And at least when I was there, ~5 years ago, Google executives really, really wanted you to choose Voice. Because the history of Silicon Valley is basically built upon talented engineers choosing Exit and creating the company that eventually replaces you. Google itself was mostly built by people who did exactly that - its early (pre-2005) employees were practically a who's-who of alumni from Xerox Parc, Western Digital, Bell Labs, JPL, Netscape, Sun, and academia.
I dunno if it's the same today - I chose Exit 5 years ago (and my grievances were a lot smaller than most of what I hear in the press today - I generally enjoyed my time there, I just didn't feel like it was a place where my professional goals could be accomplished), and a lot of the people I see Exiting recently are folks I thought were very committed to exercising their Voice when I was there. As a Google shareholder this makes me a little uneasy, but perhaps it's the nature of a corporation that internal dissent just doesn't work when you get to 100,000 employees.
Much more preferable for the company if employees complain on an internal board rather than Reddit, HN, or Blind.
In a way it is a bit like some democracy in a company rather than the usual authoritarian/dictatorial workplaces we have where usually dissent and opinions against the borg direction is stifled and attacked by the vogons.
Democracy is also a pressure release valve that looks messy but doesn't blow up like authoritarianism does eventually. Better to let the proles, sharecroppers, and feudal peasants have their airing of grievances, fix if you can, if not find ways to route around the issues.
On one side, the internal social justice campaigns are incredibly pervasive due to large usage of internal message boards. On the other side, Google is one of the few companies that allows this level of internal airing of dirty laundry. I've heard stories of similar incidences at Microsoft which were swiftly shut down.
The problem is that when you encourage internal dialogue and communication at a huge company like this, you'll never have people with different opinions pitching in. You'll mostly get people with the most 'acceptable' opinions, the others being silent as they value their jobs. It's a huge risk to be singled out as someone who thinks Damore was right or that Maven should've been continued. As a result, you'll get a constant stream of one-sided social justice campaigns which inevitably leak to the press.
Encouraging internal dialogue and communication but not understanding its limits at scale is one of the biggest mistakes Google has made. Google was built on principles of open company-wide communication and sharing of information, and while it clearly doesn't work as intended anymore, there's too much inertia to change the course.
That place was actually Evil enough I quit within a year to go back to another small company but it was nothing like what you read about Google. A different axis of evil.
Stuff like being able to call a Town Hall Meeting to criticize the decisions of upper management seems unique to Google though. Imagine that happening at some place like Oracle!
Maybe like the cells in the body of a criminal and those in the body of the saint aren't really different, per se, and it's more about the state between them. I don't know how to put this well, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is a word for how something can behave very differently if you rearrange its parts, or excite them in a different order, etc.
Couldn’t the same basically be said of Google/Facebook/Twitter’s public communication platforms too? :-)
Encouraging internal dialogue and communication but not understanding its limits at scale is one of the biggest mistakes Google has made.
It's not just scale in numbers of people. It's also scale in terms of the potential value which can be captured by viral campaigns and media attention. When a "scene" is out of the way and non-mainstream, there can be a high degree of trust. However, when the "scene" gets hot, and there's some serious money and power to be gained, the sociopaths and other bad actors start coming out of the woodwork.
Complications of pregnancy involving hemorrhage and an early C-section are serious and not really a "management style" issue, and I don't understand why this discussion instead focuses on "dirty laundry", "internal social justice stuff", "wast[ing] a lot of time on these internal sites," "creat[ing] Memes on company time".
I work at Google, opinions are my own.
If anything, having your employees spend their time on a internal site seems like a great idea because even their fun time is spent "within" the company. It's not like the alternative is they just don't do things besides work.. the alternative is they spend that time on HN, Reddit, or Youtube
The infamous Border Patrol facebook group comes to mind.
At least Google leadership can see what people are saying.
I don't get why the Google management team allowed their team to get so... well, violently politicized.
Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but.. keeping politics out of the workplace worked very well for a very long time.
Google's culture is uniquely subservient to politics. The organization's mission is very clearly secondary to the employee's personal activism.
"Politics-free" also means "the ethical choice is what the higher-ups define", which would be difficult for me to stomach for its own set of reasons.
I regularly see elaborate arguments that non-political speech is impossible therefore employees must be allowed to talk politics at work. They're very tiresome, because ordinary people can see they're just not true. Non political workplaces are possible and desirable. Employees should ban political discussion, starting with this tedious everything-is-politics stuff.
It also seems so counter-productive for a company that basically controls large parts of the web traffic to become so politicized. What was Larry, Sergey and Eric thinking?
Edit: Seems like I can't create new posts - I'm being rate limited. Editing this comment instead as a workaround.
I think Google's stated mission ("to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful") relies on the staff being politically neutral.
That's the thing about values -- if you won't stand up for them when there's a cost, what good are they?
Pretty sure they could, at least early on. Come on, they had absolute power over company strategy. The most important people (their smartest developers, like Jeff Dean etc, by all accounts, didn't care much about stuff like this.)
> or felt that tamping down on employee discussion would cost more than it would benefit?
No-one apart from you is calling this tampering.
> Or maybe they've realized that Google cannot be neutral
Or maybe all of this bias is accidental because all they cared about was freedom, and while the two founders were away jetskiing, the company grew in a very particular political direction?
Maybe early on in Google. But to influence thousands of highly opinionated people, all with their own opinions, without negative side effects, is really difficult. Did you mean early on in the employees' efforts, or early in Google?
> No-one apart from you is calling this tampering.
Sorry for the confusion -- I mean "tamping" -- that any topdown attempt to force neutrality on employees when they are agitating for not-neutrality would have negative costs. (tampering is a different word, but it's an understandable mis-communication... darn English!)
> Or maybe all of this bias is accidental...
You could be 100% correct. I have no idea, it's a viable option. My point was to answer your original question of "what could they be thinking".
My objective was just to propose a few ideas about what they could be thinking. I 100% don't know, but I think what I said could fit the limited information we have.
I think you maybe don't get the whole "don't be political at work" thing.
How is your access to a gender neutral restroom or shower facility? Do you have a quiet place to pray multiple times per day? If you need a place to breastfeed (not a restroom), is that something available? What about dilating post gender reassignment surgery? Does your workplace offer the same benefits to same sex partners? Do you have to take a badge photo, if so, what name gets used? Can you wear head coverings in your badge photo? Have you ever heard expressions like, "Let's see what's under the kimono" in a business meeting? How is wheelchair access to your site? Can I operate all the machines you use if I am blind?
All of these are 'political' issues that most people are blind to.
Why do you feel it's required to take some stand (including whatever the majority default is) on free speech, gun rights, immigration quotas, abortion restrictions, tax laws, states' rights, welfare benefits, etc. in the workplace?
Or company policies?
"Employees here should have benefit X" or "I should get paid Y" or "Z should be promoted" aren't really political in the usual sense (it's office politics, sure).
"The government should on pain of imprisonment require everyone to X" or "political candidate Y should be elected" is politics. And creates unnecessary division in the workplace.
Religion and politics.
Both super important. Both better discussed outside the workplace.
“Politics” is absolutely a core part of the workplace where it starts to affect your rights, those of your colleagues, and the actions your employer takes in support or opposition of these.
I see no reason why you must discuss your political opinions with everyone else when they have no bearing on the work or job responsibility. It's neither obvious nor valid to me, and seems completely unprofessional.
I'd love to know how you figured that one out.
> “Politics” is absolutely a core part of the workplace where it starts to affect your rights
I am only slightly exaggerating when I say that all politics affects your rights.
Again, like religion, super important. But for a variety of reasons, the workplace makes a poor forum.
Should you not advocate for that internally?
Let's say you are an ally for someone who needs an affordance like a gender neutral facility, should you not speak up on their behalf?
HR can handle this easily by following the law and drafting appropriate policies. It does not need a big battle with an "ally" at all. That's what leaving politics out of the workplace means. An individual's issues should be left to the individual.
How is your access to a gender neutral restroom or shower facility? Do you have a quiet place to pray multiple times per day? If you need a place to breastfeed (not a restroom), is that something available? What about dilating post gender reassignment surgery? Does your workplace offer the same benefits to same sex partners? Do you have to take a badge photo, if so, what name gets used? Can you wear head coverings in your badge photo? Have you ever heard expressions like, "Let's see what's under the kimono" in a business meeting? How is wheelchair access to your site? Can I operate all the machines you use if I am blind (can I navigate to facilities? Use all the machines in the breakroom? etc.)?
Put that in the idea box all you want.
Policies follow the law first. If there are specific requirements then, like I said, that's up to the individual to discuss. These issues are not the concern of everyone else.
No company is forced to do anything beyond the law just as the individual is not forced to work for the company. If the issue is with the law then it should be changed through the appropriate avenues, not hashed out in the workplace.
Or are you talking about the washroom down the hall? That's just your typical company policy.
Quod non erat demonstandum
If you don't want to use the mens or womens, then just use the restroom with the wheelchair picture on the door. There's your gender neutral facility right there. Solved.
B. My workplace does require people to work after sundown on Friday. Orthodox Jews don't work there.
This isn't necessarily a religious thing though.
I also don't expect a vegan to work as a BBQ taste tester. AFAIK veganism per se isn't a religion.
They're not the only large company that does this; I think companies allow this because they know that employees will end up making memes anyways and it's a lot better that they end up on an internal board than an ad-hoc external one. (Aside: I'm not sure some of the people making those "memes" understood how they're supposed to work. The puffin one is a misuse of the template…)
It is hard to understand how someone can spend significant time in the office fomenting internal protests (even if they are for a good cause) and actually be getting their job done.
Tends to happen in large organisations.
They have to by law. If they don't take active measures to prevent their employees from talking about non-work things during work, which they don't, then by law they aren't allowed to prevent them from organizing for better working conditions during work.
Non-trivial work requires that you goof off at least half of the time.
Regarding 'it's never happened to me' arguments. Please realize that the world is varied and complex. Basic statistics will tell you that in a group of 100k people, chances are, somebody is getting harassed legitimately, let alone thinking they are being harassed or treated unfairly. Why is that at all hard to believe? Give me any 100k population and I can write articles ranging from 'great success' to 'great discrimination' indefinitely. It's just basic odds.
The management has been asked about the group a few times, and they've noted it all ends up on glassdoor anyways. Old article from 2012 where it is brought up: https://www.businessinsider.com/salesforce-chatter-airing-of...
They did seem to get a lot of value out of that group over time. They had some people monitoring it and legitimately tried to fix some of the complaints (not always successfully, of course).
See The Circle, the Emma Watson film.
The nerve.
I find it extremely ironic that those employees accept to be employed by the biggest censorship machine ever made, being paid close to the highest salaries in tech and then complain and plan walkouts in order to virtue signal and feel good about themselves.
On the "evil point haired boss" level it seems these types of things like their internal message boards cause a lot of trouble for the company.
On the less evil side it seems like employees waste a lot of time on these internal sites and all the internal social justice stuff.
Maybe Google just seems to get it's dirty laundry aired out. I've been working in this field for 20 years not including my internships in college and I've never worked any company that seemed to have as much of this weirdness as Google seems to.
Maybe it's an artifact of them having a money printing machine and then a ton of employees who seem to work on items other than the money printing machine which don't really matter to the company's bottom line.
From the outside it just seems like a never ending series of stories about ultra-toxic management.. all of which greatly exceed anything I've seen in my career.