Google employees have enjoyed revolving door during Obama administration
watchdog.org
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If you think healthcare.gov was a mess, in the USA there are more branches of federal government, 50 state governments, and countless local governments whose technology is inadequate for serving its constituents.
Things like healthcare, visas, and electricity all rely on aging software projects. Yet, some of these systems don't have strong backups, are not automated, and may run on infrastructure like Windows XP. Some parts are ticking timebombs in terms of security and upkeep costs.
"Amey said he’s not as concerned about programmers moving over – and quite a few data engineers who worked on Obama’s re-election campaign have ended up in White House jobs – but top level executives changing jobs can raise “red flags.”"
But the article is. The very first thing in the article is Mikey Dickerson's face. To call him a "top level executive" at Google is not even close to true, even if he has a high rank in his new role.
FWIW: Some of the folks they are counting are interns, AFAICT.
Otherwise, i have trouble seeing what the hullaboo is about.
For example, Matthew Bye (Disclaimer: i've worked closely with Matthew for years) is someone they claim went from the FTC to Google.
He got a job at the FTC out of law school for a few years. Then he went to Wilson Sonshini for 3 years. Then he went to Google, where's he's been 7 years (started regular counsel, now a director).
Not sure what is supposed to be wrong with this.
Moving between private law firms and corp counsel is common, people trade off "partner track millions with crazy hours" for "sane hours and reasonable pay". Moving between government and private law firms is common too (note: there are specific legal ethics rules that cover this in both directions. I make no claim they are perfect, but they do exist!). People often start out idealistic, or in government, because they have a ton of jobs. Especially in a tough legal market, it's a good place to be. They get tired of the politics or whatever, and go elsewhere. Some to private firms, some to corp counsel.
If you want a more mundane example: Eric Hysen is listed in the data. I hired him (first as an intern, then as a regular employee) and he worked for me until I left the DC office. He left mainly because he specifically wanted to help government get better, and USDS was a very hard thing to turn down in that regard.
Again, don't see what is wrong with that.
Staring at the actual US data, i'm also not sure who the "lobbying firms" are supposed to be.
Because the data doesn't list any[1] So either they are incorrectly marking those folks as "Google" (they aren't. The lobbying firms are not exclusive to Google in any way, shape or form. It also doesn't even claim the folks who went from the lobbying firm ever handled google as a client), or it's not in the data they give.
The data also doesn't say when they left google vs when they joined government. If you click the linked in links, there are often multi-year gaps here where they worked for others.
[1] Edit: Oooh, finally found one person they list from a "Google lobbying firm" : http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/senate/227736-obama-hi...
Not sure what that has to do with Google in any way (here's the linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marty-paone-90853718)
In every regulated industry there tends to be a small cadre of people who rotate through the most elite jobs in both the private and public sector. So if you're aware of that, it's no surprise that Google and the rest of the tech industry work the same way.
I think the cause of the hullabaloo may be that a lot of people didn't realize this has been going on since time immemorial. Perhaps they assumed that the people governing them were more like them, and were not, for example, financial or tech CEOs looking for a change of pace. In an age of great information transparency they are now starting to figure this out. It is part of a growing awareness that surprisingly small cadres of elites run basically everything and reap large rewards at a time when class mobility is at a low, wealth inequality is peaking, the political system is dysfunctional, the economy is sluggish, etc.
And so you get the Brexits and the Trumps, and a new level of scrutiny into just what exactly those wealthy techies are up to. Different people will render different judgments on the phenomenon but in my view it is absolutely all part of a trend where the silent majority starting to make some noise.
Similarly, after paid Google shill (literally by his own admission) Joshua Wright finished his stint as the FTC Commissioner (amazingly, an investigation against Google disappeared during his term), he then recently got a job with Wilson Sonshini as well.
No, i can't see a general problem with antitrust lawyers, or really, any lawyer deciding where to work.
Private law firms hire people with government experience precisely because they know how it works. Not because they want favors, but because they have experience. The same is true of Google, Microsoft, Facebook, whoever. This is no different than hiring from "industry". The industry of antitrust lawyers includes government lawyers. You try to hire the best, regardless of who they work for.
If your goal is to prevent favors from being done, prevent favors from being done[1]. I don't see why that has any general relation to job mobility.
People either have integrity or not. Either they make decisions and voice opinions without regard to future career mobility or not.
If they generally don't, you are pretty much screwed no matter what you do here - you need to fix people, you aren't really going to fix the process[1].
If they generally do, than you should just worry about the outliers..
[1] Imagine for a second, you go so far as to have a neutral committee review every person who changes jobs, including all correspondence, video tapes of interviews, whatever. Do you believe this would fix it? No, of course not, it'll just drive any bad behavior further into the dark. It would literally not stop any problem.
If you ban job mobility, would that stop any problems? Given the number of senators/congressman/etc indicted for having their houses renovated for free, etc, i'm going to go with "no".
If your problem is integrity, people without integrity are going to be much more creative about the favors they get, how they are done, etc.
Changing job mobility will not change this. As evidence: It literally hasn't, in the past 200 years.
The only thing it does is hurt the honest people.
And in the case of Joshua Wright, long before he revolved his way into an FTC position, he was already receiving money under the table to fabricate "academic studies" supporting Google's antitrust position, which they then used as expert references to their claims. We already have a corrupt individual who's engaged in unethical practices on Google's behalf, which then also moved into a government position where he had an extreme ability to protect Google from government action.
We've long understood that transparency in government in terms of where money changes hands, where people are employed, and similar factors are key in preventing corruption. People may not be the places they work for, but they are representatives of their employers. If this wasn't understood, political donations wouldn't require the disclosure of a donor's employer.
You seem to be suggesting we should dismiss our entire understanding of how corruption occurs, because the evidence points very clearly that corruption is happening between our government and Google. Honest people, unfortunately, are not involved here.
Note for other readers: DannyBee is a Googler and claims in his profile to be a lawyer, so presumably has worked with the Google, FTC, and WSG&R people discussed here.
If you want to work remote from SF, check out 18F: https://pages.18f.gov/joining-18f/
We're briefly pausing accepting new applications while we evolve how 18F plans for open roles.
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Background: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-se...
Also hiring in sales and customer success.
From what I have observed, having an in-house technical team at the government - even small - aids all of these projects.
In fact, that's basically what this team is - SREs - professionals at running and maintaining code. A small integrations / uptime team that understands the implications of design decisions aids everything.
I've seen the distributed approach done at a university and it was a total bureaucratic don't step on my toes mess - when they centralized, things got organized very quickly.
I think we need maybe either a tech branch or sub-branches per branch of government. Contracting is great and all but we need consistent development not one time fixes. I'm sick of hearing about how our government got hacked here or there every now and then.
Google has over 30,000 employees in Mountain View alone, and that's just a portion of its workforce. The term "Obama administration" in the headline is somewhat misleading considering that the above quote says it's surveyed from "the federal government," which is a huge workforce regardless of where you draw the boundaries.
Statistically, is it really that anomalous that ~250 people flowed between the two in 8 years?
>> Regulation watchdogs may be just as keen about the moves between Google and the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission. Those government bodies regulate many of the programs that are at the heart of Google’s business, and there have been at least 15 moves between Google and its lobbying firms and those commissions.
>> The 18 people involved in the revolving door listed in this story are just the tip of the 251-plus name iceberg, though in some cases people among that 251 are low-level employees.
So they looked at ~20 people in the article who moved from Google to the government. Given the size of Google, that number seems to be barely significant.
"Google employees have enjoyed good employability" seems like a better title, unless there's something major that I've missed.
The reality, if you dig into the data, is that the vast majority are not.
50% of total staff are at Mountain View. Of 60k staff, maybe 20-25k are engineers. So in the US it's probably 10-15k engineers total.
In my experience, software engineer attrition is around 20% per year in firms with good employee satisfaction. That's 2-3k engineers excited to be tackling new opportunities each year. In 8 years: 16-24k employees.
Of course Google is a great place to work and they weren't as large 8 years ago, so let's guess 10-15k employees turned over. Of that, 250 is 2%.
The government says around 2700 people work for the executive [1]. That is 0.002% of the total workforce in the US.
Google could replace the entire executive with castaway engineers every year.
[1] https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/data-analysis-docu...
Also ... government has been notoriously bad about grokking software. They just couldn't manage large projects effectively at all, and they were completely getting fleeced by their usual contractors (witness the initial launch of healthcare.gov). So it's good that they're getting competent people to be in charge of things now, which I suppose naturally means they'd be getting people from the top tech companies in the world.
Especially since those type of jobs often require security clearance. Once someone has clearance, they are more likely to take more jobs in the future that also require clearance, because the clearance is a valuable part of their resume.
If you search by organization you can get some numbers but it's not comprehensive. For example, it says that only 28 people (not hundreds) are profiled with "google", 30 with "microsoft" and 1 for "hewlett packard", etc.
Government technology has been a disaster for quite some time. I think we can all agree that the best technologists aren't usually looking to accept a low-pay, low-prestige job in government.
So the Obama Administration has taken steps to try to improve government technology, primarily through USDS but also with direct White House hires. Of course many of the best technologists are employed at Google, so you'll see a lot of people coming from there. Especially since there are significant network effects in recruiting.
Naturally, the best technologists aren't typically interested in a long-term government career. So they shift back out after their "tour of duty." In fact, I believe 18F explicitly requires limited term contracts.
Despite good intentions (including willingness to take substantial pay cuts), people inevitably attack these attempts.
I wonder how much of the "Google Transparency Project" funding is coming from existing federal contractors. Perhaps they should be transparent about themselves for a start.
More importantly, I don't see any clear reason to target a specific company. There are lots of organizations like The Center for Responsive Politics which investigate lobbying and corruption without doing targeting a specific company with whatever they can find.
This organization clearly seems to have an axe to grind. For example, what is the point of naming and shaming programmers who dared to quit their cushy Google jobs to come work for USDS? [0] This is symptomatic of a hatchet job:
> suggests that many former Google employees working for USDS today may return to their Google jobs tomorrow with inside knowledge and relationships that could prove invaluable in securing large IT contracts for Google.
The notion that programmers are going to work for Google so they can secure IT contracts is ludicrous. I know people working for USDS—they definitely are not interested in making a career out of government consulting.
If this group cares so much about transparency, they should be transparent about who is funding them. I suspect it's several corporations which are even more corrupt than Google.
[0] http://googletransparencyproject.org/articles/us-digital-ser...
And at the end of the day, basically all Google wants is... all your data. Good way to accomplish that is getting your employees to write the software too.
For the record, 18F and USDS both seem to have pushed for multiple cloud solutions, including their own cloud.gov.
I'm not "looking for corruption in anything". I'm looking for corruption in one of the biggest lobbyists in Washington DC that has very close ties with our administration, and strangely, has managed to avoid any sort of legal action against them, despite the fact that almost every other first world power finds cause to do so.
The previous FTC Commissioner, who is tasked by our government to regulate companies like Google, was a former paid Google shill who fabricated pro-Google "studies". After being paid under the table by Google, and then squashing an FTC investigation against Google during his term there, he's now working for Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, a law firm who has a notable client... Google.
I'm not "looking for corruption in anything". It's just that it's incredibly implausible that Google does not have a corrupt relationship with the government.
I gave a specific link to this "Transparency Project" targeting mid-level Google engineers. [0] You seem to think the people on this list are mercenaries working in government just to sell Google contracts.
Since you seem to be uninterested in having a conversation on this and instead have an axe to grind, I'll see myself out.
[0] http://googletransparencyproject.org/articles/us-digital-ser...
Considering we're talking about a time span of 7 years and Google has over 50,000 employees (took a rough average from the crazy range of source I saw) I'm surprised it's not more. The quote above seems to be someone guessing without any type of information to back up their assertions.
I'd love to see the numbers for other companies but this article is somewhat lackluster and seems to be trying to point to a possible conflict of interest
> Amey said he’s not as concerned about programmers moving over – and quite a few data engineers who worked on Obama’s re-election campaign have ended up in White House jobs – but top level executives changing jobs can raise “red flags.”
I can understand this a bit more. Not sure there is any direct evidence of conflicts of interest but like the investigation I could see it easily appearing so regardless of the truth. Hard to avoid though. After working in the government space they need lots of help.
It's impossible for someone to make the best decisions for American citizens while they're simultaneously employed by a giant international corporation which is evading billions of dollars in taxes, causing the rest of us to have to pick up all the slack.
Also USDS is a bit more "do this mission" style job: basically you're being dropped into a federal agency to try to turn their tech story around. 18F is there to promote longer-term change in the model of how the federal government does technology.
Even the most forgiving interpretation of the facts implies that Google and Goldman Sachs and other corporations have massive influence in government. There is no need to posit a conspiracy theory. It's just that the same people flow back and forth between the government and those corporations, and there are friendships as well as shared perspectives and ideals, all creating a close relationship that is highly beneficial to those corporations.
US gov't needs help regulating banks. Employees with experience in finance will likely have an easier time navigating things. Same argument for tech.
Is it really that shocking that you hire former finance people to regulate the finance industry? Experience in the domain means knowledge about how things work. It's the same argument as putting a technical person as PM for a technical project.
Of course, this doesn't work in the "regulation as punishment" mindset. But gov't regulators aren't looking to kill banks, they're looking to keep the economy healthy. Yes, that means working with banks to improve things (see regulators coordinating the purchase of failed banks by other ones).
Inversely, you are Goldman Sachs. You need help navigating regulation... a guy with regulation experience sounds good right?
Of course there are potential conflicts of interest to watch out for.
One of the great criticisms of regulation is that incumbents with access to government can influence the rules to favour themselves and avoid competition. Having employees of particular large companies work as beaurocrats encourages this, especially if they return to those companies.
In it's early phase -- such as with these googlers in the US gov, the revolving door brings dynamism. But over time it brings stagnation because parties have an interest in making current practice the only thing allowed.
If you didn't want this to happen perhaps you should make it illegal?
Like many other companies, Google uses the Double Irish to minimize its tax bill. Assuming the law were updated to affect all Double Irish users equally (like to e.g. Facebook), do you think we should prevent such tax evasion? The answer seems to me obviously yes, regardless of your political persuasion. Clearly lobbying must have some impact on its favorable tax treatment.
In a manner of bundling similar to other tech companies, Google promoted Chrome on www.google.com. It seems reasonable to describe that promotion as using its dominance in the search market to become dominant in the browser market. Likewise, its complex deal with Android manufacturers results in Google Search (among other applications) being the default on their phones. The EU is in the process of sanctioning Google for the later. Supposing the spirit of anti-trust law were applied equally to application bundlers (like to e.g., Apple), do you think we should prevent such bundling from occurring? The answer to me seems to be yes: I think unbundling software makes the software ecosystem healthier and more innovative. Clearly lobbying in the U.S. must have some impact on its favorable anti-trust treatment versus the E.U.
Like few other funnels, Google monetizes content in ways that minimize the value to the producer. This could mean monetizing copyrighted material, like searches that lead to movie torrents or whole copies hosted on YouTube. Or its dominant place in search makes previously subscription-only newspapers have to go free on-the-web, because news cannot be copyrighted and anyone can read an NYTimes article and write a free (but plagiarized) destination for search results. How much value should go to producers, and to the extent that it extracts a rent from the transaction, should Google be the entity that transfers the value from the producer to the consumer? The answer to this question isn't obvious. But Google has won a complex set of legal victories, like the Google Books Search settlement lawsuit and lawsuits by newspaper publishers around the world. It's likely, though not as clear, that its extensive relationship with government (and for that matter, consumers) has earned it a favorable view of its rent extraction from producers.
The controversy ought not to be the revolving door. You would have to be a real blowhard to believe that Google doesn't receive favorable treatment from the government. Furthermore, you should be allowed to campaign against Google's favorable treatment without simultaneously campaigning against Apple, Facebook, and all of corporate America.
Instead, I think the controversy should be whether or not you actually think Google is in the right on these matters.
- Senator Orin Hatch; Chairman of Senate Judiciary Committee
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