Google employees are free to speak up, except on antitrust

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/13/technology/google-employees-antitrust.html

by bigpumpkin • 6 years ago

461 333 6 years ago

cm2187• 6 years ago

...and diversity programs

vkou2• 6 years ago

Do you think it's acceptable for someone to circulate a manifesto that argues that conservatives are unlikely to make good engineers, because they are more authoritarian, and authoritarians are less creative, and are less likely to challenge the status quo? And propose some policy changes that the company should take in its outreach to, and hiring of conservatives?

Even if it comes with citations to out-of-context, misunderstood, or under-reproduced political psychology studies (In addition to a complete misunderstanding of the criteria on which your own job is evaluated on)?

I'll tell you what would happen if someone did that - the right wing media would have a field day with blasting both the author of such a manifesto, and the company that employs them.

I understand that this is an uncomfortable topic for a lot of people, because it exposes a rather obvious double standard.

zozbot234• 6 years ago

Do you think it's acceptable for someone to circulate a manifesto that argues that conservatives are unlikely to make good engineers, because they are more authoritarian, and authoritarians are less creative, and are less likely to challenge the status quo?

The actual argument is that conservatives have lower Openness to Experience on average and they're thus less likely to be interested in working at a company like Google, that places such a high value on being open and stuff - this doesn't mean that Google is inherently ideological or biased against conservatives! It's an argument about people's individual interests and preferences, not skills or ability.

MattGaiser2• 6 years ago

The question is more whether Google would fire someone for circulating such a thing. Outsiders will always howl about something, but the interesting question to me is what Google would do.

golergka• 6 years ago

Yes, it is. It's obvious bullshit, but I would always defend people's right to circulate any bullshit they want.

ben509• 6 years ago

Do you think it's acceptable for someone to circulate a manifesto that argues that conservatives are unlikely to make good engineers, because they are more authoritarian, and authoritarians are less creative, and are less likely to challenge the status quo?

Lefty shrinks churn out studies finding that conservatives are authoritarian, wet the bed, kick puppies, you name it, we've heard it all. So I doubt your premise since I've seen the reaction to this stuff being published, and it's usually more bemusement than anything else.

But nothing Damore wrote was personally insulting to women like calling them "authoritarian." His larger point was that women have, in aggregate, different interests than men.

Say, for the sake of argument, that there are some distinctly masculine priorities and distinctly feminine priorities. If so, our base assumption should be that they are equally morally valid.

And there's plenty of evidence, e.g. college graduation rates, that professional women are somewhat more capable than men at identifying their interests and acting on them.

That means that if men and women pursue occupations to different degrees, our default assumption should be that they're intelligent and capable and making decisions in their best interest, not that they're victims.

That could all be true and it's still possible that engineering is an unfriendly climate for women. The hard fact is there used to be a lot more women programming and it declined in the '80s.

But to whatever extent there's a real feminine preference, we ought to respect women expressing such a preference and not try to save them from it.

And propose some policy changes that the company should take in its outreach to, and hiring of conservatives?

If, as Damore was, the manifesto is entirely supportive of the effort, it's hard to see why it would be unacceptable. If the company has set out to do a thing, and someone wants to help them do it, you can't fire them for that.

Even if it comes with citations to out-of-context, misunderstood, or under-reproduced political psychology studies

No, you can't fire them for it even if they do poor work. Especially when, like Google, you still have trouble hiring as many women in engineering as you want.

Damore's interpretation of the data may have been amateurish, but he's presenting some analysis that could be improved upon to figure out a better strategy to achieve those goals.

You're claiming a double standard, but if Google was serious about employing more women, they'd act on these ideas, even if the action was to dig into them and say "nope, this stuff is wrong." Not fire the guy.

The picture the firing of Damore paints is that Google was more interested in showing that they cared about hiring more women than actually succeeding in hiring more women.

I'll tell you what would happen if someone did that - the right wing media would have a field day with blasting both the author of such a manifesto, and the company that employs them.

The right-wing media is as garbage as any other media.

Even if the press were good, you've a cacophony of opinions, so you can't make them all happy. You're better off sticking up for your employees.

Viliam12342• 6 years ago

Do you think it's acceptable for someone to circulate a manifesto that argues that conservatives are unlikely to make good engineers, because they are more authoritarian, and authoritarians are less creative, and are less likely to challenge the status quo?

In academia, you could publicly collect signatures under such manifesto, and people would be afraid not to sign.

In Google... dunno, someone has to try. Unless it already happened.

InitialLastName• 6 years ago

FWIW, my employer probably also wouldn't like me commenting on imminent legal issues that risked affecting their bottom line, but they don't mind me talking about much else politically speaking.

This is a twist on the famous Upton Sinclair quote. Google has everything to gain by extending their "live at work" strategy to political conversations, until those political conversations affect them.

cletus• 6 years ago

It's commonplace for employment contracts to restrict your ability to represent the company to the press. Depending on the seniority and visibility of your position this may extend towards so-called "ethics clauses" where you will be in breach of your contract if you disparage the company or otherwise associate the company they don't want to be associated with.

Just look at Amy Cooper [1].

But it goes further than that. It's generally a good idea not to do anything that might lead to a heading like:

"Employee of X says [bad thing about X]"

When I worked at Google, I made it a point never to comment publicly on any issue or thread where I could possibly be quoted. That's just commonsense and (IMHO) completely reasonable for your employer. I'd suggest that if anyone chafes against such restrictions that they should probably seek other employment.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/26/woman-fired-by-franklin-temp...

commandlinefan• 6 years ago

Based on past incidents, I'd venture that Google employees are free to speak up only as long as they speak up with the "right" opinions on a vast range of topics. "You can say whatever you want, as long as it's this".

rogerkirkness• 6 years ago

Overton window.

jancsika• 6 years ago

Not only that, but also-- regulatory capture.

If Google's competitors didn't have a Justice Department that blatantly serves their own interests of investigating Google, then Google would have no incentive to keep their employees from discussing anti-trust law.

Government cronyism is why corporations can't simply let us have nice things.

jakevoytko2• 6 years ago

This is true, but Google also had very specific guidance around this topic when I worked there (10-5 years ago). We received specific training about this. The core message was approximately, "You don't understand the legal trouble that you're going to get yourself into by talking about markets, competitors, competition, etc. Innocent words or phrases may have very specific legal definitions or implications that may be surprising to you. Speculating about these things will bring you trouble, the amount of which which will also surprise you. At Google, we don't talk about ourselves in relationship to our competitors, we only talk about ourselves in relationship to our customers"

adt2bt• 6 years ago

As someone who just recently joined Google and took a training on this, I can confirm this is still pretty much the gist of the messaging.

brandmeyer2• 6 years ago

To clarify: this covers both internal and external communication.

This kind of training is not unique to Google, either. I got very similarly themed training at Eaton (a manufacturing conglomerate). In both cases, I was left with the impression that the employer had been burned in the past due to otherwise-irrelevant employee communication in some lawsuit.

bigbubba• 6 years ago

Is it really true that an employee speculating about the monopolistic nature of their employer might get themselves into legal hot water? If Google got taken down by one of their developers saying 'our employer kind of seems anticompetitive to me...' in an email, would that developer really have anything to fear from the government? It seems like the corporation is protecting itself with this sort of advice.

tytso7• 6 years ago

This is boilerplate which you'd also find at other companys as well. In fact, the language was almost identical to what I saw at IBM. General counsels at big companies share "best practices" at their own conferences dedicated for corporate laywers. I've been a guest speaker talking about open source issues at legal conferences where they were talking about best practices for OSS compliance; it's not an accident that many company's OSS policies are very similar.

So policies like "require annual, mandatory training for anti-harassment training", and "how to communicate with care", etc., are going to be remarkably similar across companies.

hn_throwaway_992• 6 years ago

While I don't necessarily have as pessimistic a take on this, I do agree this article is evidence as to why I am so often against social activism by companies. Companies, all companies, the "good" and the "evil", will only ever engage in activism that is not a threat to their bottom line. Given that constraint, it means the activism is incredibly cheap in my opinion.

I mean, look at all the recent BLM support from large corporations. I mean, on one hand I'm glad to see them doing this. On the other, I know the only reason they are doing this is because it's pretty easy for them - it's largely already supported by their employees and the bulk of their customers see it positively. I can guarantee if it could negatively affect their long term prospects they wouldn't have done it.

For example, I remember quite clearly that in the late 80s and early 90s you'd hear nary a peep of support on LGBT issues from corporations, and even some of the more progressive companies had to do it with coded language (language gays understood but straight people were oblivious to). It was only when gay rights were already largely supported did corporations jump on the bandwagon.

Again, I'm not saying this is totally a bad thing, but I do think it is a cheap, easy thing. And if you know a company is never willing to do the hard thing, why put any weight into its opinions on these topics in the first place?

nostrademons2• 6 years ago

Doesn't this apply to most people as well? Most people are happy to vote for rent control - unless they're a landlord. Most parents will vote for higher property taxes if it means better schools, but most childless homeowners will not. Most urbanites will vote for gun control, most hunters will not. People who walk or take public transportation to work will vote for higher gas taxes, people with 2 hour commutes will not. Heck, isn't one of the claims leveled against liberal white suburbanites that they will happily fight for minority rights in the abstract, but then fight for zoning codes that in practice keep minorities (other than high-earning Asians) out of their neighborhoods anyway?

Social movements that succeed tend to take this into account, and frame things in ways that are not zero-sum. I lose nothing by letting gays marry; my heterosexual marriage is still just as legitimate. I lose nothing by allowing abortions - as a male, I'm not going to get one anyway. I lose nothing when YC seeks out qualified minority & female applicants; I have plenty of advantages of my own, I don't need that extra attention. I lose nothing when Black Lives Matter - my life still matters too, we just need to fix the institutional systems that let a black person get shot dead with no repercussions to the killer. (Personally, I think the left has made some very large tactical errors recently by ignoring this principle - fights over things like affirmative action, political correctness, and white privilege are all because the debate has been framed as "You must lose something in order for life to be fair", which isn't a great way to persuade people.)

rebeccaskinner• 6 years ago

We can't, in general, rely on companies to be on the forefront of activist work or to push the boundaries, for exactly the reasons that you outlined, but I think the role they play in rounding up the stragglers is also very important.

To pick a specific example, you're completely correct when you call out that a lot of companies only started visibly supporting LGBT causes quite recently, when the social momentum was obviously moving that direction, and there was a direct profit incentive to pridewashing things. I know many members of the LGBT community who are against corporate involvement in pride events for precisely that reason, and I know many LGBT people who find it very disingenuous that companies might be profiting off rainbow marketing while not (or only recently) having non-discrimination policies, or offering equal coverage for health insurance to their LGBT employees.

On the other hand, I would contend that the pride washing and corporate push into LGBT rights is a large reason why they haven't backslid as quickly during the last 4 years as they might otherwise have done, and why there's still broad public support for marriage equality even in the face of a possible reversal of Obgerfell after the inevitable SCOTUS appointment. The activists did the work, but a few years of corporate pridewashing, seeing rainbows on every t-shirt, cereal box, soda can, and brand of tennis shoe normalized things for a group of people who wouldn't have ever listened to the activists who are pushing on things. There's real social value in signaling "Supporting LGBT rights is the cheap, easy thing that we're obviously going to do because everyone agrees it's the right thing". It won't change the mind of the active bigot, but there are a whole lot of people who will just go along with the majority opinion on social issues, and corporate signaling is perhaps the defacto way to signal the majority opinion on social issues.

tehjoker• 6 years ago

Social activism by employees is usually progressive. Social activism by management is nearly always reactionary.

julienb_sea• 6 years ago

Corporate activism is cheap, but it's also fairly required at this point. Non-activism on certain subjects would be viewed in a highly negative sense which can impact recruitment and sales. There is really no alternative to corporations showing public support for certain issues.

I suppose this does devalue the activism, but I'm not really sure activism is the point. It's more about solidarity with the change, and cementing its place in "normal" society.

vbmallon• 6 years ago

Yes, Google employees can post rants on Twitter as long as it is the party line.

Some of those rants remind me of "spontaneous" pro party demonstrations of children wearing red neck scarves in North Korea.

shadowgovt30• 6 years ago

It's a little more complicated than that, but to a first approximation, you're basically correct.

Worth noting, of course, is most Google employees actually believe in the party line. Like, it's not an act... They are at will employees working for an employer they believe in. Google doesn't tend to retain long employees who stop believing in the mission or the execution of the mission (because having Google on your resume opens a door to them basically taking any other job).

zobzu• 6 years ago

"You're free to speak up and they're free to fire you"

webmaven9• 6 years ago

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” — Anatole France

sillysaurusx• 6 years ago

(This is true everywhere, not just Google, though. I’m not sure there’s any such thing as an employee who doesn’t get in hot water for bringing unwanted attention to the business.)

newacct583• 6 years ago

past incidents [...] vast range of topics

You mean gender representation. There was one incident.

shadowgovt30• 6 years ago

Oh, definitely not. There have been many. It's a huge company, so it's done plenty of good and bad things. The one you're talking about is one of the more famous ones.

awerawerawrjhui7• 6 years ago

James Damore would agree with this analysis.

darkwizard42• 6 years ago

No, I think this is just sound legal advice. You, as a line level employee and not in the legal department, should NOT discuss any matters that have legal scrutiny. There is no "party line" outside of the legal line here.

Traster• 6 years ago

Once again, it seems the issue is less about Google (or any company) restricting you having a personal opinion about issues that affect the bottom line at work, but instead is about the disingenuous pretense that they don't restrict you.

Don't be evil. Unless it affects our bottom line. Think Different. Unless you're a monopoly, then think the same as every other monopoly has. Move fast and break things. Their things, not our things.

Cut the shit "Make us money" is the corporate manifesto.

xiphias2• 6 years ago

This just means that companies are predictable. Google is at least thinking long term and takes on huge projects, unlike most non-tech companies. I love that they finally launched Waymo even if the scale is small right now.

Tesla wants to make money just like Enron, but their strategies are quite different.

aunty_helen• 6 years ago

Don't forget the startups: We'll do the right thing, unless times are tough

Shish2k2• 6 years ago

I worked for a startup that did the right thing even when times were tough… alas, that’s not good for business, and so the company no longer exists :(

colinmhayes• 6 years ago

Obviously make us money is their motto. The only reason public companies exist is to make money. They can still have marketing campaigns.

yunruse• 6 years ago

This is why it's important to consider realpolitik when thinking of company ethics or morals.

Companies have people who will want profit before all else, and they will have people who truly want to value certain user values. The interaction between people is far too difficult to model as a consumer, so it's better to consider the business model, or, more weakly, how a decision affects social capital, thereby affecting this model. This helps create "trustless" scenarios, in which the "morals v profit" quandary is meaningless because both align to some degree.

For example, take Apple and Google. Google profits heavily from adverts, so it is not only sensible but natural that Apple, as a strong rival in the OS field who have no business incentive to do so, should lean heavily into this, exploiting and actualising this gap in business-model-incentive. Likewise, Apple profits heavily from phone hardware: it is sensible and natural that Google, who somewhat rival Apple in this field, should desire somewhat to try and present their phones as being less overpriced.

This is far harder glean information from, of course, and PR can be as genuine as it can be deceiving. But it's a useful tool in a savvy consumer's arsenal, methinks, especially for large decisions or with companies whose practises and profits are well-known (as opposed to, say, a brand of toothpaste).

ericzawo• 6 years ago

Bravo and 100% true.

m0zg3• 6 years ago

Google employees are free to speak up

Try to show up for work in a MAGA hat, and see if you're still employed by lunch. Google employees are, at best, free to support the dogma approved by Google.

dpratt• 6 years ago

I can’t say definitively why you’re being downvoted, but it might be consistent with the very point you’re trying to make.

m0zg3• 6 years ago

It'll get flagged, too, thereby reinforcing the point even more.

cmdshiftf4• 6 years ago

I can’t say definitively why you’re being downvoted

I'll hazard a guess: This site is full of former and current Google lackeys.

oska2• 6 years ago

I'd shun anyone who shows up to work wearing some political campaign message, regardless of their political affiliation.

m0zg3• 6 years ago

Haven't you heard? Silence is violence now. Not explicitly supporting certain candidates and causes can get you into trouble also.

teddyh• 6 years ago

I’d bet it would have the same effect simply having a photo of them wearing such attire (outside of work, in an appropriate setting) published on social media. Google is, from what I gather, extremely polarized:

https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/09/12/leaked-video-googl...

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/16/google-content-moderation-in...

(Not to mention the whole James Damore thing.)

dheera• 6 years ago

Ultimately, if the Justice Department or other regulators asked for those documents, Google would have the option of declaring them secret communication.

What if they just banned English from all company documents and let people use a smattering of all other languages the employees know? With some documents in Chinese, some in Swahili, some in Spanish, and the most confidential documents in obscure tribal languages, it would be fun to watch the Justice department try to piece things together.

For employee productivity they could just hand out AR goggles that translate everything in sight automatically to a language the employee knows -- they're Google, after all.

Or simply invent a company-specific language that uses the same words as English but with some words switched up, e.g. Customer -> Clown, Stock market -> Circus, Earnings -> Feast, etc.

stale2002• 6 years ago

Courts don't look kindly on obviously bad faith legal hacks.

Using such hacks would likely be interpreted as evidence that the documents should be interpreted more maliciously than normal.

The legal system is not computer code. Instead it is interpreted by judges and people.

Judges who will simply rule against you/fine you/send you to jail if you act in obviously bad faith.

AaronFriel• 6 years ago

I'm not sure if it's accurate that they would "simply..." but I think the consistent thing I've heard from my lawyer friends is that judges do not like to be deceived or misrepresented to or have their time wasted. You should not try to be "clever" with them, even if you think you've been clever with the law.

This approach combines all three of those things, it involves deceiving a judge or jury with language games, misrepresenting that these words or languages have hidden meanings, and wasting their time in deciphering what was really communicated.

This would be akin to everyone at Google typing in qwerty but using a keyboard setting that interprets the keypresses as dvorak, and also having an extension that substitutes characters viewed from fellow employees back to qwerty. How the message is stored or exchanged doesn't change the material fact that one employee intended to write "competitor" and another employee read "competitor" and in depositions both would admit to those facts.

xondono2• 6 years ago

For employee productivity they could just hand out AR goggles that translate everything in sight automatically to a language the employee knows

Because if you actually have this to the point needed, you’re far better off selling those out to the world.

mountainb• 6 years ago

They do piece it together in cases in which that is an issue. Translators are cheaper than attorneys by an order of magnitude and they are available in large quantities. This behavior described just consists of dopey attempts to evade discovery that will not work to obstruct federal investigators. All it does it call into question the character of the company, which does annoy the government and the court and will make the company look worse.

umanwizard2• 6 years ago

Courts often need to employ _chains_ of interpreters: for example, one to translate from English to Spanish, one to translate from Spanish to one Mayan language, and one to translate from that Mayan language to a different, more obscure Mayan language spoken by a monolingual defendant.[1]

Chinese and Swahili would give them no trouble at all.

1: Real example from my friend who represented such a person in an immigration hearing.

umanwizard2• 6 years ago

The simplest explanation is that Google execs genuinely believe in good faith that they’re not doing anything illegal, so they wouldn’t think to invent such a scheme.

Shish2k2• 6 years ago

English but with some words switched up, e.g. Customer -> Clown

At most places I’ve worked, “Clown” was already a well-established code-word among the engineers - it’s code for “Engineer” :P

burtonator• 6 years ago

Anti-trust is a hack.. We need proper taxation. Large corporations like Google have TONS of advantages that small companies have so it's easier for big companies to get bigger.

Part of this is taxes... if we just taxed them properly they wouldn't grow large and wouldn't need to be broken up.

xondono2• 6 years ago

Except it simply doesn’t work.

Companies don’t pay taxes, people pay taxes. Companies may be the ones signing the checks to IRS, but they’re not the ones footing the bill.

The only difference is that for big companies it’s worth their while to have lots of accountants working the books, the same way it’s worth it to have lots of engineers fine-tuning the tech.

duncan_bayne3• 6 years ago

That is the most refreshingly honest description of progressive taxation I've seen in a while.

In other words: progressive taxation destroys wealth creation.

webmaven9• 6 years ago

In other words: progressive taxation destroys wealth creation.

No, progressive taxation destroys wealth concentration.

I understand that when the pockets that wealth is concentrated in are your own, it might feel like destruction in a "who-moved-my-cheese" sense, but the fact is, no wealth is destroyed.

Nasrudith• 6 years ago

Isn't that telological in that it assumes that "proper taxes" are in service is to make it easier for smaller companies to compete?

The advantages over small companies aren't neccessarily a problem - in the same way that it isn't a problem that a fabric mill makes hand weaving uncompetitive and that a skilled weaver makes a rank amateur uncompetitive.

pessimizer• 6 years ago

Large corporations can buy legislation. The reason you don't want companies to get too big is because they get undue influence on the system that regulates them.

dessant• 6 years ago

Have you ever seen a current Google employee clearly denounce Google's privacy practices? It seems they are very loud and keen to organize when it comes to issues that closely affect them, but the mass surveillance of the general population usually takes a back seat.

shadowgovt30• 6 years ago

I believe it's a combination of two things:

1) Googlers have some internal insight into how the privacy practices mechanically work; that insight engenders trust.

2) Googlers who don't find a level of trust very quickly get turned off to what the company's mission is and take their high-paying skillset elsewhere.

I mean, "To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Gathering the information is implied right there in the mission statement. People who aren't comfortable with the ramifications of gathering and using lots of information seek employment elsewhere.

randmeerkat6• 6 years ago

Or the person could work to change the mission. Look at what Satya Nadella did for Microsoft. If an employee doesn’t believe in a company’s direction they are totally within their right to try to effect change to shift the direction of the company.

gerash3• 6 years ago

I know researchers who worked at Microsoft and moved to Google and ,at least during their time there, they said accessing even aggregated user data for research purposes meant jumping through a lot more hoops at Google but the outside image is often the opposite for some reason

shadowgovt30• 6 years ago

Byline: "A company operating in the shadow of government regulators has some very particular rules about what workers can say about it."

I don't know where the reporter gets the sense that they're "very particular." It's pretty common sense: "You are not a lawyer; don't speculate on points of law in discoverable media."

slaymaker1907• 6 years ago

It is quite weird how specific they are about not figuring out market share. That definitely does not seem like common sense.

topspin• 6 years ago

Google is an active target of multiple investigations around the world involving their share of market. The concerns ongoing litigation.

skissane• 6 years ago

Years ago, I worked for a public sector organisation that had both staff and contractors. In IT, we had to create accounts for them all. For the staff, HR had a central database with all their details, so we just sucked that database into our identity management system. For contractors, there was no central database of who the contractors actually were, that knowledge was distributed across all the departments that employed contractors. Finance knew how much money was being spent and who the contracting agencies were, but didn't keep records of who the individual contractors were.

I said: "Can't we just get HR to put the contractors in their database too? We can have a different person type or something to make the staff-vs-contractor distinction clear"

I was told: "HR will never agree to that. The unions keep on asking for statistics on how many contractors are employed and how many hours they work. HR can truthfully answer 'we don't know'. If HR puts the contractors in their database, then they will know, and then they might have to tell the unions."

dontbeabill• 6 years ago

A little over a year ago, while working at Google I needed to work from home for personal reasons. HR told me “we have done extensive studies and it doesn’t work so take a personal leave”. Okay. In another issue I suggested to my manager we stop using “blacklist” and “whitelist”. He said no one else had a problem with those names and of this was a personal issue take it up with HR

Google will never change unless forced to. I quit soon after.

shadowgovt30• 6 years ago

It sucks that happened to you. Especially since different arms of the company have actually adopted that blacklist and whitelist should be deprecated ( https://9to5google.com/2020/06/12/google-android-chrome-blac...).

Google's a big beast, and it's not as homogeneous as people from the outside looking in sometimes assume. Hell, I'm pretty sure nobody really knows everything that's going on in it.

rossjudson• 6 years ago

Google is a city, not a village.

nostrademons2• 6 years ago

The "blacklist/whitelist" issue is still circulating and appears to be getting some traction. I just had a manager on my team bring up migrating away from them and our management chain was generally supportive.

I thought it was slightly ridiculous until I saw the suggested alternatives of "allowlist" and "denylist". These really are better terms: they're completely self-describing and match the verbs that you'd usually be using when referencing a denylist. Only downside is they don't have the same number of letters (and so don't line up if you put them one after another in code), but that can be worked around.

anonunivgrad3• 6 years ago

Google employees are not shy about speaking up. In the last few years, they have openly confronted the company about building a censored search engine in China, the handling of sexual harassment claims and its work with the Pentagon on artificial intelligence technology for weapons.

I'd love to see what would happen to a Google employee who tries to argue that sexual harassment laws and policies are stifling normal social interactions, empowering the vicious and overly sensitive to destroy anyone who upsets their particular sensibilities, and creating an overall climate of fear and conformity.

shadowgovt30• 6 years ago

As a non-lawyer, such an employee is probably stepping into relatively dangerous territory committing to discoverable media open speculation that the law under which the company operates is bad.

It's not the company that might hold them accountable; it's the government, if the government's looking for evidence that either individual employees break law regarding hostile work environment or there's a pattern that can be established that the company either encourages or turns a blind eye to creation of hostile work environment.

That sort of speculation is for a law salon or (anonymously) Reddit, not an internal mailing list.

anonunivgrad3• 6 years ago

Criticizing sexual harassment law is not sexual harassment, not even a "hostile work environment" violation.

On the other hand, employees criticizing the company for not sufficiently punishing sexual harassment is exactly the kind of evidence you're talking about.

tqi• 6 years ago

To me this is the key paragraph:

...employees are told to assume that every document and email will end up in the hands of regulators, so they should refrain from using certain words or phrases. “We are not out to ‘crush,’ ‘kill,’ ‘hurt,’ ‘block,’ or do anything else that might be perceived as evil or unfair,” according to a slide used in the training, which The New York Times reviewed.

In my experience, these policies exist largely to avoid negative PR hits.

im3w1l• 6 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised if these kind of policies also change culture and behavior for the better. Or maybe another phrasing makes it clearer: If your boss has a slide deck on crushing the competition that could cause some impressionable folks to bend the rules just a little.

5423542342353• 6 years ago

hands of regulators

I'm pretty sure it is to avoid legal problems. Being deposed on what you might have said in a meeting 8 years ago is a lot different than being deposed about the complete chat history of what you said 8 years ago.

yongjik3• 6 years ago

It's unfortunate that the headline sounds like pure clickbait, because the story contains examples of Google's behavior being more suspicious than the headline suggests.

But, as far as the title is concerned, it seems common sense to prevent employees from talking about potentially very expensive legal issues, when every internal emails and chat logs can be potentially quote-mined by adversaries in future lawsuits.

(Disclaimer: worked at Google before.)

dannyw• 6 years ago

Quote mining isn’t a possibility, it’s an inevitability.

Now here’s something: if corporations like Google are worried about quote mining, what does this mean for your personal search history, and how you may face in a secret court for some “national security” charge in 2027?

asdfasgasdgasdg• 6 years ago

You can enable activity history auto-delete on this page: https://myactivity.google.com/activitycontrols?pli=1&authuse...

yongjik3• 6 years ago

I don't think the threat model is comparable. Quote-mining is a problem for Google because it's an effective strategy between multinational companies wielding a hundred lawyers. On the other hand, if the government decides I'm a terrorist, they will "take care of" me, and they don't need some stinking search log to justify their action.

whack• 6 years ago

I'm no Google apologist, but there's nothing nefarious about this. Why on earth would any company encourage its employees to speculate and talk freely, when doing so would get them into legal/PR trouble. It's the equivalent of a lawyer telling his client to go drinking and have a fun night out with the district attorney.

Rule #1: Never talk to the police without your lawyer being present

Rule #2: Don't create a paper trail that is going to make you look bad when it gets subpoenaed

I personally think that Google needs to be broken up into 10 different companies. And I would love to live in a world where companies face antitrust enforcement because of concrete actions. Unfortunately, we live in a world where a carelessly worded email is going to cause you more legal troubles than actual anti-competitive behavior.

cblconfederate• 6 years ago

i mean this is kind of elementary. You wouldn't go work for a church if you wanted to preach atheism. Its against the immediate interest of the company which you re supposed to be working for, so by definition you are a deadweight employee

macspoofing9• 6 years ago

I'm no Google apologist, but there's nothing nefarious about this. Why on earth would any company encourage its employees to speculate and talk freely, when doing so would get them into legal/PR trouble.

Similarly, why the heck would Google want to have employees discuss controversial topics like politics and religion as well? Workplaces are a neutral environment. You want activism, do it outside of work.

vore3• 6 years ago

I mean, given Google operates both a PAC (https://ballotpedia.org/Google_NetPAC) and spends millions on lobbying (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/09/google-is-techs-top-spender-...), it would be pretty two-faced to claim a neutral environment for workers but also with their executives actively engaging in unequivocal political activism.

skj• 6 years ago

A ban on politics is not neutral.

Talking about politics provides no liability to Google.

mewse• 6 years ago

Workplaces are a neutral environment

Oh, that’s good to know.

So the workplaces are going to stop contributing to political parties and lobbyists, then? I can expect that any day now? That’s good to know, thanks!

Or did you perhaps mean that it’s only the workers that ought to be “neutral” and silent in their politics? Yes, that seems more likely to be what you meant.

heimatau3• 6 years ago

Limiting free speech is never a good idea. Not for any reason.

Google is picking a decent and fair path by allowing anything except anti-trust. Honestly, go to Google where you can be authentic and human about things.

thethethethe2• 6 years ago

Workplaces are a neutral environment. You want activism, do it outside of work.

Workplaces like Google are inherently political because they manage vast amounts of data and their actions have implications on millions—even billions of people. Ignoring this is just complacency.

Why should you only do activism outside of work? If we actually want to change institutions for the better, it helps quite a bit if the people running the institutions are also trying to change thing too. If you don’t want to get involved for whatever reason, that’s fine but I think it’s unfair to say no one should

Disclaimer: I work for GOOG opinions are my own

jlebar6• 6 years ago

Workplaces are a neutral environment. You want activism, do it outside of work.

Equal pay regardless of gender is a political question. In the name of "leaving politics out of work", should we disallow women and nonbinary folks from advocating at work for equal pay?

Equal opportunity for people of color is a political question. In the name of "leaving politics out of work", should we disallow people of color from advocating at work for equal opportunity?

Accommodation for disability is a political question. Paid time off for pregnancy is a political question. What rights we grant to older employees is a political question. Whether LGBTQ folks can be fired for being out is a political question.

The system as I've seen it works pretty great for youngish cishet white men like me. From my perspective, things at my workplace seem quite "neutral". But when I get to know people who are at all different, I find that the workplace is not at all neutral towards them.

omgwtfbyobbq• 6 years ago

Restricting discussion about religion could be a Title VII violation, and restricting discussion about politics could run afoul of voter suppression laws.

shadowgovt30• 6 years ago

To the extent they can, Google assumes its employees are mature adults and can discuss just about anything.

The rare exceptions usually result from collision with legal constraints on that policy, such as conversations that can get the company in legal trouble. Because whether or not Google as a company wants everything open for debate, US employment law makes it fairly clear that there are some things you're not allowed to say---for financial securities reasons, hostile workplace reasons, and lawsuit vulnerability reasons.

JumpCrisscross• 6 years ago

Workplaces are a neutral environment

Political neutrality is a cultural attribute diametrically opposed to "change the world" narratives and "eat your meals at the office" work-life balances. A lot of company cultures are politically neutral. Google isn't.

That said, a company controlling what their employees say in public about matters of strategic commercial importance doesn't strike me as politically pointed. It's a business acting like a business.

littlestymaar2• 6 years ago

Workplaces are a neutral environment.

Political neutrality doesn't exist. “Do not discuss politics” is a defense of the status quo.

Puts• 6 years ago

This is both a scary and weird comment. Everything we do is politics in some form. Even the decision on what toilet paper to use is political and can have both social and environmental impacts.

Mvandenbergh• 6 years ago

Sure but why would they care? They're not going to get into massive existential trouble because employees have strong views on political issues except that on anti-trust, a paper trail of internal people saying "we are too powerful and should be broken up" will cause them a huge issue.

gggfarov• 6 years ago

It's the equivalent of a lawyer telling his client to go drinking and have a fun night out with the district attorney.

No it’s not. The lawyer works for the lawyer’s client, employers don’t work for their employees. Opposite.

75dvtwin• 6 years ago

Why on earth would any company encourage its employees to speculate and talk freely, when doing so would get them into legal/PR trouble.

There is another view, and another analogy.

A monopoly that closes ads accounts without any explanation (pointing to their 'terms of use' is not an explanation)

A monopoly that removes apps without any explanation

A monopoly that swallows competition, their patents to further suffocate market space

Is just evil.

Small businesses hurt, consumers manipulated and fair competition practices are poisoned.

So an analogy would be a private contractor for state prison system, is threatening their employees not to talk in public about their practices. While being investigated for corruption, unfair usage of federal and state empowerment, and unfair treatment of the prisoners.

I think this would be ok as far as legal practice, but hardly something one would applaud to, given the context.

Vaslo• 6 years ago

Completely agree here, and I hate Google. A business is not a democracy.

I have worked for a company acquired by a Private Equity that was universally hated by managers and employees alike. They didn’t even want to hear problems internally in quiet. It still wasn’t appropriate to trash them or talk to the media while you were an employee.

If you don’t like it and you complain to HR or your manager and they don’t or can’t address the problem, you should work somewhere else. If enough people leave, change will happen. Before that, don’t expect much.

webmaven9• 6 years ago

I have worked for a company acquired by a Private Equity that was universally hated by managers and employees alike. They didn’t even want to hear problems internally in quiet. It still wasn’t appropriate to trash them or talk to the media while you were an employee.
If you don’t like it and you complain to HR or your manager and they don’t or can’t address the problem, you should work somewhere else. If enough people leave, change will happen. Before that, don’t expect much.

I'm curious, how did the PE situation you described work out? Did enough people leave to make change happen?

scoot_718• 6 years ago

Sure, but I feel like any judge will treat this the same as employees talking about anti-trust. This alone is evidence.

learnstats2• 6 years ago

"Don't create a paper trail" shouldn't be a thing you demand of employees if you have "Don't be evil" as a motto.

They appear to be mutually incompatible.

tytso7• 6 years ago

I don't see what the point of the article might be (except as click bait to get ad views, of course). I had exactly the same training when I worked at IBM, every year. "Never talk about dominating the market", yadda yadda yadda. It's sound legal advice that I would expect all corporate employees would get. VMWare won't want their employees to talk about how they dominate the VM indusrty; EMC wouldn't want their engineers talking about their enterprise storasge arrays "crushing the competition", and so on.

And at all companies, the standard line is, "never send in e-mail anything that you wouldn't want to see on the front page of the New York Times, or might cause you to be deposed as a witness in a courtroom." And it's not just about anti-trust; you also never want to talk in any kind of discoverable medium how an engineering short-cut in the development of your product (say, like a 737) is going to cause people to get killed.

All of this is not unique to Google, but applies to any company with half-way competent lawyers and a half-way competent HR department.

elefanten• 6 years ago

It's absolutely (clickbait) to get ad views -- that's the whole company's business.

It's also a political stance that aligns with said company's political disposition and (more importantly) chosen market segmentation.

Finally, this company (desperately wants to believe that it) stands to increase its profitability if it strikes back against the forces that have lowered that profitability.

mywittyname• 6 years ago

And it's not just about anti-trust; you also never want to talk in any kind of discoverable medium how an engineering short-cut in the development of your product (say, like a 737) is going to cause people to get killed.

I would. If I spoke up about something dangerous to management, and they ignore the problem in a way that allowed someone to die because of it, I abso-fucking-lutely do not want to be their scapegoat. Leaving a paper trail is an important security measure here (and good ethics).

tytso7• 6 years ago

If you must leave a paper trail, you send it to the product counsel and to the technical lead with the heading that this is privileged communication for the purpose of getting legal advice. (At least in the US; the legal situation around privileged communications may be different in different countries.)

Nullabillity6• 6 years ago

And it's not just about anti-trust; you also never want to talk in any kind of discoverable medium how an engineering short-cut in the development of your product (say, like a 737) is going to cause people to get killed.

You don't see the fucking problem with this policy?

Ultimately, I guess the solution here is that this "training" ought to be considered as damning as the kind of speech that it tries to forbid.

This is like trying to get out of a drunk driving ticket by smoking weed and wearing a blindfold.

jeffbee3• 6 years ago

No, it's not like that at all. What you don't want is a bunch of nerds with no idea what they are talking about writing an email that says "I don't think this follows standard safety practices" because then that will be admitted into court even if the author has no knowledge whatsoever about industry standard practices.

The training is more about getting nerds to shut the hell up, and less about some great conspiracy against humanity.

tytso7• 6 years ago

There are ways to raise issues related to product safety that don't potentially leave you in the very uncomfortable position of being a witness in a court proceeding. (Trust me, this is not going to be a pleasant experience, so if you don't care about your fiduciary duty to your employer, you might want to learn how to raise these issues so you can meet your engineering ethical demands and at the same time, not risk landing you and your company in a super-uncomfortable position, whether it's in a lawsuit, or at a congressional hearing. "No Senator, that's not exactly what I meant....")

tytso7• 6 years ago

Oh.... and if you are sure that your product has flaws that might cause people to get killed, or cause medical information to be inappropriately leaked, etc., the proper path is to schedule a meeting with your team lead and the product counsel on the issue.

Not only did I have to certify that I received this kind of training every year at every large corporation that I've worked at (and yes, this includes Google), this was also covered in my MIT Sloan School class, "Legal issues for I/T Managers" that I took as continuing education when I worked in MIT Network Operations and served as Tech Lead for Kerberos V5 development.

I'm really surprised at the comments in Hacker News on this article. Doesn't everyone get this fundamental, basic legal training? IMHO every single practicing engineer should!

michaelt2• 6 years ago

Taking your example, that you are sure that your product has flaws that might cause people to get killed - and assuming you're not mistaken, as your example didn't say that:

There's a big difference between "You should immediately tell your manager and legal" and "You should not tell anyone in the company other than that, state the facts plainly in clear terms, or leave a paper trail"

The former is your ethical obligation to keep people alive - but the latter is mandating employees to always participate in cover-ups, which is obviously unethical.

Animats• 6 years ago

It's an antitrust instruction employees at very large companies are given. If you're #1 to #4, it's important. If you're #326 in your industry, it's not an issue.

dboreham• 6 years ago

I think the idea is that there are people who think their desire to do whatever they want is more important than their employer's right to limit bad publicity and legal risk. A quick re-watch of the movie Erin Brockovich might illuminate why this could happen but there are obviously other reasons.

ardy42• 6 years ago

And it's not just about anti-trust; you also never want to talk in any kind of discoverable medium how an engineering short-cut in the development of your product (say, like a 737) is going to cause people to get killed.

It's not my responsibility to help cover the company's ass if my they take a shortcut that gets people killed or help them avoid legal consequences for illegal or boundary-pushing behavior. My highest loyalty is not to their shareholders, and paying me a salary doesn't change that.

xmprt• 6 years ago

That's 100% but you'll also likely be in headlines and go to court because of it. So neither of you are wrong.

The company is covering their own ass and part of that is telling their employees that it's important not to leak stuff.

int_19h2• 6 years ago

The point of the article is the claim that Google wasn't so extreme about this before. If true, this means that they're seriously concerned with the ongoing anti-trust probes, and don't see them as something that's likely to go away.

PragmaticPulp2• 6 years ago

It would be noteworthy if a company didn't restrict their employees from publicly talking about legal and regulatory matters. What they're doing here is standard practice.

Average employees aren't in a position to speak accurately about antitrust matters anyway. If they misspeak, it will certainly be used against the company regardless of the actual merit.

harry82• 6 years ago

It would be noteworthy if a company didn't restrict their employees from publicly talking...

No it would NOT. It is absolutely noteworthy if they do such a nefarious, un-american thing.

Banning speaking on behalf of their employer. Sure. Go nuts.

Banning speaking as a private citizen because you have an opinion you wish to express in public as a private citizen representing the opinions of yourself?!?

FFS!

Are you actually serious about that???

You can't push back against that hard enough. Surely? Freedom, opposition to totalitarianism. The right to speak your mind. Even if Google doesn't like your opinion and your opinion is objective wrong, to hell with them. Freedom.

pmiller23• 6 years ago

The distinction here is that Google employees are not legally banned from speaking as a private citizen about the company they work for. They just won't be employees of Google for much longer after Google finds out.

I don't like that any more than you do. Corporations have far too much power in the US, and way more control over the lives of ordinary citizens than they should. But, there's nothing against the rules here. And, that's the way big corporations like it.

Note that Google employees are still free to donate money or otherwise assist organizations calling for Google to be broken up. While Google may not like this, it's highly unlikely they'll ever find out about it.

yongjik3• 6 years ago

... such a nefarious, un-american thing ...

Well, TBH, "banning employees from using certain everyday terms because they have specific legal usages and the company can be sued for $$$ if the words were taken out of context" is one of the most American things I can think of.

astrea• 6 years ago

I think the part of that sentence you conveniently left out of the quote is the most critical. One would be wise to not talk about matters of which they know nothing about, especially if it harms their employer. I think this SV tendency to speak and rally against their employers at every turn is cutting off your nose to spite your face and comes from a place of extreme privilege.

esoterica3• 6 years ago

If you are freedom absolutist then you have to agree that Google has a freedom of association right to fire you if they don't like the things you are saying.

It's funny how the people who adamantly oppose any restrictions on "freedom" don't realize "freedom" cuts both ways - if you have the unlimited freedom to do what you want then other people also have the unlimited freedom to punish you if they don't like what you are doing.

codecutter• 6 years ago

Freedom.. absolutely.!! An employee is free to find another employer.

dleslie• 6 years ago

They're free to make those statements.

And Google is free to fire them for doing so.

'Tis quite American sounding, to me.

kenferry• 6 years ago

If I, as an employee of google, say a bunch of stuff about google antitrust, it doesn't matter how often I say I'm speaking "not in my capacity as an employee of google."

It will be reported as "google employee says <>". It _will_ be taken as a statement that is believed by "google employees".

delfinom• 6 years ago

Worked at numerous small companies. General stance by lawyers is if you write down a legal issue without consulting them first, they will have you fired six ways to Sunday. It is a big de.

jonas21• 6 years ago

I'm sure lawyers at Google have studied the Microsoft antitrust case, where one of the big lessons was that anything you write in an email will be used against you by the Justice Department [1] -- so this is not at all surprising. In fact, I'm a bit shocked there's no mention of the Microsoft case in the article.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/02/business/antitrust-case-i...

throwdbaaway• 6 years ago

And ironically, Google would probably cite Microsoft as a legit competitor in this antitrust case.

ziml77• 6 years ago

This is normal and expected. Where I work we have rules about what we can say in written communication. Hyperbole and jokes will not be interpreted that way if an audit or subpoena finds it. A court might decide that we didn't mean exactly what we said, but we don't even want to deal with a court case in the first place. Not only because it directly consumes money to put up a defense but also because it can restrict our ability to make money and could tarnish our name.

We also have rules against talking to press. We can send them to a department that will handle that communication, but in general they won't get anything from us because it's easy to put a negative spin on anything we say.

owkman• 6 years ago

Googler here. This is pure and simple click-bait. We are asked not to speculate on legal matters precisely so that it doesn't get misrepresented in the media or in lawsuits. I've worked at other companies with the same policy because why would you shoot yourself in the foot?

Since the NYT is denied the option of misrepresenting employee comments, it has settled for an alternate spin. What a great deal they have. Its a win-win.

rjkennedy982• 6 years ago

I've worked at other companies with the same policy because why would you shoot yourself in the foot?

If you are even slightly historically aware, US labor history is one of the most violent and adversarial in world history. We've had plenty of strikes in this country where the company literally murdered employees. Google itself has been convicted of suppressing engineering wages.

I honestly am so baffled that all these liberal "woke" people suddenly come to the defense of a company (who along with small oligarchy of peers) now own 90 percent of the internet. They think its fine that the company suppress internal and external free speech, especially on the most important items to them.

I find the whole thing just utterly baffling.

esoterica3• 6 years ago

There is literally no competently run company that will let an employee say things in public or recorded chat logs that could potentially cost them billions of dollars in lawsuits if found in discovery. This policy is neither unreasonable nor specific to Google at all. Does it also offend you that banks don't allow their employees to speculate about committing securities fraud?

If you get paid in company stock it's entirely in your interest to agree to let your company take measures to not get sued for billions of dollars, especially if those measures have ~0 actual negative impact on you. So why would employees push back against a banal rule regarding antitrust speculation?

oska2• 6 years ago

It's entirely predictable that Google would have this policy. It's also entirely predictable that the NYT would write this article. However, the article still contains interesting detail and will be informative for a lot of the NYT's general readership who don't work for a (somewhat controversial) big corp. Dismissing it as 'simple click-bait' is an over-reaction. Not improved at all by the snark in your second paragraph.

lxe• 6 years ago

Yup that's just literally every company... speculating about how "we will crush our competition and dominate the market" can lead to legal trouble more so than talking about other contentious topics.

AcerbicZero• 6 years ago

Does the NY times use a shitty AI bot to write these taglines? I find it hard to believe someone who worked as a journalist and wasn't in a coma for the last decade would suggest that google employees are "free to speak up".

Generally speaking (and regardless of personal position on the topic) any company which has a dedicated "diversity" commissar isn't a place you can speak freely.

gflarity• 6 years ago

I don't think that's the only exception.

jariel2• 6 years ago

So that everyone is clear there's a very big difference between Google saying:

1) Use the right language concerning things like 'market dominance'.

2) Not wanting Googlers to have public opinions which are against the companies opinions

3) Suppressing voices over very material causes for concern i.e. whistle blowing.

The more nuanced issue is #1.

If Google legit doesn't believe they are a monopoly player, then they have to make sure that everyone acts and behaves in that manner, and uses the right language. If personnel go around talking about 'dominating the market' that could be effectively 'used against them' irrespective of the material nature of ostensible market domination.

A lot of this kind of stuff is vague, political, words have power etc. and things can be taken way out of context.

It's not wrong for Google to want staff to use the right words to describe market situations correctly.

Of course this means something different if in fact, objectively speaking they're trying to get people to actually misrepresent reality.

gweinberg• 6 years ago

There's at least one other topic that Google employees won't talk about... anymore.

one2know2• 6 years ago

Is it Sergey Brin being a Harvey Weinstein at early google as outlined in 2018's "Valley of Genius" by Adam Fisher?

rkapsoro• 6 years ago

Or on sex differences or ideological echo chambers.

summerlight• 6 years ago

This is a pretty standard practice in big tech companies especially after the Microsoft v. U.S. case. When a seemingly naive internal memo can make the company broken up, then why would you allow your employee to write it down from the first moment?

jungletime• 6 years ago

Is this even legal? Can a company prevent employees from talking about the company breaking the law. I don't see how this could be enforceable. Assuming they are indeed found to have broken the law.

redm• 6 years ago

Rule #3: Don’t skimp on the attorney. Get the best you can, regardless of cost.

rkagerer• 6 years ago

https://archive.is/cSma0

jariel2• 6 years ago

Folks need to grasp the distinction between the company requiring employees to be careful about using specific terms like 'market dominance' vs. speaking up.

Using terms like 'market dominance' may have legal implications, they surely will have populist implications as anti-trust issues are as much political as anything else.

So instructing staff to 'not speak about Google's market position' is very reasonable, because words have power and implications beyond what most employees probably believe when they're using them.

This is somewhat different from asking people to 'not have opinions' and a totally different league from trying to suppress whistle-blowers etc..

gerash3• 6 years ago

The title seems like a click bait. Generally you don't want employees to talk about active legal cases.

All companies will learn this the hard way when during the discovery the other team of lawyers bring casual internal conversation between employees as evidence into the court.

longtimegoogler• 6 years ago

The article is a nice piece of spin. It seems they started with a narrative and fit the facts to it.

I've taken the trainings referred to in the article and I never once thought they were designed to dissuade discussions about antitrust issues. A more banal interpretation is that Google wants to create a culture that emphasizes creating good products not at the expense of competitors.

I've never felt inhibited about having conversations with employees about these issues. The fact is that most of the employees I've discussed these issues with don't think Google is violating antitrust regulations.

My personal opinion is that a certain segment believe that Google should just be broken up because their data collection practices whether or not there are any real antitrust violations and just see this as a tool to accomplish that end.

known• 6 years ago

TRUTH is suppressed in the name of trust/loyalty/discipline/patriotism/sedition/job/national security/intellectual property etc https://yts.mx/movies/citizenfour-2014

panny• 6 years ago

Google employees are free to speak up, except on antitrust

And unionizing. Don't forget unionizing.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/25/technology/google-fires-w...

I'm sure there's a few more things you can't talk about at Google too. But the NY Times should at least do a better job of remembering their own stories.

hajderr• 6 years ago

The Google Caliphate

Google employees are free to speak up, except on antitrust

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