (broadly speaking).

saagarjha• 7 years ago

Misinterpreted in what way? What are you doing that you wouldn’t be comfortable sharing with other people in your own company?

fishnchips6• 7 years ago

I’m always surprised by the level of employee activism at Google. I mean, it’s a job. You don’t like it, or the company, then the default thing people do is leave. But based on my experience Google is different because they brainwash you into thinking that Google is the second coming of Christ and you don’t want to lose your front seat by just leaving. So instead of moving on, lots of frustrated employees burn out trying to change the company from within.

hknd2• 7 years ago

It's actually with any company which gives you that much of freedome and voting power. And people hate it if something is being taken away.

clevergadget• 7 years ago

I assume that the culture of employee activism or at least advocacy being encouraged and fostered by internal systems of communication was probably part of the selling point for a lot of people to begin with. I agree with your premise though - Google established a different kind of relationship when they did the brainwashing/cultural indoctrination. This is the kind of genie that gets let out of a bottle when you do that and then you change up your culture after the fact.

fhennig• 7 years ago

I think that's not a bad thing. For big companies like that it is impossible to drive them out of the market with a competing company, so if you want to change it makes sense to do so from within. Especially since its such a powerful corporation they will always find people to replace the ones that leave, so your leaving doesn't actually help your cause all that much. Much better to stay inside and exert your power from within.

mstade• 7 years ago

So instead of moving on, lots of frustrated employees burn out trying to change the company from within.

(Quote from the post above yours, emphasis mine.)

I read the post you're replying to as saying they didn't understand why people don't just go work somewhere else, rather than burn out with futile attempts at trying to change the corporation from within. Whether they are right or not I can't really speculate in, just thought it interesting that we seem to have had different takeaways from the comment.

mcguire4• 7 years ago

Even if your power doesn't change anything?

nradov2• 7 years ago

How is it impossible? Plenty of big companies — including tech companies — have been driven out of the market by competitors.

macspoofing6• 7 years ago

I’m always surprised by the level of employee activism at Google.

I'm not. Google encouraged it. Now they are forced to quash that culture because you can't run a multinational business that way. When profitability starts drying up in the ad business, you'll see a further shift.

fishnchips6• 7 years ago

Google encouraged it.

Everyone's story is different but I joined in 2008 and it took me about a week to understand that the company did not want employees to get involved in a way that would affect day-to-day operations. As an example, you could organise an LGBT group, print out stickers and t-shirts, dance at the local Pride, take a few photos, and you'll get a pat on the back from HR. But if you asked for health benefits for your same-sex partner, that would be at least frowned upon. As a different example, you could organise Irish-speaking evenings, and again - pat on the back. But try to push for an Irish language version of Google interface, and you can get in trouble if you make enough noise that decision makers hear about it. Both of these are actual examples I saw first hand.

ForHackernews• 7 years ago

The impression I have (as an outsider) is that Google is a totalitarian institution, in the same way universities are for undergraduates: it encourages employees to centre their entire lives around Google.

They provide employment, food, transportation, leisure activities, social validation; in some cases housing. It's no wonder employees (especially young ones fresh from the bosom of Mother Academe) who have their entire sense of self wrapped up in being a Googler are hesitant to just walk away from that.

thatfrenchguy2• 7 years ago

That’s true for a lot of tech companies: the goal is to make sure you spend all of your time thinking about work.

philwelch• 7 years ago

I think the term is “total institution”—a totalitarian institution wouldn’t actually tolerate factionalism and infighting.

dunkelheit2• 7 years ago

You say you are surprised but then provide a perfectly good explanation in the next sentences of your comment. It is not much different from nation-states indoctrinating their citizens to "love their country". Moreover, some degree of indoctrination seems essential for any large-scale organization. They simply begin to collapse without it.

non_sequitur• 7 years ago

This is fairly cynical but i think it's one consequence of the economic boom. During recessions and recovery aftermath there are rarely issues like this, people are generally grateful for their jobs, not looking to pick fights over it. Not saying that is a better situation since it enables more corporations to exploit their employees, but the pendulum has swung pretty far the other way. Will be interesting to see what happens next recession.

UI_at_80x24• 7 years ago

I've always likened it to the early days of computing when it was "Big Blue" vs everybody. Small upstarts like Apple were very much the Hippy compared to the Button-Down Square.

That Hippy rebel spirit is/was very much an identifying characteristic of `Silicon Valley`. I'd even say that Google is the poster child of Silicon Valley v2.0, and the people that work there might even resent the inevitable conservative slide that makes Google in 2019 look more like IBM in 1989. I know I resent that.

chrisco2552• 7 years ago

I suspect "corporatist" might be a better term than conservative.

Ididntdothis5• 7 years ago

“So instead of moving on, lots of frustrated employees burn out trying to change the company from within.”

I think the mindset of changing of something from within is actually a good one. “Moving on” is probably easier and pragmatic but as a society it’s better to change things instead of just tossing them aside and going to the next thing. I hope the same people will also be active in politics and try to change things.

dmix4• 7 years ago

Leaving while making it clear to your higher ups and coworkers that it's due to the dying work culture is not leaving without anything.

Individual employees shouldn't have to make personal sacrifices, especially for a megacorp, beyond what they contribute each day as an employee. Unless they are an executive or management and get paid (and mandated) sufficiently to do culture stuff.

There are people at Google who have this responsibility and are either failing, or possibly it's not really that bad and the news is overhyping a bunch of highly vocal individuals/small groups, while most Googlers are apolitical and happy with the group of people they work with. It's always hard to tell but most companies aren't getting multiple articles a year written about their culture.

shizcakes• 7 years ago

I'm not convinced that burning out trying to change something that's unchangeable is the right strategic way to fix things for anyone other than the company.

If enough people leave and go work on next-generation things because the previous-generation has run it's course - that strikes me as having many parallels in nature.

Large companies don't adapt quickly unless they have a true (ie, in-practice, not just in-speech) mandate to do so.

A leaf contributes to the health of the tree, but it doesn't control where new branches grow.

there_the_and• 7 years ago

The way we change things in this industry is by creating new companies and either outcompeting the incumbents or getting acquired by incumbents and taking them over. Trying to significantly change a company from the inside is a fool’s errand and these employees who keep trying are just reinforcing the incumbents’ positions.

jseliger• 7 years ago

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: https://www.amazon.com/Exit-Voice-Loyalty-Responses-Organiza.... A classic for a reason.

BurningFrog2• 7 years ago

I think the mindset of changing of something from within is actually a good one.

This assumes the disagreeing people are right. In reality people genuinely like different things.

If a disaffected minority tries to change what a majority likes, I'd expect they'll just ruin things for everybody.

Finding (or founding) a company that acts according to your ideals to work for, while letting Googlers work they way they like, is the obvious solution to me.

CharlesColeman2• 7 years ago

I think the mindset of changing of something from within is actually a good one. “Moving on” is probably easier and pragmatic but as a society it’s better to change things instead of just tossing them aside and going to the next thing. I hope the same people will also be active in politics and try to change things.

I agree. "Moving on" is a market/capitalist attitude, while "trying to change the company from within" is a democratic/civic attitude. The US has has way too much of the former and way too little of the latter than what I'd consider healthy for a democratic nation. Civic participation is often a thankless slog where it seems like your efforts are having no effect, but it's extremely necessary.

Also I think "moving on" often isn't so much "tossing aside" but simply ignoring/avoiding the problem.

dnautics• 7 years ago

In a capitalist society, for small minority groups within large firms, changing from within is a strategically better. "Moving on" is only good if, as a baseline, you can line up a 'relatively equivalent' position, and if you want to enact change, there is enough momentum within the firm to do damage with 1) a mass exodus or 2) media attention. Both are made easier the higher up you are.

mensetmanusman• 7 years ago

This exactly describes the two major schools of thought in economics:

-stay and fight to fix

Vs.

-vote with your feet and compete

Each of these have positives and negatives :)

gukov• 7 years ago

Do you have similar thoughts on emigration (or brain drain) from less fortunate countries?

ksec• 7 years ago

I think the mindset of changing of something from within is actually a good one

Yes except experience tells me unless you get your hands dirty and climb to the top of the ladder nothing will ever be changed.

You may stop a company from doing things, ( Dragonfly or BlitzChung ) but their mindset wont change, their culture wont change. The attitude and culture of these companies will only change when people at the helm change, like Intel Bob Swan and AMD Lisa Su for example.

And as with all things there is a long tail and slow death, Numbers on Balance Sheet and Report wont show immediate effect but over the years the trend will be undeniable. Normally by that time most of your talents are gone, you are left with people who are comfortable with current ways of things. ( Look at IBM )

Remember Companies is not a democracy, it is pretty much the other side of it more like Imperial ruling.

roenxi2• 7 years ago

changing of something from within is actually a good one.

Politics; yes. Corporations; no. Corporations have specific legal, cultural and practical mechanisms to keep control with the shareholders and board. The major purpose of shareholders and boards is to be the people who decide whether a company changes or not.

If shareholders and the board are happy taking on government work then Google will take on government work. Ditto military projects, ditto Chinese projects, ditto anything really. The workers don't have the right or privilege of influencing what compromises are made. The only influence they do have is to cause profits to go higher than people planned on; because that makes management happy.

TuringNYC3• 7 years ago

> I’m always surprised by the level of employee activism at Google. I mean, it’s a job. You don’t like it, or the company, then the default thing people do is leave. But based on my experience Google is different because they brainwash you into thinking that Google is the second coming of Christ and you don’t want to lose your front seat by just leaving. So instead of moving on, lots of frustrated employees burn out trying to change the company from within.

How much of that is simply due to vesting schedules?

Not just for Google, but broadly in tech, that doesn't quite work. If you jet, you lose un-vested equity. Oh, and you are also forced, in many cases, to spend a boatload of current cash to exercise vested options and get stuck with illiquid holdings for 5 or more years.

kmonsen• 7 years ago

This is not true at Google, you can trade all your vested equity ave the not vested ones should be replaced by a similar amount in your next job.

Google pays pretty well which makes it hard to leave, ave there is a lot of nice people to work with.

Analemma_• 7 years ago

Google (and most large established tech companies) give RSUs instead of options, so you don’t have to spend any money to exercise them, but your point about vesting is good.

overthemoon• 7 years ago

Not a googler myself, but if I had to guess I'd say they feel a sense of ownership in Google employees at other companies might not. I think that sense of ownership is warranted, if not in a strictly legal sense. If a Google employee feels that, it seems natural to want to see it change for the better, and stick around to help influence it to do so.

Moreover, the sheer size and power of Google means that changing its culture changes how it interacts with the world, which could have far-reaching consequences. Seems natural to want to see that impact improve.

shadowgovt8• 7 years ago

Google attracts quite a few people who, were they not doing industry, would be in academia. There tends to be a lot of philosophy of why things are done overlapped with what is done.

SkyPuncher• 7 years ago

Typically, I'd agree. However, I think leaving isn't a great option for a lot of FAANG employees.

They have two options:

1. Maintain high pay at another FAANG. Depending on perspective, at least one of those is no better than Google.

2. Take a significant pay cut to work somewhere else.

compiler-guy2• 7 years ago

There is also the money. Truckloads and truckloads of money.

gfs783• 7 years ago

Probably the result of years of social engineering played upon the protesters. They fail to see Google is not their friend. But also fail to see that the part they play as Google employees is not that important either.

tanilama• 7 years ago

Maybe Google pays well and the work-life balance is great so the employees can enjoy a good life while spend most of their energy protesting, so much so they don't want to leave what they are protesting against /s

Bartweiss• 7 years ago

I see a very different explanation which could also explain this pattern. Employee activism doesn't make the news that often, but it's actually pretty common - as long as the activism doesn't challenge any core element of the business.

If you want your call center to be more ecofriendly or your consulting firm to support Fight For $15, you may or may not get support but you probably won't see consequences. In tech itself, I've watched plenty of people push for green policies, or organize donations to support immigrants, or even recruit for the DSA with no issues at all. But they were recruiting for border reforms and political groups, not workplace unions and H-1B liberalization - and certainly not user privacy. When it comes to the Kickstarter union or Wayfair stopping sales to the CBP, the accommodation dries up fast.

That doesn't mean the activism is insincere, or even about not making waves: there's also a powerful selection effect invovled. If you're passionate about the environment, you probably don't take a job at Shell, or you quit in protest. But if you're passionate about LGBT issues, there's much more reason to be optimistic about workplace activism, and it's mcuh easier to reconcile keeping your job while you do it.

So what's up with Google? They used to do one thing in one way, then branched out rapidly, so they have lots of employees who bypassed the normal selection effects. And now they do everything, so every issue is simultaneously non-central to Alphabet as a whole and a direct challenge to some component of it. We haven't heard much about Google employees protesting search ranking algorithms or advocating for GDPR, because that's been selected against from the beginning. But AI, military work, internal transparency, and even corporate hierarchy are comparatively new issues for Google. The people who object aren't gone yet, and nobody can tell what's fundamental and what's safe to challenge.

paul7986• 7 years ago

I think it's because Google started and sold itself as the Do No Evil company that inspired 1,000s to more to get into tech; aspire to want to work for or with such a company.

In the end we learn Google does evil for the sake of profits and many those who they inspired have become disenchanted.

bduerst• 7 years ago

This week Bezos said he wants to hire missionaries, not mercenaries, at Amazon.

Nurturing a work culture of employees who care and are passionate has always been a goal for many companies.

Ar-Curunir• 7 years ago

I mean, worker organization is never a bad thing. Just like democracy is good for decision-making in government, it's also good for decision-making in the institution that dominates most employees' lives: their employer.

d1zzy3• 7 years ago

Yeah it does feel overwhelming. I'm actually starting to think that some of this may be targeted. Meaning that actively political people (of any political affiliation) are actively looking to get hired at Google and stir shit up. One way to confirm this theory is to get the the seniority of people that start these internal movements/arguments/threads/etc.

thundergolfer• 7 years ago

The 4 people recently fired that were labour activists had tenure of 11, 8, 4, and 1 years.

I think it’s honestly ridiculous to suggest people are trying to get hired into Google to be political activists. We have no evidence of this and I’d need a lot to start believing it.

uoaei• 7 years ago

When your hiring process encourages critical thinkers, don't be surprised when they become critics.

LIV22• 7 years ago

The kinda critical thinking that makes them think working for China to throw people in deathcamps is good but working with the US government is bad?

throwawaysea10• 7 years ago

Most employees working at companies (even Google) are seeking to just get their work done, be productive, draw a paycheck, and get some friendly socialization done along the way. It isn't a setting where they are seeking to fight political battles, argue about moral values, generate anxiety, be subject to leaks/doxxing, etc. But that's the exact environment created at places like Google where employee activism isn't shut down.

Effectively, a minority of these employees are using company time/resources to engage in personal activities. Often those employees are highly-vocal, cutthroat about shutting down others' differing views, and the voices of others who are just trying to get things done are not represented. I think the lack of an anonymous channel for others to push back is a big problem because there is no psychological safety afforded to the majority of employees.

Put another way, employee activism is an unscientific popularity contest where most people don't want to participate in the contest.

cameronbrown• 7 years ago

they brainwash you into thinking that Google is the second coming of Christ

Never once have I heard anyone describe Google in such high regard while working there. We're encouraged to be autonomous, self aware, thinking people, believe it or not. There are many things I agree and disagree with that Google does and expressing that is perfectly fine.

AzuraJergen• 7 years ago

It will be interesting to see how companies will engage with culture wars in the upcoming years. I expect it to get back to firing of employees to create cultural hegemony, something that will be frowned upon in some societies.

StevePerkins• 7 years ago

We're 12 years into the longest economic expansion in U.S. history.

Moreover, the 2008 crash didn't really affect the tech workforce as harshly as the 2001 dot-com crash.

Altogether, this means an ENTIRE GENERATION of tech workers has NEVER really experienced a true labor market bloodbath in their career. Doesn't even fully comprehend what one looks or feels like. Believes that protesting your own employer, or management tolerating a fragmented internal culture, is normal and natural rather a temporary aberration.

As a 40-something who was around for the dot-com crash, I feel a blend of resentment and pity for the younger crowd. The next time the pendulum swings, and management has more leverage than labor once again, I wonder how they will react to the reality of that landscape.

thatfrenchguy2• 7 years ago

The next time the pendulum swings, and management has more leverage than labor once again, I wonder how they will react to the reality of that landscape.

Google employees probably have so much money laying around after years of working there that they don’t care anymore.

pnathan• 7 years ago

Believes that protesting your own employer [snip]

Unions would like to have a word. They started, in modern form, in the 1800s.

geebee3• 7 years ago

Interesting comment, I relate to it. The recessions affected me pretty heavily. I'm in my late 40s. I graduated into the recession of the early 90s, and was living in SoCal at the time which was really bad (military cutbacks hit the job market at the same time as the recession). The dot com crash hit later - I kept my job through it, but my wife's company went bankrupt and she had a lot of trouble getting back into it.

I think I internalized the notion that it's essential to have very specific and in demand job skills, and I am innately pessimistic about my general ability to adapt and learn on the job as a means of attaining employment. I suppose that's always true to an extent, but in the early 90s, only certain engineering grads were getting good jobs, there were a lot of coffee shop humanities majors. In the late 90s, during the boom, I felt a world of difference between myself and people just 5 years younger, who seemed to think the difference between college and the working world is that now your employer pays for the booze. Even the humanities majors tended to land pretty good jobs - and I don't just mean money, I mean the kind that start to build up your resume. The dot com crash definitely hit like a hurricane, though.

That said, 2008 was rough, wasn't it? My company went bankrupt and I did get a new job, but options weren't great. That said, I do agree that the tech workforce was hit more harshly in 2001.

People talk a lot about generational differences, but I think that there's a large and generally hidden difference in cohort. It can hit hard. For instance, graduating into a severe recession can really set you back. The reason is that you don't get good experience (you string together freelance and coffee shop jobs), and then 4 years later, the economy picks back up. The problem is, you're competing with recent grads for entry level jobs, and companies tend to recruit at the colleges (and may wonder, why has this guy done nothing relevant for the last 4 years?). I've read that the effects of graduating into a recession can be seen 10-20 later, and I'm not surprised. I think it's harder to get an entry ramp back on when the economy does improve, and I suspect that people may develop a more risk-averse mentality about what kind career path to pursue.

kccqzy• 7 years ago

That captures my sentiment as well. The word that kept coming into my mind is "entitlement."

geebee3• 7 years ago

I'm surprised the Damore controversy didn't show up in this article. There are a couple of things that resonated for me:

"About 20,000 employees walked out last fall over the company’s generous treatment of executives accused of sexual harassment"

There is a kind of moral collapse in a company that fires a rank and file employee for writing a memo while quietly paying out massive exit packages to executives who have been repeatedly and credibly accused of sexual harassment. I think people can agree on this while disagreeing about whether Damore should have been fired.

I'll admit to my own personal politics - free speech doesn't exist for you when you deny it to others. I'm not making a fairness argument, that it's unfair to deny free speech to others if you have yourself, I'm making an existential one. If it doesn't exist for others, it doesn't exist for you - free speech is the right to listen, otherwise it's nothing but a tree falling in the forest with no one around to hear it.

Google employees are now getting fired for speaking out on activist issues, including unionization. Yeah, unions often protect their members right to speech, including unpopular speech. And guess what, your bosses may not like that. Why are people who decide to create an authoritarian tribunal always so sure they're going to be able to keep their little monster on a leash?

godshatter2• 7 years ago

Those executives probably had their "massive exit packages" written into their employment contracts. Google couldn't not pay them, if that was the case, because it would have been a breach of contract. Rank and file employees likely don't have such a clause in their employment contracts.

Should they have had such clauses written into their contracts? Maybe not, but maybe it's hard to hire people at that level without them.

tpmx2• 7 years ago

A group of Google programmers created a tool that allowed employees to choose to alert Walker with an automated email every time they opened any document at all, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. The deluge of notifications was meant as a protest to what they saw as Walker’s insistence on controlling the minutiae of their professional lives.

Wow. Just wow. The level of highschool-level unprofessionalism displayed here is shocking to me. Are these the people we have trusted all of our personal secrets with?

throwawaysea10• 7 years ago

This sort of malicious action needs to be nipped in the bud. Google's management failed to enforce normal workplace guidelines and created a culture where personal opinion and political warfare take precedence over making the business successful. Google remains strong just because of the coattails current employees are riding.

tpmx2• 7 years ago

Seriously though: Is this something the ~2 billion people holding Google accounts need to think about?

Previously we sort of all trusted Google employees to be competent, smart and professional.

Should we still do that with these internal divisions becoming public?

Over the past few years I've taken to a habit to do the more personal searches about things about personal medical issues etc from a separate browser installation (with no Google cookies) using duckduckgo.com or bing.com. I just don't trust Google with new personal secrets any more.

ignoramous• 7 years ago

The specifics of Google’s business operations traditionally haven’t required this level of secrecy, but that is changing. Google’s cloud business in particular requires it to convince business clients it can handle sensitive data and work on discrete projects. This has brought it more in line with its secrecy-minded competitors.

The article fails to mention a certain Anthony Levandowski [0] and biases towards anti-innovation and anti-activism narratives, in particular. Sensitive documents can't be just kept lying around esp when industrial espionage [1] and intellectual property theft is a thing [2].

Apple Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. demand that workers operate in rigid silos to keep the details of sensitive projects from leaking to competitors. Engineers building a phone’s camera may have no idea what the people building its operating system are doing, and vice versa.

I remember back in 2010-14 when the entire Fire Phone / Tablets / TV / Echo orgs were kept under wraps. It was such a drastic change from the otherwise quite transparent culture at Amazon that it almost felt un-Amazon-esque. To me, those teams, back in the day, felt as if had a culture of their own separate from the rest of the company. The silos were rigid, and that was by design. These days you'd find, by default, certain teams keep their docs under wraps forever (even post-launch). Some teams continue to commit to transparent documentation.

I missed the open culture which was curtailed (a necessity, though took a bit too far by some orgs) but I see why Amazon needed to do that. You could not possibly trust all 600K employees going through the system with high churn. The learnings / information weren't pull anymore, you had to get it pushed to you, on a case by case basis, and the principal engineers became the common thread through which Amazon's culture and engineering fabric was woven. Not sure if that was a bad thing or a good thing, but seemed necessary for the scale at which the company was operating.

Things did not get better and there were down-sides: Even a mention of things on internal pages you didn't even know were supposed to be secret, got you nice escalation emails from all corners, which meant your year-end reviews had a special mention of how you needed to improve earn trust and tone down learn and be curious [3], just because...

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718586

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20283828

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9011628

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15910526

devit3• 7 years ago

Regarding the data policy, is the reason that the risk of someone leaking information is now being perceived as higher than in the past?

If so, why? Have there been leaks? Is there a plan to hire a bunch of new less vetted employees?

Or maybe it's a manipulative attempt to make those with undesirable cultural traits (including a desire for internal openness) leave the company without saying so explicitly?

Infinitesimus• 7 years ago

Check out this piece https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/25/technology/google-fires-w...

The excuse is that those for abusing that freedom to gather information outside the scope of their jobs (no details given though).

Plus I think they recently cancelled the Friday meetings because information was being leaked to the media. Inevitable at a large corporation but when a few people act this way, if ruins it for everyone

simion31415• 7 years ago

Would you say the same if the Boeing employees that don't like the new unsafe culture should shut up and leave?

I think is better when the employees have some power to keep the company true to the ideals and not close their eyes. I understand that is bad PR to criticize unsafe or imoral shit but if this would have happened at Uber or Boeing then a lot of people might have been alive now.

airstrike3• 7 years ago

Would you say the same if the Boeing employees that don't like the new unsafe culture should shut up and leave?

Yes. Best way to incentivize the company to change is to have enough talent leave to force their hand. Anything else is mostly just noise.

SolaceQuantum• 7 years ago

"Best way to incentivize the company to change is to have enough talent leave to force their hand."

Is there historical proof that this is more effective than a union effort?

simion31415• 7 years ago

I am not sure you get the result you predicted but 100% you don't get safer products

maxlamb• 7 years ago

I think the point OP was making is that dozens of people died because executives as Boeing “shut down” concerns that some long time engineers had. I’m not sure lives at risk with Google’s products but I think the point is hoping that a half a trillion dollar monopoly will change its ways because lots of employees leave is wishful thinking and might only happen if it results in a catastrophe. Google can replace them easily and regardless a majority of their profit comes from search which only requires a small fraction of their employees to keep operating at profit.

praptak2• 7 years ago

Sounds good, doesn't work. No essential change was ever achieved by boycott. What works is enough people willing to stick their necks out and organize politically.

throwawaysea10• 7 years ago

The 'unsafe culture' at Boeing is an overblown fear, IMO. The two crashes on the 737 MAX were both on airlines that are not known for adequate training or maintenance. Everyone got on the "bash Boeing" train while ignoring the reality of what happened. The NY Times finally wrote about it, after numerous articles presenting a one-sided story: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/24/world/asia/lion-air-boein...

Crash investigators were presented with photographs supposedly showing that a mandatory test was done after the vane had been replaced. But upon further inspection, investigators concluded the photos were from a different aircraft.
“This is a test that Lion Air was required to do, and they didn’t,” said John Cox, an aviation safety consultant.
If the test had been done, engineers likely would have realized the vane was calibrated incorrectly by 21 degrees. The misalignment would prove fatal because it mistakenly catalyzed Boeing’s anti-stall system, forcing the plane into its final plummet.

simion31415• 7 years ago

Please stop with false information, one of the companies has a good record. The safety concerns are real, documented and were ignored. There are many more issues with the MAX then the one causing the crashes, as an example while trying to patch the current software issue a new software problem was found that delayed the update.

fishnchips6• 7 years ago

Would you say the same if the Boeing employees that don't like the new unsafe culture should shut up and leave?

Absolutely not. And if you leave, at least do not leave quietly lest you end up in jail. But serious as Googlers' misgivings may be, it's hard to compare their concern to what Boeing did.

simion31415• 7 years ago

Google is working on self driving cars and they were planing to work for military, so I would prefer Google employees to speak up then shut up and leave.

frank2• 7 years ago

do not leave quietly lest you end up in jail.

Are you saying that an employee might be convicted of a crime in the US for not speaking out as he or she quit? If so, I disagree.

herostratus101• 7 years ago

Airplane safety is fairly black-and-white compared to, say, the decision to partner with law enforcement or to censor certain kinds of content on YouTube.

Given that Silicon Valley engineers have attitudes that are not broadly representative of the general public, I think it's rather presumptuous for them to operate as moral crusaders within a company.

jrockway• 7 years ago

I think the difficulty was that it wasn't black and white. You can say "I think MCAS is a danger because it only relies on one sensor and has authority to make the plane uncontrollable" and someone can counter with "MCAS failing looks like and is fixed the same way as any runaway stabilizer trim, every pilot knows how to handle that".

Obviously the second hypothetical statement was wrong, but it's hardly "evil" to make that argument.

NikolaeVarius• 7 years ago

Aircraft safety is the opposite of black and white. Engineering is all about making compromises, in aircraft, you compromise with weight, otherwise, we would be giving every passenger an ejection seat/parachute.

gfs783• 7 years ago

Airplane safety is/must be regulated by laws, not by companies cultures and values.

In the case of boeing/uber the problem is the regulators are getting more and more relaxed and/or corrupt.

cma• 7 years ago

But if it wasn't regulated by laws, would the same thing apply? People should just leave if they don't like it and don't try and rock the boat?

dang• 7 years ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21781771.

Despegar2• 7 years ago

The thing about Google's culture is that it was always dishonest from the start. And it was dishonest because they were deeply ashamed of how they made money. So from the very beginning the culture was built around being "Googley". It put the engineer on the pedestal. 20% time. Moonshots. Infantilizing the workplace (are there still ball pits and slides?). "Don't be evil".

All of that was to paper over the fact that fundamentally this was an ad-tech company and it's hard to get people to go work for one if that's what your brand is (Yahoo is a good example). They did 20 years of recruitment on this lie, and it's finally coming home to roost. The idealists that got brainwashed by this are understandably chafing at the changes happening as Google transitions into a typical big company with a McKinsey alum CEO.

ocdtrekkie• 7 years ago

This. I think the belief that Google wasn't evil and is losing its way come from people not wanting to accept they'd been duped. The company was always evil. It was always built around selling your attention to advertisers who want you to buy things. And ad clicks have always been more important than quality search results.

As ad blockers have become popular and the demand for continual growth has remained steady, the costs they accepted to hide their evil were the first expense to get cut.

shadowgovt8• 7 years ago

I think it's worse than that. I think "Don't be evil" implied that the company sought to avoid taking its highly-trained technical talent and applying them to the job of, say, weapons systems. In that sense, they weren't evil; attention shifting isn't nearly as bad as drone targeting.

... but if the money isn't there in ads in the future, I don't expect the company to just curl up and die. It'll be interesting to see what comes next when "The smartest people" need to find something to do.

CWuestefeld• 7 years ago

ad clicks have always been more important than quality search results

Whatever else you might think about what Google is doing, this is certainly not true.

Google gained dominance precisely because its search results were vastly superior to any other. I was a web developer even back then, and clearly remember trying to struggle with the results of Yahoo or AltaVista or DogPile, etc. There's just no question that Google won because of higher quality results.

And at that time there was also a lot of controversy about their competitors selling search positions, so you could outright buy the #1 slot, for example. Google never did this, and always maintained a policy of maintaining a clear distinction between organic results versus ads. The line may have become less bright over time, but it's always been possible to discern which items on the results page were "real" and which weren't.

You can criticize them for having decreasing commitment so they're not as bold about the ideals, but I don't think it's fair to say that they never cared, or even that they don't care anymore.

shadowgovt8• 7 years ago

While it's made them financially successful, it is in some sense a bit depressing that the company has spent years casting about for an economic engine that will generate revenue as efficiently as ads and nothing has been found.

One could ask for better of the world, but the world does not deliver. "People's attention" is the highest ROI resource to mine.

kareemm• 7 years ago

People's attention" is the highest ROI resource to mine.

It’s the scarcest resource we all have. Makes sense that mining it is so valuable.

lern_too_spel2• 7 years ago

Nobody in any of these articles complains about ads, so that is nonsense. They complain about becoming like Apple and handing over unrestricted access to data to the Chinese government or about becoming like Palantir. They also complain about bigwigs being protected after harassing lower level workers. Those things, and the no-poach agreement Google entered with Steve Jobs, are evil.

bryanlarsen• 7 years ago

People expect ad-tech companies to be evil; once you've sold your soul once the second time it's a lot cheaper.

mcguire4• 7 years ago

Of course they don't complain about ads; that's paying their salary.

Once upon a time, Google was the most admired, brilliant company on the net and doubleclick.net was universally reviled for pushing all the ad tech that everybody hates. Then Google bought doubleclick...

matz13• 7 years ago

What dishonest about "Don't be evil" ? The definition of evil is relative and subjective. Lets say building weapons systems to suppress dissident, is it evil ? It depends on who do you ask.

npongratz• 7 years ago

Sure, that's cool. Then I can also redefine words, sometimes retroactively and perhaps in contradiction to reason and rationality, as I see fit, to match whatever I subjectively feel is in my best interests.

rainyMammoth• 7 years ago

you described this better than I would ever have.

I also always thought that the whole "Google got the best engineers in the world" was the best marketing campaign ever. Reinforced by all those people amazed by the stupid Google interview questions (how many ping pong ball in a 747?). It's amazing that all those engineers thinking of themselves as best in the world managed to get duped so easily by a marketing scheme.

earthboundkid• 7 years ago

That's interesting. Google certainly did pick up a number of world class engineers from Microsoft and Bell Labs (Ken Thompson!). I wonder though if it was a conscious strategy to get these top-level engineers in order to retain a vast pool of average-level engineers by inflating their egos with the positive association.

GoodDreams• 7 years ago

Speaking of shame: Many people in the Bay Area blame tech workers for their woes. A friend of mine, an engineer at Google, also believes this and feels much shame. If they can focus on what others are doing wrong it makes them feel a little better.

ex_ex_nihilo• 7 years ago

A couple of years ago I was walking around downtown SF, and I noticed someone had drawn a chalk outline on the sidewalk and labeled it "techie fuck". I had a good chuckle. We are not loved there.

rapind• 7 years ago

I see this as obvious. We should always expect a company to gravitate to whatever policies generate the most revenue and fight off the competition. Anything else is a Disney fairytale.

In Google's case I think they were playing the long game and the "do no evil" mantra wasn't disingenuous, but they still need to compete. /shrug

Eventually this is all going to get regulated, and the real story is how incredibly long it is taking to implement that regulation.

duckkg5• 7 years ago

Wow, you nailed it. The culture was easily the #1 reason IMO that Google kept getting getting on top of the top places to work lists. No other company could do it such a that scale - transparency, freedom to work on stuff you like, free food, having TGIFs (or TGITs) where you can ask the CEO of one of the most powerful companies in history to his face why the company chose to do XYZ last week. And no one there really, truly actually appreciates the fact that the entire empire is built on digital ads. Yes it's known, but it's not appreciated. It's just kind of understood that the business org sells ads so the rest of the company can work on other things, almost none of which make money and are largely built to squeeze out competitors in a given space that they can't or won't acquire. It's no longer a place I'd ever want to work again and hasn't been for years.

lallysingh2• 7 years ago

There's a scale here for "evil" and it seems this discussion is sloppily equating all evil as the same.

But it's mostly subjective.

They also serve meat (including veal) in the cafes. Some find that pretty bad.

Are web ads evil? Some will say yes for the intrusion, or the interruption, or the compound effect of all the ads people see in they're lives. All valid reasons.

Is weapons research evil? Hurts people in new ways, also can deter violence and defend from bad guys.

But, can we say without hesitation that it's just as evil as helping ICE break up families, or helping Chinese censorship?

People joined Google knowing about the ads (and the meat) but didn't expect other stuff they're seeing now. And that's perfectly reasonable.

Few firms (any?) pass every possible "not evil test," so let's strengthen the quality of the debate here by avoiding logical sloppiness that would invalidate the important questions being discussed.

jayd16• 7 years ago

transparency, freedom to work on stuff you like, free food, having TGIFs (or TGITs) where you can ask the CEO of one of the most powerful companies in history to his face why the company chose to do XYZ last week.

Sure there's the elephant in the room but all that still sounds pretty good. Is it right to call that a lie?

john_moscow2• 7 years ago

Oh, their recent way to make money with hotel/flight bookings, restaurant reviews, etc is even scarier.

They essentially use their search engine market domination to find out who else makes money off the biggest searches, and then clone those products and show the clones on top of the originals. Good luck competing with that...

shdh• 7 years ago

Wouldn’t doing the same thing be feasible to anyone with access to Google Trends?

reroute1• 7 years ago

Do you know examples of these services? What can you search for that does this?

infoseek12• 7 years ago

Ya, it seems like a carefully orchestrated plan to envelop a big chunk of the internet. Google Featured Snippets began doing it with static content, now features like Google Flights are doing it with a lot of dynamic content. I especially dislike how they're pursuing this strategy in regards to Accelerated Mobile Pages. Google has done a lot of incredible things, and I think fears about killing the golden goose merit serious consideration, but all this does make one appreciate the value of antitrust laws.

https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynet...

mola• 7 years ago

There was no real ad-tech concept before Google. We didn't really realized the problems with this business model and its effect on society until much later. I do believe that Google's claim to actually try and create good products, was an honest try to be "good". Search was a game changer, it really helped information be more accessible than ever. AdWords made sense, if people search for a product they won't mind seeing an ad for one. As opposed to tv commercials, which were the main ad platform, which was basically a brainwash machine sitting in people houses.

Gmail was an amazing product that email much more useful for the non techie, and techie user.

I believe, Google, as opposed to Facebook was honest in their mission statement. Facebook's "connecting people" was a sham from the get go, zukerberg's "dumb fuck" comments about his first users proves it.

Google is an organism, organism change and adapt, corporates are organisms with one pure value function, shareholders bottom line. MBA types took control of the company because they are trained to optimize corporations to thrive, nothing else.

I think saying Google was always evil is missing the real point. That corporations are not humans, they can't have human values while bottom line is the only value that counts.

air7• 7 years ago

The thing that ad-hating people (me included) sometimes gloss over is that ads actually work. They work in the sense that enough people willingly actually click them and then actually willingly give money to the advertiser in exchange for something they offer. While it is annoying, and in a sense the 99.9% of us that don't click/buy any specific ad are paying the price (by wasting our attention for no personal gain), we all get tons of cool stuff for that price. Is it worth it? That's a different question, but it's not evil per se imo.

Nullabillity• 7 years ago

ads actually work.

Yes. That's the (biggest) problem.

whateveracct2• 7 years ago

You could argue the influence ads have on people is now at a level of power (thanks in part to advancements by Google) that no one should have over others.

jdbernard2• 7 years ago

This is the same reason spammer keep spamming too: it works. The pursuit of profit by means that work regardless of the external costs seems evil.

cryptozeus3• 7 years ago

Agree with most of the points but I mean people want to work for google is also due to their tech and innovation. Look at the products that has come out if google !

ProAm2• 7 years ago

Are you being sarcastic? Most projects get abandoned by the developers, or get canceled within 18 months. Search is good, maps is good. Everything else isn't industry leading or is just involuntary data collection (i.e. Android)

emtel• 7 years ago

Do you have any basis in fact for what you're saying? Because this might be the most wrong top comment I've ever seen on HN. I worked at google for most of the 2000s, and no one was ashamed of the company or how it made money. We didn't even regard ads as a necessary evil, because back then, most of the ads were very clearly non-evil. You can argue that we should have been ashamed if you want, but that's a different matter.

And no, it was not hard to convince people to work for google. Everyone wanted to work at google, and everyone understood exactly how google made money. But, everyone also understood why google was exciting. There was no deception necessary.

asdfasgasdgasdg7• 7 years ago

Yep. Still this way today for the most part. You wouldn't guess it by reading the comments on this site, but there are no shortage of folks who would love to come work for Google. And if people internally have objections to the work, ads never enter into it. Perhaps that's because the comment has fundamentally misunderstood what google is.

See, calling it an ad tech company is overly reductionist. Even though it is technically true, it obscures the overall picture, rather than clarifying. It is rhetoric. It would be as if you called it a bit shifting company because the most proximal event to it making money is the shifting of some bits. The statement is actually even more misleading, because a bunch of folks are by default opposed to advertising, so the point of the rhetoric is to minimize all the other stuff and maximize the unpleasant part by obscuring it with this reduction.

Yes, ads are the proximal cause of Google's wealth. But Google is a consumer services company that makes money via the inclusion of ads on some of those services. Most Googlers do not work on nor are concerned with ads. They work on the services I mentioned. The work is to make the services better so they will attract more users. It is by delivering great services that Google attracts users. Incidentally, these users also enable Google's money making machine by clicking on or viewing ads sometimes.

(To be clear, I am not claiming that the services are universally great, only that that is the aspiration and the end upon which most Googlers' work is focused.)

dclusin2• 7 years ago

If nobody was truly ashamed then it's because they probably weren't paying attention to the shadier sides of your business. One example was back in the 2000's, google knowingly profited from online pharmacies that sold controlled substances to US citizens illegally[1].

1 - https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/google-forfeits-500-million-g...

blondin• 7 years ago

no one _was ashamed_ of the company or how it made money.

do you think the sentiment has changed since?

last time when the occulus VR targeted ads news broke, some prominent people defended them on twitter. that took me by surprise.

could it be that people from inside (or who have been inside) don't see things the way others do? kinda like a stockholm syndrome thing?

just curious...

viburnum• 7 years ago

Google’s founders easily could have run the company to be purely a force for good. They have a huge amount of equity and the company generated huge profits before it went all-in on maximizing ad revenue. They could have used share buybacks to buy out their other investors. They could have been billionaires who created something good but they choose to be $50 billionaires instead. Now the only option left is to regulate Google the way natural monopolies used to be regulated.

greentrust• 7 years ago

fundamentally this was an ad-tech company

Sure ads are their only real revenue source but the vast majority of engineers there are not working on ad-tech, many of them are working on transformative projects like maps, translate, android, chrome, that drastically improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Your view is quite cynical and conveniently ignores the leverage and impact that an engineer can have there.

goatinaboat3• 7 years ago

many of them are working on transformative projects like maps, translate, android, chrome

All of those exist purely to expand opportunities to show more ads.

lisper3• 7 years ago

they were deeply ashamed of how they made money

I was the lead engineer on the first release of AdWords, so I can tell you from firsthand experience that you are absolutely, 100% wrong about this. To the contrary, in the early days we believed (correctly) that we were improving the situation by providing text-based ads that were related to the search the user was conducting rather than the indiscriminate banner ads that were the standard in the industry at the time. We were proud of what we were doing, and it had absolutely nothing to do with being "Googley".

zapita4• 7 years ago

Out of curiosity, are you proud of Google’s ad business today and its impact on the world? If you could go back knowing what you know now, would you do it again?

patrec• 7 years ago

Not so. At the beginning it looked like Google would basically magically fix advertisement. Instead of being bombarded with gaudy invasive flimflam trying to sell you stuff based on buildling up some asinine aspirational self-image almost entirely unrelated to the advertised product, you actually got low key, clearly demarcated, non-intrusive text-only ads, relevant to what your were looking for at the moment. And the ads funded genuinely cool and transformative tech.

A lot of technical people would have been qute happy to work for that. It just turned out that the social good of making the tumor of advertisement benign and even possibly a net positive didn't pay as well as slowly evolving a strain of previously unheard of malignancy.

oppositelock2• 7 years ago

I worked at google for 8 years, 2005-2013, and I disagree with your statement. Nobody was ashamed of how we made money, and the ads organization was a great place to be an engineer and get promoted. Early on, 20% time most certainly did exist, but you had to push for it, and among some managers, it was impossible to get it during normal work hours, but in the broader organization, it existed. People genuinely did try to do the right thing. Google was not my first job, I had already been working for quite a few years, so I had many earlier silicon valley companies to compare it against, and it genuinely was a fun, interesting and well meaning place to work. That started to shift over time and turn into a bureaucratic corporation where people were no longer rewarded on merit, and so I left, that was six years ago.

During the years that I enjoyed there, we got to work on some truly difficult problems in terms of scale, built a whole lot of cool stuff that's helpful to the world, but doesn't make money (Maps, for example). These cool projects happened because advertising brought in so much money that we could waste some on providing something of value without clear financial return, and Sergey, Larry, and Eric were behind that.

So, Google was not dishonest from the start, it was idealistic, and then at some point, the idealism crashed into reality, and that's when things started to change. The initial attempt at a unique culture was an honest attempt.

riversflow4• 7 years ago

This is the same sort of bias I witness in Facebook.

Built a whole lot of cool stuff that’s helpful to the world, but doesn’t make money(Maps, for example).

Through your lens, perhaps, from my perspective you made a series of sophisticated data harvesting apparatuses for one of the biggest advertisers on the planet. You conflate the work Google has done with something like OSM.

The fact that open source Android is corrupted by Google Play services belies the idea that they work for anyone but themselves, one of the largest businesses in the world.

Despegar2• 7 years ago

So, Google was not dishonest from the start, it was idealistic, and then at some point, the idealism crashed into reality, and that's when things started to change. The initial attempt at a unique culture was an honest attempt.

I certainly wasn't saying that rank-and-file Google employees were dishonest. Larry and Sergey understood that advertising could be deeply corrupting, and they said it themselves in their paper [1]:

8 Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives

Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.

Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries [Marchiori 97]. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who "deserves" to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed. This business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a viable search engine. But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.

The "Googley" culture was an artifice built to paper over the central conflict of Google. I'm sure that the early years were great and that everyone genuinely believed they could avoid being corrupted by it. But a leopard can't change its spots and in the end that's what happened.

[1] http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

j-c-hewitt• 7 years ago

Google is a company that sells multi hundred dollar clicks to lawyers, locksmiths, insurance companies, and brokerages. Plus a lot of cheap ads to everyone else. It is not very romantic to be writing software to connect people to the DUI lawyer they are looking for with incrementally improving efficiency.

It's not nuts to create a romantic narrative to motivate your employees, but it is more than a little dishonest to try to convince investors that they are buying into something that's heading into a better direction than the digital edition of the Yellow Pages. However, you can't say that investors have not wanted something to believe in -- and Alphabet was more than happy to fulfill the desire for tech stock fairy tales. Despite this the fundamentals of selling search ad insurance leads to insurance salesmen is a great business from a numbers perspective.

I think it's sort of an open question about whether or not it makes sense to burnish corporate brands with saving the world fairy tales, but the smartest people in America have decided that fairy tales are what works, so that is what they put people to work in burnishing and promoting. Obviously it has worked pretty well for a lot of companies, especially considering that they are competing with companies that sell candy, toothpaste, and fizzy corn syrup fluid for investor attention and acclaim. Even McDonalds is now saving the world with burgers or something, and that's because these kinds of spiritual fables have been so successful in helping companies to stand out from the pack.

Your Yahoo comparison is a good one. Google at the end of the day is a marginally improved iteration of Yahoo with a slightly broader product offering and better core services. However, Google's brand fluff makes it appear to be something so much different and more grand than Yahoo 2.

For what it's worth I think the old Google statement that they were here to organize the world's information and to make it more accessible and organized is a big enough goal as it is: they don't also have to be a rocketry and car navigation system company.

tubbs• 7 years ago

Archive: http://archive.is/iO1ls

Causality1• 7 years ago

If Google wants to kill their special culture that's up to them, but I hope they know that without the "Google magic", a lot of their failings as a company become a lot less forgivable. For example, you can't be as fucking god-awful at customer service as Google without something to make up for it.

zbentley• 7 years ago

you can't be as fucking god-awful at customer service as Google without something to make up for it

Like near-total dominance in multiple market spaces?

They don't need great customer service or continued innovation to remain absolutely ubiquitous for decades to come.

beamatronic• 7 years ago

Who’s in place to be the next Google? Amazon has built all the foundational pieces for scalable cloud services. Could we see Amazon Mail? Amazon Calendar? Etc....

mikelward• 7 years ago

“It was that way since the early days of Google, and it’s that way now,” [Walker] wrote.

Then the article ends with

“Maybe Alphabet is just a different company than it used to be,” [Humu] wrote in an email to Bloomberg News. “But not everyone’s gotten the memo.”

zer0faith• 7 years ago

Kent Walker voiced his opinion about not sharing all information because folks did not agree

"programmers created a tool that allowed employees to choose to alert Walker with an automated email every time they opened any document at all"

I can't help but feel maybe their culture is a little toxic?

khalilravanna2• 7 years ago

I think the chief legal officer sending out a memo to the whole company is a little bit more than “voicing an opinion”. Nevermind when you add in the context of the actual actions taken against employees who were breaking the rules (firing).

As for the toxic thing, it’s 100,000 person company, I personally wouldn’t read into a couple bad apples spamming someone.

That being said, I think it’s hilarious so maybe I’m biased (and toxic).

badfrog2• 7 years ago

That being said, I think it’s hilarious

I think there are many things that would be hilarious and also should get people fired.

Vysero• 7 years ago

"Other employees say they are now afraid to click on certain documents from other teams or departments because they are worried they could later be disciplined for doing so, a fear the company says is unfounded."

“Supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.” ― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

cryptozeus3• 7 years ago

I may get downvoted for this but IMO these days everything is a collapse. Of course the same policies can’t apply when you are 100,000 large vs when you were smaller. Look at this complaint by one employee on transparent policy

“In an internal email describing the firings, Google accused one employee of tracking a colleague’s calendar without permission, gathering information about both personal and professional appointments in a way that made the targeted employee feel uncomfortable”

I mean its ok to change with time, if you get stuck in the past then you are not seeing the real problem that google is too big to be 100% open for internal employees. This is when you see out of context protests and mob attacks.

einpoklum• 7 years ago

The "radical transparency" is probably just propaganda (on management's part) and self-delusion (on some employee's part).

It says:

When google was founded... Nearly all of its internal documents were widely available for workers to review. A programmer working on Google search could ... dip into the software scaffolding of Google Maps

Oh, how transparent! You get look at more source code. Such a deep dark company secret! Or you could track someone's calendar. Amazing! ... not.

"Nearly all internal documents" likely means "...except the import stuff": Finances, investor relations, interactions with the US government, senior management internal discussions. Did employees have access to any of that? I doubt it.

carapace6• 7 years ago

I know it's kind of a tangent, but I want to point out that Google is serviced by an army of workers that wear special uniforms, are not included in the major perks, are trained not to fraternize with the rest of Google's employees, and are of a markedly different racial and cultural makeup than the rest of Google's employees.

Also, remember that time that Google, Apple, and "dozens" of other companies colluded to prevent each other from hiring talent from each other, in large part to defraud their own employees of opportunities (to the tune of an estimated $8,000,000,000)?

So it seems like there's a small group at the top that does whatever the hell they think they can get away with, then a large group in the middle that is more-or-less exploited by the top group, and another large group on the bottom that are more-or-less totally fungible and who are almost completely ignored by design by the other two groups.

Most of the people in the "middle" group are either clueless about their exploitation, or complacent, and what we're seeing in TFA is a fraction of the former becoming the latter. I suppose a tiny fraction of people might actually quit Google over this.

(I worked at the Google-plex for a couple of years as a TVA, a kind of half-life role in between a normal Googler and a service staff. It was a very weird experience, and afterward it felt like I had been kidnapped by aliens and returned to Earth.)

LarryDarrell• 7 years ago

I don't think Anand Giridharadas will be invited back at Google Talks.

https://youtu.be/d_zt3kGW1NM?t=2900

carapace6• 7 years ago

I didn't watch the whole thing (yet) but the part that you link to is spot on: If the Google top brass or the rank-and-file wanted to give the service workers a better break they could do it overnight, it just costs money, and not enough people care or notice.

The first comment on the video has some context (if you take it at face value):

Google initially decided, for the first time in its history, to not publish this video to its Talks at Google site here on YouTube after it was recorded. This presentation was given on the second week of September, note the publishing time lag. Giridharadas contacted Google to ask why, and his contact said "I'm not on that team anymore" and was blown off. He then leaked the story to a leading tech journalist, who started calling Google for comment because she was working on a story about why, for the first time ever, a Talks at Google video was not published. They published it the same week

caleb-allen• 7 years ago

Thanks for the link, really enjoyed those questions. I'll watch the rest later.

weiming• 7 years ago

is serviced by an army of workers that wear special uniforms, are not included in the major perks

Isn't this about government (IRS et al.) categorization of contractors vs. employees and not about GOOG specifically? IIRC there is a specific reason contractors cannot receive employee perks or even participate in team morale events.

ggm3• 7 years ago

Do you not think it says something, nobody much talks about google having worker-ants in uniforms? The IRS issue is why they have to wear a yellow star, yes. But the question is not that they wear the star its what the fuck is the culture which normalizes this

therealcamino• 7 years ago

This is backwards: companies began outsourcing support functions because it was cheaper, and the reason was precisely because the contracting companies would provide worse pay and benefits than the large company provided to its own employees. The worse benefits are the point, not a side effect. Nobody's forcing companies to outsource, especially not the IRS.

soup10• 7 years ago

Another way to looking at it is the upper-middleclass at google is riding a large wave of ad-tech/search money and have comfortable jobs for relatively little grind and risk compared to other companies.

anarchodev• 7 years ago

I really appreciate you connecting the struggle of the tech workers in google to those in other industries which don't enjoy a lot of the same freedoms. Understanding of this is severely lacking in tech, and once we develop it I think solidarity will build exponentially. It's high time google workers unionized, and that includes ALL workers -- not just those in the engineering org.

lanius• 7 years ago

What is a TVA?

carapace6• 7 years ago

You know, I never actually knew what it stood for.

It's the same dodge as the service contractors, but for programmers: You're technically an employee of a separate company that then contracts your labor back to Google. It's a big open secret loophole to pay less in taxes and in overall benefits.

E.g. you work in the same buildings, ride the same buses, and eat the same food, but enough of a "fire-wall" is maintained between you and the "real" Googlers to satisfy the government that you're not legally an employee of Google.

The project I worked on was so inefficient that I suspect that Google is simply big enough and rich enough to sequester talented programmers just to keep them from working for competitors.

drdeadringer• 7 years ago

I wonder if "TVC" was intended instead, which stands for "Temp, Vendor, Contractor".

If "TVA" is what was intended, I have no idea. This is the first time ever I've heard "TVA", let alone in relation to Google's unofficial workforce.

d1zzy3• 7 years ago

Full time employees are around 100k with TVAs at around 120k. Yes, TVAs are more numerous and they enjoy different perks/benefits/etc (they aren't Google employees technically so that's not surprising) but we aren't talking about a 10% "elite" vs 90% "plebs" here.

carapace6• 7 years ago

To be clear, I left out the TVAs in the above breakdown (or lumped them in depending on your POV).

So: ~0.1% elites, N% Googlers-of-the-line, M% TVAs, P% service workers, where N+M+P ~= 99.9%

LIV22• 7 years ago

I guess even in California rich privileged people like class seperation

perl4ever6• 7 years ago

How does this differ from other organizations? Places I've worked or interviewed at outsource things like cleaning offices or running the mailroom. Are you saying that Google has their own employees do that stuff, but they are a separate class/caste?

Does Google also have significant numbers of temps from staffing agencies, or other contractors?

carapace6• 7 years ago

That's (part of) my point: Google isn't some egalitarian techno-utopia.

You could, say, have a policy that the lowest-paid employees have a floor of 1/7th the pay of the highest-paid employees, like the janitor makes $100k and the CEO makes $700K, or whatever.

C1sc0cat• 7 years ago

This is just another tail function department wanting to enhance its role, very common for HR, Building services etc.

golemotron• 7 years ago

Google's mistake was to brand themselves as a moral cause. When you do that, you send out a beacon to some of the most righteous smart people on earth and they become employees. Righteousness and smarts is a toxic self-undoing mix.

malvosenior• 7 years ago

If you add making a bunch of money on top of that you have the ultimate combination of toxicity. Arrogance, ignorance, hubris, echo chambers, thinking you're an expert on matters outside of your field, random and inappropriate activism... Google brought all of it on themselves.

Google is now a blight on our industry (in terms of invasive technology and cargo cult copying of their culture and policies). It's so huge and entrenched that it will take a Microsoft amount of time for its relevance to die but thankfully it's going in that direction.

jelliclesfarm• 7 years ago

Interesting. The first thought that popped into my head as I read the article was ..this is the corporate version of the evolution of the rise and fall of communism.

Prediction: Google will be in 20 years what Soviet Russia became at around 2000s.

They will go from utopia to totalitarian to insignificant player in a few decades.

Why this happens puzzles me..I grew up when Soviet Russia/USSR was still alive and then watched it go away. And see where it is at now. I don’t understand it. It’s like a mystery. But the pattern to dissolution is inevitable.

scottlocklin• 7 years ago

I'd like to think they're just engaging in internal sabotage as a form of activism, like the OSS field manual for disrupting organizations suggests:

https://corporate-rebels.com/cia-field-manual/

Seems to have this effect anyway, and I support the google workers trying to destroy this evil company.

mcrad3• 7 years ago

I'm always surprised about workers attitudes on "transparency". Google created a monster, not only internally, but among troves of idealists in corporate America/SV who distrust structure and strategy in the business world, in lieu of free-for-all style of management. To the googlers who whined about Walker's memo: you are a total disgrace to the business of engineering.

slumpt_3• 7 years ago

Do you season the boot before you lick it?

mcrad3• 7 years ago

Ha! Get back in your bubble you sellout

neonate2• 7 years ago

https://outline.com/etcKaN

tqi• 7 years ago

I wonder why these types of gossipy internal company strife articles are never written about big news orgs. For example, I'd love to know how 2k+ reporters who work at Bloomberg feel about their recent editorial decisions re: Mike Bloomberg's campaign. Is it that these orgs are so ideologically homogenous that everyone mostly agrees?

neonate2• 7 years ago

More likely it's that they don't cover themselves, or each other, with nearly the same scrutiny.

currymj• 7 years ago

if you go look at the twitter accounts of the journalists you can see all the gossip in real time. it seems like a lot of people are very unhappy about the Bloomberg reporting decisions.

(there are occasionally actual articles written about internal news industry drama but they're absolutely insufferable. you don't want more of them.)

kevingadd• 7 years ago

It's kinda hard to justify running a story about internal strife at another newspaper if you know the odds are good that you're going to get laid off in the next 2 years and potentially look for an opening at that newspaper. The job market for journalists is nasty lately.

tlear• 7 years ago

So let me get this straight these busybodies wrote some code to spam companies lawyer with notifications.. and they did not get all fired on the spot?

GauntletWizard• 7 years ago

So long as people are leaking Google's "Internal Culture" like a sieve, can someone upload the xtranormal "Borgmon Readability" video somewhere? Even though I'm a huge fan/proponent of Prometheus... I feel like that video is a necessary warning to those going in.

aoki• 7 years ago

you should try offering three peer bonuses

RickJWagner• 7 years ago

Not surprising. Corporate entities will tolerate employee 'activism' so long as it doesn't interfere with day-to-day business. Once that line is crossed, the business is going to start providing guidelines that focus attention where it needs to be.

This is how it should be. Activism is fine and belongs in personal lives and organizations dedicated to the cause. It does not belong in companies with a diverse workforce.

kjgkjhfkjf• 7 years ago

Perhaps Google is less transparent than it once was, but once again it seems like people are lamenting the passing of a Google culture that never really existed. Parts of Google's monorepo were restricted to specific owning teams over a decade ago, and sending email to an executive would get you a talking-to from your manager if they didn't like the tone of it.

fg6hr2• 7 years ago

Wow, 5 posts attacking Google in the HN top right before Christmas. That can't be a coincidence. Someone with money clearly has personal issues with Google, but I don't see what this is to do with Christmas. P.S. I'm not defending Google as it's indeed done some questionable things, but 5 posts at the same time is really rare event.

Google Culture War Escalates as Era of Transparency Wanes

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