But only Google is this outwardly politically aligned. You don't see these problems emerge at Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, or Netflix.

Google's culture is uniquely subservient to politics. The organization's mission is very clearly secondary to the employee's personal activism.

Having politics free zones like work is a good idea.

"Politics-free" inherently means "maintain the status quo". This does well to serve the majority, but tends to go poorly for people who are harmed by that status quo, such as historically underrepresented groups. If I'm a gay person asking to change the company policy to allow parental leave, is that political? Is an Asian person asking coworkers to not use harmful stereotypes political? Is a trans person asking to have their pronouns respected political? It will usually be the majority to decide it's whether it's political, even if they're not affected. And that's where the problem inherently lies. The majority of people want no-politics zones until there's something "political" that affects them.

"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.

No. A politics free zone is a politics free zone. Talking about C++ is not political. Talking about cookie recipes is not political. Talking about skiing is not political. Anyone can see that. Don't try to tell me that what happens every day is in fact impossible.

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.

If there are people, there are politics.

In hindsight.. it seems like it could become their downfall.

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.

Perhaps they couldn't stop it, or felt that tamping down on employee discussion would cost more than it would benefit? Or maybe they've realized that Google cannot be neutral?

That's the thing about values -- if you won't stand up for them when there's a cost, what good are they?

> Perhaps they couldn't stop it

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?

> Pretty sure they could, at least early on

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.