Yes. Stadia execs lied to their own employees. It's a pattern for the company.

This call was followed by a contentious Q&A where the Stadia boss was confronted about his email from just the week before which suggested anything but a wholesale shutdown of the studios. Harrison expressed his regret over the misleading statements made in his previous email, according to four sources with knowledge of the call. When asked what changed from the week prior, Harrison admitted nothing had and told those on the call, “We knew.”

https://kotaku.com/stadia-leadership-praised-development-stu...

I'm sure there's some sort of doctor-like logic going on in some heads where you tell the patient everything is going to be fine because the surgery goes better if they aren't freaked out before the anesthesia hits.

But with team dynamics getting thrown in I think that narrative sounds noble and glamorous but has little to nothing to do with reality. Instead it's an equal part "I can save this" and "we aren't gonna save this but we need people to stay to help with an orderly shutdown", and the Mushroom Treatment (keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit).

> I'm sure there's some sort of doctor-like logic going on in some heads where you tell the patient everything is going to be fine because the surgery goes better if they aren't freaked out before the anesthesia hits.

That is a clear violation of informed consent. Even if it might lead to better short-term outcomes, over the long-term it leads to degrading trust in doctors. Same with this case. It gives all of us (internal employees, outside devs, businesses, customers) even more reasons to never believe any promise that comes out of the mouth of an Alphabet executive.

I am at the moment trying to get an appointment with a doctor to tell him the same thing to his face.

What you shouldn’t do is enumerate all of the potential side effects in vivid detail. That’s the WebMD curse. But if someone wants you to look at your work you should look at your work, not blow them off on the phone. That’s just more arrogant asshole behavior, which contributes to White Coat Syndrome.

What are we going to call WCS for mega corps with short attention spans? Because I think we need one.

Google Syndrome fits well

At least with the mushroom treatment though you end up with some very tasty and healthy products!

I am not a product.

I found much more peace as an employee by accepting that all executives lie to some degree

In their circles it’s called “controlling the message”, “not causing panic”, “simplifying” etc. They often simply do not believe it’s lying

I think it's realistic to assume that this happens but it doesn't mean it should be accepted. How can you trust in the leadership of someone you know will lie whenever they think it will get them a slightly better outcome? Execs like that are not leaders and they should not be in those positions.

> How can you trust in the leadership

You shouldn't. At best, they are fellow travelers. At worst, they aren't accountable to you, and their incentive structure usually does not drive them to behave ethically towards you.

Execs aren't paid to lead, they are paid to deliver business value. Ethical leadership is often incidental or counterproductive to it.

In this case, the execs were paid to do everything possible to promote and grow the product. And that's what they did.

I try to work for companies that aren't openly evil.

The greatest idea since sliced bread... too bad that leaves a vanishingly small pool of potential work.

"Working as Intended"

you best bet of doing that is spinning off your own company. I unfortunately cannot afford to do that.

Pull Request: Remove "Don't be evil" from the Code of Conduct.

My very first TGIF after my noogler one, I sat behind some disgruntled employee who kept yelling at the stage about how the execs were lying to us.

I thought it was fairly rude and also I thought the execs were simply using careful language. After attending a bunch more TGIFs, I finally realized that nearly every exec had a very specific way of presenting things that sort of made their work sound perfect, even if it was shit. You can see an example in "An Update On Google Reader" or "Advancing our Amazing Bet on Google Fiber", or even this one.

Was it Vic "OKR=1.0" G?

No, way before that. The very end of Google Classic era.

They should probably try implementing OKRs at Google. I heard it helps with transparency.

Surely these executives will be severely reprimanded for their lack of integrity, lest employees throughout the company begin to assume that such behavior is the standard.

Actually, the Stadia management were this close to being shitcanned for failing to live up to Google ideals. The only thing that saved them was when they announced that their group had already pivoted to a promising new product idea featuring a built-in messaging client.

Upvoted because I had to think twice if this was sarcasm.

I doubt the social media guy even knew. They were posting promotional tweets just 2 days ago.

Source: https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1574790973443522566

It's an employee doing a job. The job was to lie to the public for short term gain. Don't have to blame the employee, do have to blame the management.

Why would s/he? S/he is prob. 10 levels below the actual decision maker and sometimes is not even a fulltime employee.

After negative news, it’s pretty safe to assume thr opposite when PR / Marketing says something like “we wont be shutting down” or when a CEO says “there wont be any layoffs”.

If you read between the lines, those kind of announcements can usually be a good indicator of the appropriate “time to adapt”, whether that be to prepare for a layoff or to start buying IP on a survivable platform.

Companies, governments, and politicians do not say things to inform you about what is happening or what they are doing. They say things to produce in the listener the state they desire, whatever that may be, and they have few limitations as to what they will say to do that. (Not quite "zero", but definitely "few".)

The sooner you learn this, the more information you can get from this sort of release. It doesn't mean you can perfectly decode it, it just means you can get more information. And the amount of time that "more information" outright contradicts the nominal content of the statement... it's not terribly uncommon. It's certainly the normal case that the decoded content heavily shades the nominal content.

This gets confusing when you consider public companies, whose shareholders are also the targets of public statements (like tweets saying "no we won't shut X down"), and there are (well, supposedly) legal limits on misleading public statements by public companies.

I hope this becomes common knowledge and starts being taught in elementary schools.

I wish. People talk big about "critical thinking" but critical thinking curricula still tend to focus on the nominal content of claims. Motivation of the speaker and their desired goals is not an incidental concern to be briefly covered, it's the core of the skillset.

Of course asking people teaching "critical thinking" to arm the students with a toolset that can be turned against the teachers is a pretty tall ask. I've had teachers who could take that level of heat, and props to them, but I've certainly had teachers that simply couldn't.

Excellent point!. I agree typical critical thinking courses seems to be about logical/mathematical consistency. I find a follow the money approach works much better in real life situations.

Unfortunately, many people let their political beliefs interfere with their use of this principle; if one institution('s representative) lies, then it's just an isolated incident or there was a good reason, but if another institution does, it's because that institution (possibly including all institutions in that class) are "evil".

> Companies, governments, and politicians

More broadly, this applies to any hierarchical authority system. The amount of agitprop is proportional to the number of levels between you and the person speaking, and the amount of truthful and not misleading information is inversely proportional.

A company I worked for moved from the Suburbs to downtown in the city I live in. Local news broke the story right when the deal was signed with the building contractor. For weeks on end they denied it, until they didn’t. Surprise we were always lying to you!

They usually couch it in weasel words such as "we have no plans to conduct layoffs at this time" rather than an outright lie.

That is an outright lie if they do have plans for layoffs.

"at this time" just needs to refer to when the layoffs are happening rather than the existence of a plan.

No, that is also lying.

Oh no, they have a plan to create a plan for layoffs, but as of right now there is no plan to layoff employees.

More realistically, "We don't have a plan for laying off employees at this time. Our plan is for laying off employees next month."

As a general rule, I tend to invert any sentence any manager ever gives me.

How many times has MS said "Xbox is not shutting down."?

The corpo doth protest too much. If they have to say it, it has to be a lie.

Googler, opinions are my own. I don't work on Stadia.

From what I saw, the Stadia team was working hard on product improvements and adding new games still. So a careful parsing of the sentence is that the Stadia team was still working towards the goals of expanding the service, as the shutdown decision wasn't made yet or told to the team yet.

Unfortunately there's a reason teams and people get put on "Double Secret Probation". If consumers find out the team might get shut down they start relying on them less, at which point the probation becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

It got out that one of my favorite restaurants was going to lose their lease for new construction, and didn't have plans to relocate. I moved shortly thereafter and never checked up on them. What actually happened is that the construction project got delayed over a year, and the restaurant stayed, but anyone who didn't live in the immediate vicinity didn't hear about that. Any time I told someone it was still open, the response was happy, but complete surprise.

They opened a kind of a cafe with just a fraction of their menu closer to my house, but the location wasn't great (It's worth paying someone to sit around a potential location for hours on multiple days to see what foot traffic is like. If you're across a high traffic street from a high foot traffic area that doesn't mean you'll see foot traffic) and I'm sure by then the rumor of their demise had affected revenue. So bad location and the food wasn't quite as good as at the old location. Probably staff turnover.

That slow avalanche took three years to shutter the company, and they probably would have been fine if they'd managed to stay out of the local paper.

At this point it's standard fair for Google, in my opinion, a large reason this ended up being unsuccessful was that people were worried it was going to be shutdown.

Oh I’m totally on Team Popcorn at this point, I’m more talking about “hey kids, copying a Google is not the ticket to success”.

Being caught saying “don’t worry” just damages their brand more. What they really need is to declare some things as sacred cows. But you can’t do that after you’ve already lied using the same phrasing.

I can’t believe that I’m defending Google, but this time at least they offered credit or refunds for any purchases. Google not doing this in the past has made me extremely hesitant in paying for new Google devices that feel risky. This will alleviate that worry a bit

It's a very common problem in software that we target 'better' instead of 'good'. Or as we used to call it, "sucks less." It doesn't help that we keep trying to 'disrupt' domains that had no software or had software written by people who know how to write critical systems.

It does sound like they're trying to do better, but it was a long time coming and this still isn't good behavior.

I don't see how this is bad in the consumer's perepctive. Those that didn't use it lose or gain nothing. Those that did use it get their refunds. They don't care about the dev side.I don't think it's bad behavior to shut down something no one watns.

The exec communication with the devs is unfortunate, but a separate matter.

"Stadia is not shutting down" admits no "careful parse.

I mean, HN is read more often then memegen/ I guess they know now.

> When asked what changed from the week prior, Harrison admitted nothing had and told those on the call, “We knew.”

I encourage you to consider looking for work at a company which respects you; you’re worth it.

TBF, if Mcdonalds paid people 100k at age 23 to flip burgers, employees would put up with a lot more BS as well. And that salary for a google newgrad is low balling.

I doubt it was a lie in the sense that the person who said it believed it to be false. I think this instead falls under Frankfurt's definition of bullshit: speech intended to persuade without regard for truth.

But there's a corporate twist here, in that the person saying might have believed it to be true, because some executive also believed it to be true, even though if you take Google as a whole, it was always uncertain.

So I think I'd call this "corporate bullshit", where Google as an entity has low regard for the truth as presented by PR mouthpieces, and is thus a dedicated bullshitter.

Publicly, knowingly uttering bullshit of which you know it's false, or has a high probability of being false, is simply called lying.

I agree, but don't see the relation. Who specifically do you believe publicly said something knowing it was false?

Probably the reason they had to give refunds, or they'd get sued, and this would be evidence #1 against Google

Like... maybe? Why does it have to be a lie instead of incompetence? They may have totally thought that back then, then changed their mind?

It's Google. Everyone knew the second Stadia was announced that it would die. It wasn't even a particularly good example of a game streaming service. If you work for Google and were convinced that Stadia was secure for the future, you should reconsider the reality you live in.

So... Just to get this correct, the social media person who probably isn't privvy to plans affecting their job in two months should have written something along the lines of "were told it's going to be ok, but who even knows with Google"?

Maybe PR teams shouldn't get a free pass to say whatever they want. If your PR team can just lie to the public due to "ignorance" it becomes very very profitable to lie to your own PR team.

That would actually have been hilarious.

They could just say "we don't comment on future plans" instead of lying to increase sales, aka committing fraud.

I've used GeForce Now and Stadia was a lot better than it on my iPad/WiFi

What service is better than Stadia at actually running games in the cloud?

What is the social media person supposed to say in this case? "we're working on a blog post about Stadia shutting down that'll be released in 2 months"? Even if Phil Harrison himself were the one running that Twitter account, he probably knew it was destined to shut down but didn't have anything official on when or the details of the shutdown.

Something evasive in the vein of "Stadia represents a significant investment and Google has not announced any plans to scale back Stadia. We can't comment on rumours and speculation."

"Good night, Stadia. Good work. Sleep well. I'll most likely kill you in the morning."

Fittingly, piracy would’ve served consumers better than Stadia did.

"We're proud of our Stadia experience and we are working hard on projects for it." That would not be as misleading as we are not going anywhere.

Anyone who didn't think Stadia was going to shut down at least a year ago was either kind of inexperienced or being paid not to realize the obvious.

There are also those who knew it was at risk and in danger but thought that it could be saved with hard work and a little luck and were working toward that end.

How about nothing?

> What is the social media person supposed to say in this case?

If they can't find peace with everybody calling them a professional liar, they should quit their job and find an honest line of work.

It depends on when they made the decision. Changing your mind doesn't mean you previously lied, it just means you were wrong. Lying needs intent.

This is an extremely dangerous attitude. Truth matters, not just whatever feels good.

If we collectively stopped believing non-binding statements with no skin in the game, these bullshitters would stop bullshitting.

It’s really a lie if everyone knows it is a lie thou?

Of course it is, and it's just a blatant one at that.

Yes it is.

It was a joke

In the current zeitgeist it was a poor one.

Blatant lies are destroying nations.