At least when I was there, the line was drawn somewhere between SVPs and normal employees. People seemed pretty okay memeing on Vic Gundotra. But there were other characters at Google who were just ordinary employees, and people felt at least a little uncomfortable when you discussed them excessively. I think the meme templates for a specific person I have in mind were removed entirely.

Ultimately, it's about the level of power that people wield. With great power comes great responsibility. Vic tied the compensation of every single employee to the success of Google+. So there is going to be some pushback, especially from one of the 75,000 people that have no control over how the social network does. There were also various circumstances that just made it feel right. One day there would be an email from Internal Comms about a day in the life of Vic Gundotra, mentioning how few hours of sleep he gets. It was then dug up that Vic did a car commercial where he talks about falling asleep at the wheel and how the lane assist feature saved his life. You have to find that kind of funny. Or maybe I'm just a terrible person and my cynicism ruined the guy's life. Either way, I was amused when people poked fun at senior leadership. It kept them honest. Every SVP thought they were Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos, but really they're just coming to work a little sleepy every day controlling a machine much bigger than they can understand.

In the end, making fun of specific people was a tiny tiny part of the culture of openness at Google. I think it was worth taking the bad with the good, but it seems like that didn't scale too well. I feel like that's just part of the lifecycle of a corporation. The companies whose engineers invented computers and the Internet just aren't around in their original form anymore. Apple made it out. Microsoft is doing pretty OK. That's about it. I feel like Google is the next IBM; people will live out their careers there and keep it alive for the foreseeable future, but I am not sure that people aspire to get their first job at IBM anymore. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think the culture that made Google Google has been determined to not maximize investment returns over the next quarter, and so it has to go. It worked for IBM, right?

The meme templates weren’t even the worst part. People stalked him online and leaked some of the posts to his next employer.

Yeah, it wasn't great. I think people learned from that episode and made a mental note to not do that again, though.

Ultimately, the person in question had a large volume of publicly-available writing, so I'm not sure it changed anything. But it does leave a bad taste in one's mouth because looking back, it was such a trivial thing that he was known for. In the years to come, shit got a lot more serious.

you mean ch..ch or whatever his name was?

Believe it. People were mercilessly mocked for making unpopular or disingenuous statements. When GCP hired an Oracle executive, he faced immense criticism purely on the basis of his reputation. And none of this was moderated in the past

It's a hangover from the days when Googlers were largely adults, and capable of being treated as such. After growing so huge, it's obviously not sustainable to keep hiring at this bar, so they're putting in stricter rules around employee behavior just like almost every other company does.

I remember fairly early on someone complaining about not having the right cereal in the lunchroom.

Ha, I never came across the entitlement-to-perks attitude, though I do believe that it existed even during my tenure. That being said, this is a wildly different problem from the one we're discussing.

This is the level of discourse you get from people who reverse binary trees all day.

People are downvoting this comment because they are missing the clever jab at the hiring process.

How can you be so sure?

Mocking an exec in the open that is a really cool culture. Well, it was while it lasted. At our BigCo we celebrate, venerate, suck up in every possible and impossible way to our beloved execs. Granted our revenue on per head basis is hardly tenth that of Google.

Was this not precisely what was done to James Damore?

It did, but it doesn’t seem like it was acceptable then either. In fact they fired one person who went too far in criticizing Damore, and (anecdotally, unverifiably) are said to have punished a dozen others. (https://www.wired.com/story/ex-google-employee-claims-wrongf...)

Of course it's always been understood as poor form to personally attack another employee, there was never any need for a rule saying so. In the same way, a "culture of openness" is always embraced with the implicit caveat that being "open" about criticism of decisions made by executives is also unacceptable and will be met with retaliation. That doesn't go both ways -- executives can be openly critical of you by name and on whatever terms they wish. Our generation didn't invent office politics, after all.

So this new rule is so broad as to be meaningless, it's sort of like making a new "no complaining" rule (which isn't as uncommon as you'd think). It demonstrates that the "chafe" was never about the rule. When we see workers purposefully making these criticisms anyway, as with this new hire or someone like James Damore, it means they've probably already understood that google won't act unless it represents a serious threat to their productivity. This is the company's first initial attempt to squash that sort of effort.

> In the same way, a "culture of openness" is always embraced with the implicit caveat that being "open" about criticism of decisions made by executives is also unacceptable and will be met with retaliation.

Very much not the case at Google historically. The level of criticism against execs was vicious, to the point that a lot of it was IMO in bad faith.

If an executive at Google posted memes and personally attacked a rank and file employee, they'd be met with the same pushback. The notion that this was only a problem because it was directed at an executive (or high level employee in general) is quite ridiculous. Personal attacks are not acceptable, full stop, regardless of who they're directed at.

Executives get away with more crass offenses all the time but even if they didn’t, you’re ignoring a key power imbalance that defines this struggle. What purpose would it serve for an executive to post in this message board? They have plenty of recourse already if a bad hiring decision has been made.

I think we’re also conflating “personal” attacks with criticisms that just happen to be about one person in particular. The meme in the article is criticizing google for exposing their relationships to key actors in child imprisonment policies in the US (connection was exposed by hiring one of them). By this standard there’s no criticism you could make of the company unless it didn’t apply to anyone, which doesn’t sound very meaningful. The same criticism could be levied (with the same picture/meme text) if they decide to hire Mike Pence next year, will that also be considered an unacceptable personal attack?

It ought to be, yes. People shouldn't bully their coworkers over political disagreements, even if they're large or important political disagreements.

Maybe a better exploratory question would be: what would have been an acceptable way to phrase that criticism, if you feel the substance was acceptable sans its obvious application to the most recent hiring decision?

Which criticism are we discussing here? The article describes a Matrix meme which Google allowed to stay up, and previous articles I've read suggest that Google regularly allows questions on hot-button issues when they don't call for specific personnel decisions.

Google is overrun by the leftist mob. Initially management heavily encouraged it because it was easy to score few morale and PR points, but now its got out of control and turned out on them and they don’t know what to do.

They should have let some bloodletting happen when hotheads threatened to leave during Damore and Project Maven times and entire company would be better off now, but they chickened out.